“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.” (Eliezer Wiese, Nobel Peace Prize Winner 1986)
So what if you’re a sculptor who loves the marble too much to cut into it? You’ve put so much time and energy into choosing just the right marble?the right words?and now you have to slice some of them to bits? Agony, absolute agony.
But you’re a writer, and writers revise, so you take out the chisel and pare the excess. The piece looks so much better, but there are still rough edges. But they look nice. Maybe this is your style, kind of rowdy and free. Maybe readers will respond to that little bit of anarchy subtext.
But you’re a writer, and you know when your characters are lying to themselves because you made them do it. So you take another chisel and pare some more.
And when the piece is perfectly released from the stone, you put down your tools and bless everyone who told you to keep cutting.
I remember a book titled The Agony and the Ecstasy – by Irving Stone? So there’s a lot of agony here. I looking for the ecstasy. Comments?