Revelation

When peo­ple talk about re-writ­ing and revis­ing a text, gen­er­al­ly speak­ing they mean mak­ing it bet­ter. Par­tic­u­lar­ly in schools, it means teach­ers call­ing upon stu­dents to check spelling, gram­mar, and punc­tu­a­tion. All to the good. Nev­er­the­less, there is anoth­er part of rewrit­ing that is as, and per­haps more, important. 

Rewrit­ing allows you to know and reveal your char­ac­ters more and more. I’ve been work­ing on a book now for three years and only recent­ly discovered—if that’s the word—something very impor­tant about a key char­ac­ter. It made all the dif­fer­ence to the nov­el as a whole. It is rather like know­ing some­one for a while, even a good friend, and then learn­ing some aspect of his or her life here­to unknown. That knowl­edge explains some­thing about their behav­ior, or think­ing, or doing, which made lit­tle sense before. In writ­ing jar­gon, moti­va­tion. Rev­e­la­tion might be a bet­ter term. For the read­er, epiphany.

At the worst that has happened—and it has hap­pened to me—after a book was pub­lished. At best, it comes about dur­ing the writ­ing process. All I know is that it takes time.