Doing It Over

THERE ARE cosmic jokes, as we all know; and the one I’m probably most familiar with on a daily basis is the one whose punchline goes: “I don’t write...I rewrite.” As cosmic jokes go, this is hardly the most terrifying; but, as I say, it’s the one I’m most familiar with, and like all such jokes its aim is to chasten.

Everyone who’s ever written anything at all knows all about this humbling joke, of not writing but rewriting —with the exceptions perhaps of teenage poets and professional philosophers. Whether it’s to be a love letter or a term paper on Thomas Paine or a few blistering remarks to be delivered before the neighborhood livability subcommittee, or whether it’s Anna Karenina—the semi-comic truth is that whatever is first put down on paper shouldn’t be seen as much more than simply a way to get the ink accustomed to coming off the pen. That’s it. Even to call it a framework or a scaffolding is probably to say too much.

Better to think of it as the beginning of a dazzling process of subversion. You knew—or you you knew—what you were going to say. After all, you knew what you thought, right? But the moment you commit it to the piece of paper on the desk or in the typewriter, or to the floppy