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Shoutout to the librarian in Boise who showed me that even Hemingway needed 47 tries to nail one paragraph
I was stuck on the opening of my short story for two weeks, rewriting the same three lines over and over until I wanted to delete the whole file. Last Tuesday I went to the library in Boise to return some books, and the librarian saw my notebook and pulled a book off the shelf showing early drafts of a famous author's work. The guy wrote the ending of one book 47 different times before he got it right, and some of those drafts were straight up bad. I'd been treating my messy first pass like it was supposed to be final, which is the whole reason I froze up. Has anyone else felt way better after seeing how rough a famous writer's early pages actually looked?
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wright.sam3d ago
The 47 drafts thing is wild mostly because we never see the middle part, right? Like we get the clean final book and assume the writer just sat down and typed it that way. Which draft did the librarian show you, because I'm curious if it was one of the bad ones or one that was almost there. Did seeing the mess make it easier to actually finish your opening, or did you just swap one kind of freeze for another?
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