On Writing
And Re-Writing





This short essay was published by the Scottish Book Trust in 2014.


I first started thinking about formulating a clear, regimented approach to writing, for the sole reason that all of my early stories were so awful. Truly awful, and with no exceptions.

Part of the reason for this was that at the writing class I joined back in 2006 or 2007, the tutor advocated ‘automatic writing’ in order to produce a first draft. Initially I found this quite tricky to accept: that you would begin with no plot or plan in mind other than an opening line, and would then move the pen continuously, until either you finished or had ran out of the time you’d allocated for writing. This may sound odd to those who haven’t considered this concept before; the best explication of the technique I’ve found was from Flannery O’Connor’s book Mystery and Manners, when she detailed the writing of that great story, ‘Good Country People’. In this piece, the protagonist has her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesman. O’Connor explains that when she began writing, she didn’t know there would be a character with a wooden leg, and when the Bible salesman appeared, she still had no idea that he would eventually steal it.

This way of thinking hadn’t occurred to me before. I threw myself into writing automatically in that class and outwith it, doing as our tutor advised and trying to engage my inner voice and sensibility through the act of moving the pen, allowing the characters to grow and act before me, never tying them down to some rigid, pre-planned plot.

And yet, the stories were bad. Even after ‘editing’ them. My problem was that whereas I’d stumbled upon an effective writing process, I didn’t really understand how fiction could/should be edited. I would edit stories by unleashing the miserable, Americanized Microsoft Word spelling & grammar check, tweaking sentences here and there, and changing the ending or title if either struck me as being particularly objectionable.

A turning-point was a few years ago when The New Yorker published a composite version of the Raymond Carver stories ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ (I’ll refer to it as WWTA) and ‘Beginners’ (both title stories in their respective collections). This was the first time I’d been able to see exactly how a great editor (Gordon Lish) worked with a text – the extent to which it had been revised and altered was quite shocking to me. It made me realize that I had been so lazy and short-sighted – the first draft is really only a beginning. It is something to work from, rather than be tinkered with. The re-writing of it is far more important than the initial outpouring.

When the full version of that collection, Beginners, was released in 2009, I spent time poring over the two books, comparing in detail the original and un-edited author’s originals (Beginners) with the substantially-edited versions published back in 1981. This was a fascinating experience, and I’d recommend it to any writer who struggles with self-editing (and who, like me, is a sorry enough individual to remain undaunted by the prospect of long, lonely hours spent on line-by-line comparisons). From this process, I was able to identify what I consider to be the four main types of editorial action:


- Distilling - the trimming/cutting of lines

- Filtering - rewriting lines already on the page

- Removing - wholesale omissions of lines & strands

- Developing - the addition of brand new lines & strands


Finding and recognizing instances of each of these within the stories of ‘WWTA’ helped me to come to an understanding of when each should be utilized. If you feel your story is somewhere close to the story you wanted to write, you would use filtering to improve your hastily-written first draft, and maybe distilling to rid yourself of any unnecessary explication or descriptions. But if the first draft has not transpired as something approaching your desired piece, then rather than surrender it to the wheelybin, you could and should use removing and developing to retain the original sentiments or existing structure, but to move the story in an altogether different direction.

The Beginners/WWTA comparison provided brilliant examples of how to cut down on things like needless backstory and heavyhanded symbolism, while re-working and improving the flow and feel of dialogue, and revising the ending to go out on just the right note – while still keeping the heart of the first draft (for those interested in examining one such piece, try ‘Want To See Something?’ from Beginners, and the superior ‘I Could See The Smallest Things’ from WWTA).

And just as instructively, there were also (to my mind) instances of poor editing practice, as in ‘The Bath’ (WWTA) and ‘A Small, Good Thing’ (Beginners), where the editor Lish became infatuated with omission and ambiguity (aspects he worked so well with elsewhere). He succeeded in deleting a wonderful, evocative concluding scene, thereby effectively discarding the soul of one of the great short stories of the twentieth century (‘A Small, Good Thing’ was published in its unedited form in the collection Cathedral in 1983).

I like to think that I use good and prudent editing principles in my role as submissions editor at thi wurd magazine as well as in my own writing, and I hope to soon publish online a study of James Kelman’s editing practice in his book A Lean Third, released last year. A Lean Third is a superb exercise in the aforementioned fourth editing technique, developing, where Kelman has written into some stories quite extensively, and in doing so has enhanced them in significant aesthetic ways while never compromising their initial premise. A comparison of the two versions of the story ‘The City Slicker and the Barmaid’ is definitely something I’d recommend for anyone wishing to observe great developing at work.

I feel that developing, writing into stories, is a wonderful way to improve your work. This constituted the bulk of the advice given to me by my mentor, Alan Warner, after he’d read an early version of my short-story collection in the summer of 2013. He was urging me to write into the pieces, develop them further, as the kernel of a decent story is not enough to rest on. And by refining and reinventing the drafts as I went, I believe I found new depths in various characters and stories, and emerged with a stronger, more substantial body of work.

Automatic writing gives the work a fresh, organic structure, and lends the writing a fluidity that I don’t think can be achieved via rigorous pre-planning, but that is only really a fraction of the work. Using all four forms of editing (especially the fourth type I’ve listed) is, to my mind, the best way to arrive at the story you wanted to write, the one you hoped for, that you had a sense of in your mind at the outset. A first draft is rarely enough, and a planned story never flourishes, it is only by revisiting and exploring your story further that you produce the best work you are capable of.

I’ll conclude with a quotation from AL Kennedy’s book On Writing – a perfect expression of the inevitability with which great writers view the exhaustive business of re-working a hard-earned first draft, and surely a sentiment worth remembering:


"Rewriting is as much a part of writing as being mugged is a part of walking
about in an urban environment at night looking happy."