"I have seen her write a rough draft on a piece of gilt-edged stationery — that was in some sense unbelievably wasteful, in this gorgeous way," she says.
"I have seen her write a rough draft on a piece of gilt-edged stationery that was in some sense unbelievably wasteful, in this gorgeous way," she says.
In fact, I actually wrote an entire first draft of a piece that simply asked that first question, but then I began to think about what happened in Washington, D.C. yesterday, and the cold, hard truth about my first reaction to the news became clear as day: for all of my writing, speaking, and so-called activist behavior, I had totally forgotten what real activism was.
The first draft of a long piece on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether.
Stapled to the top of every returned draft was a piece of colored stationery — teal, gold, red — filled from beginning to end with single-spaced narrative comments.
Do you do a lot of drafts of one piece?
And then, that evening, I was working on a draft of this piece, an essay I am free to open with Before we get started and in which I can write sentences like I'm a dancer who walks for a living and expect they will survive revisions.
Into several late drafts of that piece, I laboriously typed and retyped those journal entries — another adventure in tedium.
Into several late drafts of that piece, I laboriously typed and retyped those journal entries another adventure in tedium.
He sends me drafts of the piece and I agree to it and it comes out.
