Writing Tools

My book "Writing Tools" is dedicated to Donald Murray, perhaps America's greatest writing teacher. Among his many gifts to me was a book titled "Authors at Work," a collection of famous literary manuscripts.

The photos and commentaries reveal the work of revision, the kinds of creative additions, deletions, and transplantations now made mostly invisible by the technology of word-processing. Sure, it is possible to "track changes," but nothing compares with seeing poet Percy Bysshe Shelley scratch out the word "the" and replace it with "a" in the title of his poem "To a Skylark."

It may sound too old school for modern tastes, but in my coaching, teaching and editing I still like to work from hard copy. Helping the writer mark up the page with a pen or pencil helps reveal the range of good choices to both of us, freeing the writer to imagine the "re-VISION" part of revision.

So I was happy to put my hands on another collection of manuscript pages in the coffee table book "1000 Years of English Literature: A Treasury of Literary Manuscripts." It was remaindered, and I got it for less than $20. The examples range from "Beowulf" to Virginia Woolf. (Man, I've always wanted to use that phrase!)

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My favorite example comes from the World War I poet Wilfred Owen, who died in battle in 1918, at the age of 25. The few drafts he left us were revised by Siegfried Sassoon, another battle-tested veteran and English poet. The hand-written sonnet, titled "Anthem for Dead Youth," was published as "Anthem for Doomed Youth," and reveals Sassoons' "amendments."

Owen begins: "What minute bells for these who die so fast?"
Sassoon revises: "What passing bells for these who die so fast?"

Owen: "Only the solemn anger of our guns"
Sassoon: "Only the monstrous anger of the guns"

Owen:  "Let the majestic insults of their iron mouths"
Sassoon: "Let the blind insolence of iron mouths"

In the next line, Owen writes, "Be as the priest words of their burials," but crosses out "priest words," replacing the phrase with "requiem."

And so forth. Some pages, such as those hand-written by Lewis Carroll, look almost mystically perfect, and even contain a gorgeous drawing of little Alice. Others, such as the one edited by Joseph Conrad, show dozens upon dozens of changes on a single page.

Writers I know seem to fall into two camps. I'll call the first one the Chip Scanlan camp, in which the master drafts quickly and then rewrites and rewrites until someone hits him over the head with a frying pan. Then there is the David Finkel camp, in which the writer works on the first sentence until it is just right, then the second sentence, so that drafting and revising become one. I'd describe the Clark camp as falling somewhere in the middle.

[Please describe your method of drafting and revision. To which camp do you belong?]