The essence of writing is rewriting.

The biggest mistake you can make as a writer is to toil away for months or years on your own, honing your masterpiece in solitude, polishing and repolishing your prose until every word is perfect. The writing process begins when you show your first draft to people and start getting feedback. Beethoven sometimes went through 70 drafts of a single musical phrase. As William Zinsser put it: “Rewriting is where the game is won or lost; rewriting is the essence of writing.

This is one of my favorite anecdotes about the rewriting process. It’s from William Zinsser’s excellent book On Writing Well, a lively manual on clear writing that I think every writer should own.

A school in Connecticut once held “a day devoted to the arts,” and I was asked if I would come and talk about writing as a vocation. When I arrived I found that a second speaker had been invited—Dr. Brock (as I’ll call him), a surgeon who had recently begun to write and had sold some stories to magazines. He was going to talk about writing as an avocation. That made us a panel, and we sat down to face a crowd of students and teachers and parents, all eager to learn the secrets of our glamorous work.

Dr. Brock was dressed in a bright red jacket, looking vaguely bohemian, as authors are supposed to look, and the first question went to him. What was it like to be a writer? He said it was tremendous fun. Coming home from an arduous day at the hospital, he would go straight to his yellow pad and write his tensions away. The words just flowed. It was easy. I then said that writing wasn’t easy and wasn’t fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.

Next Dr. Brock was asked if it was important to rewrite. Absolutely not, he said. “Let it all hang out,” he told us, and whatever form the sentences take will reflect the writer at his most natural. I then said that rewriting is the essence of writing.

I pointed out that professional writers rewrite their sentences over and over and then rewrite what they have rewritten. “What do you do on days when it isn’t going well?” Dr. Brock was asked. He said he just stopped writing and put the work aside for a day when it would go better. I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.

“What if you’re feeling depressed or unhappy?” a student asked. “Won’t that affect your writing?”

Probably it will, Dr. Brock replied. Go fishing. Take a walk. Probably it won’t, I said. If your job is to write every day, you learn to do it like any other job.

A student asked if we found it useful to circulate in the literary world. Dr. Brock said he was greatly enjoying his new life as a man of letters, and he told several stories of being taken to lunch by his publisher and his agent at Manhattan restaurants where writers and editors gather. I said that professional writers are solitary drudges who seldom see other writers.

“Do you put symbolism in your writing?” a student asked me.

“Not if I can help it,” I replied. I have an unbroken record of missing the deeper meaning in any story, play or movie, and as for dance and mime, I have never had any idea of what is being conveyed.

“I love symbols!” Dr. Brock exclaimed, and he described with gusto the joys of weaving them through his work.

So the morning went, and it was a revelation to all of us. At the end Dr. Brock told me he was enormously interested in my answers—it had never occurred to him that writing could be hard. I told him I was just as interested in his answers—it had never occurred to me that writing could be easy. Maybe I should take up surgery on the side.

Source: William Zinsser, On Writing Well