Rewriting is only for people who want to deliver high quality work. For everyone else, there's "Write Like a Beast". https://www.amazon.com/Write-like-Beast-Optimize-productivity/dp/B08FSKQTVX/ …https://twitter.com/dsawyer/status/1374707791701610502 …
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Replying to @MorlockP
Thanks for the RT! Unwilling as I am to want to lump Ellison, Poe, Asimov, Dickens, et. al. into the "low quality work" category, I long ago was forced to concede that the requirements of rewriting vary by both the particular literary work and the writer (& the combo).
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Replying to @dsawyer
Asimov may not have been low quality, but rereading him ... man, he wasn't actually great. Dickens was entertaining popcorn. Ellison was a genius Not all can do what geniuses do.
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Replying to @MorlockP
Like you, I'm not a huge fan of Asimov, but he Asimov'd like nobody else :-) Which is, I suppose, my point. The "quality" of a work emerges from the interaction of the creative stew that the artist bathes in, and from the artist himself. The great benefit of rewriting...1/?
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...emerges when the writer learns to treat the story (including the writer's voice in the story) as a "thing in itself" and make it more itself--a difficult thing to learn, as you know, as it requires cultivating a very unusual ability (that being: to hear one's own voice). 2/?
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Writing one-and-done (or close to) like Ellison http://et.al . and making great work requires both 1) cultivating a rich, deep, and well-developed self, 2) learning to slip into flow state, and 3) engaging with the story as thing-in-itself in the moment... 3/?
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...rather like a Jazz musician or a rock guitarist does when they jam. Either way, high-quality work requires genius. Both skillsets are acquirable, both are hard to master. In either case, the arts are Pareto-disciplines. Geniuses are rare, and special for it. :-) *fin*
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yes, I was going to argue that Ellison, in some sense, "rewrote BEFORE he wrote". He ruminated deeply on the craft, as one can see in his hundreds of essays, and - I think - did in his head what many of us do on paper, before he committed to paper.
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Replying to @MorlockP
That is, indeed, *exactly* what he did. It's the Young Indiana Jones method (Young Indy & the Mystery of the Blues is probably the best film about the creative process ever made): Learn the basic song well, then riff like hell and go with the surprises that emerge. Glorious!
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