“No work is wasted.” That’s a great line. Even if you only fiddled with a phrase or sentence here and there, aren’t you glad you made those changes? I’ve always felt that every change is a great change. And maybe as a result have always been mystified when I hear people talk about saving old drafts. Possibly we’ve disfigured a sentence or something in the meantime, but isn’t it better just to fix it here and now rather than going back and trying to resurrect what it may (or may not) have been before?
And all those typos you found, the ones that evaded the spell checker. In Joan Didion’s famous essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes about how a notebook is useful for “keeping in touch” with the earlier selves who did all that feeling. My edition contains this nice booboo nobody caught: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the pepole we used to be.”
Congratulations Alison! Editing and those final moments are probably the stage of writing I dread the most! It's heartening to hear your experience of it all. And now I'm also making a note to try and keep all my notes and creative moments together for ease of access later!
“No work is wasted.” That’s a great line. Even if you only fiddled with a phrase or sentence here and there, aren’t you glad you made those changes? I’ve always felt that every change is a great change. And maybe as a result have always been mystified when I hear people talk about saving old drafts. Possibly we’ve disfigured a sentence or something in the meantime, but isn’t it better just to fix it here and now rather than going back and trying to resurrect what it may (or may not) have been before?
And all those typos you found, the ones that evaded the spell checker. In Joan Didion’s famous essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” she writes about how a notebook is useful for “keeping in touch” with the earlier selves who did all that feeling. My edition contains this nice booboo nobody caught: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the pepole we used to be.”
Congratulations Alison! Editing and those final moments are probably the stage of writing I dread the most! It's heartening to hear your experience of it all. And now I'm also making a note to try and keep all my notes and creative moments together for ease of access later!