Everything was revised or overwritten, both initially, at the time of first publication, and then for this book. I don’t know if my most recent thought is my best thought, but I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt. What starts in improvisation, which is my basic method of composition for essays, has the benefit of lots of later reflection. I’m not saying I always revise but that I always rethink. I can’t help myself. I am a man of constant second and third thoughts ( and I’ve seen trouble all my days ). And often the key revisions for me are paratextual in nature: the footnoting, the acknowledgments, the visual layout of the paragraphs, the organization of the sections, and all the issues that come up in copyediting. Endless fussing. I was very lucky to work with Carol Saller, author of The Subversive Copyeditor and The Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q&A. Since my essays are filled with linguistic anomalies, rebarbative inconsistencies, and counter-conventional turns of phrase, ferreting out my errors from my mistakes takes a verbal sleuth. More often than not I fool myself. It’s great fun when copy-editing is taken as collaborative and constructive rather than punitive and regulatory. (Carol even makes a cameo appearance in one of the footnotes .) But then it’s surely Susan Bee who catches most of my errors and points out many of my mistakes, too. I seem to make more unintended typographical errors as each day passes; Susan has her hands full and I am grateful she has not yet given up on me.

The editing happens in real time while I’m writing. 99% of the time, I’m writing the final lyrics in the first hour of writing that song. I’m not into going back and editing because I trust my gut, and I put a lot of trust in my subconscious letting itself flow through me. So lyrically, there’s not very many edits that happen.

I print every draft out even if it’s like seven things I want to change and then I type it all back into the computer sentence by sentence so that every single one is good and I’ll mumble them to myself as I’m doing that to make sure they sound okay.

First of all, you can correct mistakes much more easily. One sweep of the palette-knife 'lifts' the blood and tears of a morning from the canvas and enables a fresh start to be made; indeed the canvas is all the better for past impressions.

It’s paying attention to the energy of the piece. If it feels really distant from me, I know that there’s an irreconcilable problem between me and the work, and I need to just put it to the side until it wants to come back to me. If I wake up really excited to work on something, then it’s still present in me. If not, I put it to the side without fearing, because often those things come back much, much better a decade or two decades later. It’s really allowing the work not to just be the work at hand, but the longer process of making something, making a life and making a life in art. So, knowing that even if this story, I tried to do this story when I was 19 and it didn’t work and I kept trying 26 and then 34 and then 42.