Essay: Exploring the Rewrite
‘There’s no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting’- Robert Graves
I’ve chosen to tackle this quote from two primary angles: the first being of rewriting your own material and the second being the rewriting of others (whether intentionally or not). I think the first is conceptually easier to navigate and has a more clear-cut answer, yes, I agree that in almost every case spanning nearly all forms of writing anything of quality has been through the process of being rewritten to some degree. To the second point you begin to wade into the murkier waters of whether all is plagiarism or true originality exists.
For my first argument I’m choosing to believe that Graves intended rewriting to be the process by which we edit, change, scrap and add to anything we have written spanning all types and genres of writing from commercial copywriting to Japanese Haikus and everything in between. In retrospect while rewriting some of this essay it occurred to me that perhaps Haikus (and some other forms of poetry) are the only exception to Graves’ rule in that by their very nature they are not intended to be rewritten. John J. Dunphy (2018) said ‘A genuine haiku is characterised by a freshness and spontaneity…’ and so by the process of editing one to improve it you may instead sap it of its soul and ability to capture a moment in time.
However, apart from these more esoteric examples I think you can safely say that nearly all writing benefits from rewriting. The very basic example of simple proofreading allows you to eliminate obvious errors of spelling and grammar, but it also allows you to convey your ideas far more clearly to others, from academia to world building. It does this by the reorganisation of sentences both grammatically and compositionally. It’s within this relatively boring sounding process of refinement that writing can become amazing. Academically it allows concepts and information to be understood in a deeper and more transferrable manner while in both fiction and non- fiction it allows us to truly step into the mind or world of another. That’s not to say writing is incapable of doing any of this, the first draft of anything may have brilliant stuff conceptually but the improvement of its syntax by rewriting it is what helps it to be understood and paves the path between writer and reader.
In a slightly more open concept of rewriting, even if you write something and then go onto drastically change or remove pieces, those lost pieces have still helped to inform what the final result is. Every author will have multiple versions of their writings before they reach their final product, and each version will have taught them something and got them a step closer to as close as someone can get to total satisfaction with a piece of writing. There is of course an argument to be made that you can overdo this process and half the art of rewriting is knowing when to stop, but you must certainly undertake this process to some degree. In a very broad way, every piece of writing we do informs the next, no matter how good or bad. This sentence is the sum of every piece of writing I have ever done and will go on to affect the next.
The second way I chose to interpret Graves’ quote, in that we are only rewriting what we have read, ties into this concept as well. From an academic standpoint I think this is clearer than ever, we are encouraged to reference and source where all our ideas are from and then compare and contrast these static ideas of thesis to create a new dynamic understanding but is this understanding in any way original or is it just a remix, a rewrite of others’ ideas. As Joseph Harris (2017) states ‘like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But for intellectuals, unlike many other writers, what we have to say is bound up with the books we are reading…’ however while I agree what ‘intellectuals’ have to say is more obviously tied to the academia they read I believe that any writer of any kind is ‘bound up with the books are reading’ and have read. I think this is we how improve our writing and knowledge in any field, we stand on the shoulders of others and reach a little higher.
And so, I perhaps not only agree with Robert Graves but would take it further and say, ‘There’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting’.
Dunphy, J. (2018) What Is A Haiku And What Isn’t. Medium [blog]. 13 October. Available from: https://johnjdunphy.medium.com/what-is-a-haiku-and-what-isnt-83764ed0c85a [Accessed 18 July 2022]
Harris, J. (2017) Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts [online]. 2nd ed. Colorado: University Press of Colorado. [Accessed 18 July 2022]