How much rewriting or revision do you do?

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.

But that’s part of the process, isn’t it? Something might not fit in the show. Musicals are — particularly musicals — plays also, but musicals particularly are… the last collaborator is your audience, and so you’ve got to wait ’til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration. And when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you’ve written. Things that seem to work well — work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece — suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.

I don’t rewrite. Well, not much. I think I probably do all the rewriting that I’m going to do before I’m aware that I’m writing the play because obviously, the creativity resists — resides — in the unconscious, right? Probably resists the unconscious, too — resides in the unconscious. My plays, I think, are pretty much determined before I become aware of them. I think they formulated there, and then they move into the conscious mind, and then onto the page. By the time I’m willing to commit a play to paper, I pretty much know — or can trust — the characters to write the play for me. So, I don’t impose. I let them have their heads and say and do what they want, and it turns out to be a play.

Not that important. I seem to rewrite in my head a great deal. I write in these English ruled notebooks. So I write on the right, and then I correct on the left. Then, when it’s typed out, I even make another correction, and then maybe in the typed sheets also. But not that much. I seem to have a great facility to go right into what I want to say. I do correct, but not like Balzac, who went crazy over the printing presses. He was correcting at the last minute.

It happens in the course of writing. I can’t go on if it’s not pretty much the way that it should be. Towards the beginning of a book, I will go back to page one every day and rewrite. I’ll start out the day with some marked-up pages that I have marked up the night before, and by the time you get to page, maybe, 270, you are not going back to page 1 necessarily anymore, but you’re going back to page 158 and starting over from there.

We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there.

So I use the first draft purely as a frame on which to build the actual story. So a lot of my writing is done through rewriting. And I don’t become discouraged by the notion that my first draft is not going to win any prizes or that it’s not going to be — I understand that it’s going to be lousy, but I want all of the essential elements to be there. The heart of the story has to be in that first draft, and then I can use that to create something and discover things about the story. When I wrote, for instance, The Kite Runner , there were a lot of things in that first draft that stayed, but some things in that first draft were tossed, and the transformation in some passages were very dramatic. I wrote an entire draft where the two kids were not brothers, and it really wasn’t until a subsequent draft when I realized that the kids, suddenly the idea came — well, what if the kids are brothers, and that changed the whole tone of the story. And when I rewrote it, writing it with that knowledge, it changed everything. And so you can get discouraged. Writing is largely about rewriting, and I abhor writing the first draft. I love writing subsequent drafts because that’s when I can see the story getting closer and closer to what I intended and what my original hopes for it were.

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.

It was a huge challenge going from the first draft to the second. From what you said earlier I suspect that you and I might write pretty differently. For me, the first draft is usually the heart of the book; its where I think I do my most vital writing and, if it’s not alive and working in the big ways by the time I’m done, I rarely make it to a second draft. Usually, then, the second draft doesn’t alter the overarching shape of the thing too substantially; it’s about filling holes, fixing problems, re-seeing stuff that’s not working, but all in the service of letting the fresh and newborn first draft reach its potential. Sometimes that takes many, many drafts. It’s very laborious and difficult and extremely important work—don’t get me wrong—but it’s usually not what I consider the heart of thing.

Actually, I had done what I thought was more or less a finished version of The Remains of the Day , but the very buttoned-up narrator, the butler — in that earlier version, he doesn’t quite come through confessing his true emotions. He maintains his front a little bit more effectively than he does in the final version. What made me change my mind was that, between that penultimate version and the final version I handed in, I listened to a song by Tom Waits — another great singer-songwriter, remarkable artist. And this is the power of that art form: it’s performance as well as the actual writing.

What I usually do is write a draft or two and I won’t think too much about the length. Usually my scripts don’t go over 110, 120 pages. I’m pretty good at that. Then I know I’ve got a record of that and whatever jokes are in there. Eventually I’ll read it once or twice, usually once, and then delete it off my computer. Put it somewhere, a drive somewhere, and get it off my computer. And then I rewrite it again from memory. Based on what I remembered from reading it.

D.H. Lawrence wrote several complete versions of Sons And Lovers and The Rainbow and Women in Love . I think that thing of having to begin again maybe enables you to reconceive things, completely reconceive, in a way that’s more difficult now. Now it’s just a kind of constant tampering.

Well, I can’t really work any miracles in revision , like some people can. I don’t always advocate this to students, but I don’t really have a problem just putting something aside. I don’t actually throw it away, because I have the file, but just saying, “You know what, this is not savable. It’s just not interesting to me.” I’m not someone who can systematically chip away at something that’s dead and make it better. I’ll sometimes break things down into parts and think, “Well, this was a 25-page story and it’s just really bad, but there’s a page and a half here that I could sort of use in something one day.” Revision for me is really only something I can get excited about if I can make something better.

In the same way that I’m rigid about my routine, I’m very rigid about how editing works. I like to start at the top. I can’t write the fourth session before I write the first. I basically have to write it in order, and I can’t really do rough drafts. I have to like the first section, and the shape it’s in before I move to the second one. So basically, everyday I just start at the top, and go down, and hopefully I get further and further down every day. But I generally can’t start in the middle, or be like, “Eh, that section’s a little wonky, but I’ll get back to it.” I kind of need to shore it up, and edit it, and polish it as I go along. And then you give it to an editor, and you start all over again.

That’s something that every writer and probably every artist needs to figure out for themselves: at what point in their process to bring other eyes in, because it can be tricky to do it too soon. I am very susceptible to other people’s perspectives. I’m a Libra, I’m a woman. If someone else has a convincing point of view, it’s really easy for me to get onboard with it, and that can be threatening to my own vision for my work. I need to wait until my work has reached a certain integrity and I know what the skeleton and the foundation and the general thrust of it is.

All of the above is the answer to that. I mean, I edit what I wrote yesterday before starting writing again today, so that’s the first sort of layer of editing. Then, suppose I have a chapter, then I’ll edit it again and again. Every word I publish has been through 30 edits. My first draft I do with a pencil. I just write freehand with a pencil. I do that for quite a while, and then I write with a pen. I make a draft with a pen. And then I get onto the computer. For me, it would be really kind of crippling if I were to go straight onto a computer. I would just freeze up. I think there’s a lot to be said for trying to find ways of not freezing up, of being able to be loose.

From what I said, it might seem like I pile up all this mental whatever and then BOOM, out pops a poem! It’s really not like that at all. I was simply speaking of the composition process, not the full process. So, yes, I go through the arc of associations, memories, thoughts, until I get to something that feels summative. That’s draft one. Then, for the rest of the existence of the poem, until it’s published or discarded, I read through it, and when I come to something that doesn’t feel right, I imagine where it could go instead. I think that’s what most people do? I do massive revisions to what I write over time. Two writers I’ve collaborated with, G.C. Waldrep and Kristina Marie Darling, both of them are much more assured with what they make than I am. Or at least, that’s how it feels to me. When we’d revise together, their revisions were much more of a honing, while mine would be dumping three quarters of the poem and putting a whole new thing in there. I hope I didn’t frustrate them too much. I know I did at least a little.

I revise the book, and then a few other people read it, and then there is a master document listing all of the things that have to be revised. And then those are broken out, and the book is printed out in various ways. I don’t know if you’ve ever used that function on the printer, where you can do four pages to a sheet or six pages to a sheet. I’ll often read things I write in very small font, to get an overview of them. And then I’ll print them out in really big font, and look at them that way.

My editor, Jordan Pavlin, my agent Binky, Amanda Urban, or I would see and feel that something was missing there. I would have to try to fill it. You might think, well, there’s something that belongs in this gap. And you try to write it and it’s not very well done. So that’s a whole bunch of trial and error. I would describe it this way. I would feel like I was driving down a road and some sections of the road were simply gone. When I went down in them to fill them in, they became infinite tunnels. And I thought, “Christ, I’ll never get out of this.” There were some parts that got rewritten more than others. I mean, I’ll tell you this, I literally filled tubs, those sterilite tubs—they fill the room behind me—of paper, of takes that I did on this book. It’s seven years’ worth of wrong turns. I moved it all in myself, it was very tiring. It must damn near be 1,000 pounds. So, then, when you ask about actually getting everything to be as right as possible, to make it a smooth road for the reader, I think that just came from going back over it.

In order to end up with anything you can use, you have to excavate a whole bunch of stuff you can’t use, and get it all out of your system, and then go back later and chip away at all the terrible stuff that you’ve uncovered, and find the things that go together, ideas that go together, and motifs that feel like they keep coming up; and then, reassemble a piece of writing that way. That’s also what I do for my own stuff.