Sean Walsh

The Bottom Line

When you’ve written something, you haven’t – you’ve written only the first draft. THEN the work begins in earnest. Writing, re-writing… draft after draft… editing, shaping, deleting…

Whenever I give a Creative Writing workshop I begin with this basic tenet, repeat it, end by repeating it a final time. I am always amazed at the numbers who look askance at me for even suggesting such a modus agendi, much less proposing it as a conditio sine qua non.

Yet there is no gainsaying the validity of my thesis; the Masters in any age will bear me out. Joyce, for example. Search out his original screed: page after page of edits, deletions, additions all along the margins and in his own hand…

Hemingway comes to mind. Oh, doesn’t he, just! A master craftsman; I have long been in awe of his word economy. And not just prose – he has written superb dialogue along the way, here and there, now and then…

A Farewell to Arms, for example. The last chapter, to be precise. If ever there was a love scene between a man and a woman! Beautiful, elegant, touching… And little or nothing of the conventional – He said… She replied… He asked etc. We KNOW who is speaking, who is saying what…

But now – and here’s the thing! – in an interview with the Paris Review way back when, Hemingway states that he wrote this chapter some 39 times – until he “got it right…”

Get the message?..