‘The real writing comes from revision.’
And there’s not just one revision, it’s multiple revisions. I’m going to get feedback from a lot of people.
Not only is the page marked up for like the copy-editing stuff, right? Periods, commas, the wrong tense, but then you have all these notes in the column about larger questions you’ve got to answer. You have all those markings. Many people talk about how they might glance through it, and some of them don’t open it for several days. I always open it, read through it, and then I just set it aside for several days and then I’ll come back to it because I need to let my subconscious like work on it.
And so I have to step back from it and then a few days later I can come back and say, ‘No, we don’t really need to explain this. Who is centered in this story knows this information and everyone else can get enough of a context. I’m not going to spell this out.’ But then other times I do need to spell something out because I have assumed too much for the age of who the book is designed to reach.
