The decisive point for me is to arrive, starting from nothing, at a dense, chaotic draft. The work on the draft is gruelling. It takes a lot of energy to get a text with a beginning, an end, and its own crowded vitality. It’s a slow approach, like tailing a life form that has no defined physiognomy. Occasionally I can keep rolling along, even without rereading, but that’s rare. More often I advance by a few lines every day, writing and rewriting. Frequently I fall out of love and put it all aside.
But that painful condition I will ignore for now. I want to tell you instead, cara Ann, that only when this preliminary labour has had good results does the true pleasure of writing begin for me. I start again from the beginning. I remove entire sections, I rewrite a lot, I change the direction and even the nature of the characters, I add parts that, only now that there’s a text, come to mind and seem necessary, I develop episodes that were barely alluded to, I change the chronology of certain events, I very often retrieve pages that were discarded – early, longer, perhaps uglier, but more immediate versions. It’s a job that I do alone, I wouldn’t share it with anyone.
At a certain point, however, I need attentive readers, but readers who will focus only on my carelessness: mistakes in chronology, repetitions, incomprehensible formulations. I fear suggestions that tend to normalise the text, such as: don’t say it like that, the punctuation is insufficient, this word doesn’t exist, it’s an incorrect formulation, that’s an ugly solution, this way it’s more beautiful. More beautiful? Editing that’s alert to respect for the current aesthetic canon is dangerous. So is editing that encourages anomalies that are compatible with popular taste. If an editor says: in your text there are good things but we have to work on it, you’re better off withdrawing the manuscript. That first person plural is alarming.
-Elena Ferrante, Guardian, Aug 29
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