So Hemingway wrote 47 different endings to A Farewell To Arms. This makes me feel better about my obsessive attempts to find the right words. Of course, I’m not nearly as good at finding them as H was. But now I feel less stupid about trying anyway.
So Hemingway wrote 47 different endings to A Farewell To Arms. This makes me feel better about my obsessive attempts to find the right words. Of course, I’m not nearly as good at finding them as H was. But now I feel less stupid about trying anyway.
As an anguished micro-tweaker, I find Oscar Wilde’s “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” very reassuring in this respect, too.
I had forgotten that one! It ought to be available as a framed embroidery for placement on the wall.
If you embroidered it yourself you could take years, putting in and taking out the single comma in it.
There’s a brilliant, terrible logic to that idea.