On Rereading and Rewriting

As a novelist I have learned from long experience that writing is rewriting.  First drafts are ragged hollow things that need to be revised, rephrased and rethought again and again until something transcendent occurs on the page; until the story becomes life.

Stories are like people, they have traveled a long way to get to your doorstep and you must understand a great deal to see who and what they are and where they might go.

A first draft, like a first impression, is usually off, inaccurate.  You have notions about what you're seeing but upon reflection you realize that there's much you don't understand or that is confusing.

I go through a novel twenty times or more before I am satisfied with the story and its telling.  Before I'm finished I know every word, every bit of dialogue, every insinuation and their relations to the rest of the book.

Rewriting is second nature at this point in my life.  I go over e-mails at least three times.  I rarely write notes or memos for fear that their inaccuracies may come back to haunt me.

This constant rewriting borders on obsession but there's nothing wrong with that.  Obsession is a human quality which can be either good or bad or, more likely, both.  Whatever it is we cannot help ourselves.  Neuroses, more than probably any other factor, have raised us up from our bestial beginnings.  Our ability to question and experiment, learn and sacrifice for knowledge has made us into one of the dominant life-forms on this planet.

And so I rewrite and rewrite again eschewing physical exercise and social obligations because I want to get that sentence right.

As a writer I'm always gathering gobs of seemingly useless information.  The gender of most honey bees (female), the height spurt of knights in the Middle Ages due to an excess of meat afforded by the bubonic plague, the fact that the Aborigines in Australia can cross crocodile infested rivers without being consumed (a detail that caused me to rethink the notion of so-called western superiority).

This endless quest for trivia and little known facts brought me to a set of books published (or, more accurately republished) in 1940 called The Popular Educator Library, subtitled A Liberal Education of University Standard Prepared by Sixty-three American Experts.

This ten volume set was designed to give those Americans who missed their chance at a university education to receive 1500 or so lectures on everything from Accounting to English History, from Law to Shorthand.

The amazing thing about the collection is how salient its contents are even today.  American History, Archeology, Shorthand, and Latin have not changed much in the last sixty years or so and even a subject like Aeronautics of the 1940s has a place in today's mind.  In 1940 the jet engine was just beginning and the study of flight was accessible to the everyday student without a graduate degree in physics.

I was elated by the collection and sat down to study the lectures.  Part of the reason that I was so happy about this opportunity was that I felt that I had missed a lot of what was offered in my undergraduate years.  Between hormones, immaturity, and the innate laziness of youth I missed most of what I could have gleaned from all of those leisure hours at college.

I sat down to the first lecture series in the first volume: Accounting.  I spent the next four days reading these lectures carefully.  I took notes.  I moved my lips while studying.  At the end of that time I knew words like Debits and Credits and Capital Account.  I prepared to begin the next topic, Pre-Revolutionary American History, but I had to admit to myself that I really hadn't understood the basic concepts of accounting.  I knew some words but I could not use them.  I had a notion of the accounting idea of balance but my thinking was way out of kilter.

And so a novel idea entered my head.  I thought that I should reread that section, and then maybe reread it again.

Many of you reading this article will ask, "What's the big deal?"  You've been rereading your entire lives.  Anybody who feels like this can stop here.  Because this essay is addressed to those like me who were raised on how much, how many, how often, and how long?

How many pages can you read in an hour?  How many books in your library have you read?  How much do you read in a year?  Questions based on quantity and accumulation not on the quality of your mind.

I have always been in a rush and the value of my mind and my life has been based on that rush.  I read as much as I can and if I don't understand it I move on.  I wasn't smart enough I think or that kind of thing was not for me.  There was always some other student or coworker who got it on one read and so it was they that should do that job, take on that responsibility.

I was always being compared to the best.  I compared myself to those who knew more, understood more.  It wasn't until I sat down to those lectures on accounting that I understood that I was rushing past my own potential by not looking at what was in front of me and, potentially, inside me.

All those years of public education where the emphasis was on grades and quantities of various sorts.  My knowledge was inconsequential.  What I knew only mattered in juxtaposition to what Tina McHenry knew or the percentage of questions that I answered correctly.

But in that sun-soaked room where I was reading the musty old book nothing mattered but what I could get from my rereading.  No one was grading me.  No one was judging me.  Who cared if I only read ten pages a day?  Who cared if it took me ten times longer to understand something that Tina McHenry could learn with her eyes closed?

Writing is rewriting.  Reading is rereading.  And time is judged by the journey, not the clock.  The truth is that I am on the way there and even if I finish last I will be first.