The (Near) Endless Edit

39?

47?

In a 1958 interview Ernest Hemingway said that the final words of his wartime masterpiece, A Farewell to Arms, were rewritten “39 times before I was satisfied.”

Studies of manuscripts at the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum have found 47 variations.*

Hemingway was not alone.

• Walt Whitman was working on yet another version of Leaves of Grass when he died (after 9 editions, what began as a slim book of 12 poems was a thick book of almost 400).
   
• Before deciding on The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald retitled his manuscript many times, including: Trimalchio in West Egg and Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires and Gold-Hatted Gatsby and Under the Red, White, and Blue and The High-Bouncing Lover.
  
  
• Leo Tolstoy, rewrote the whole of War and Peace seven times

Ernest Hemingway - Leo Tolstoy - Walt Whitman - F. Scott Fitzerald

I wonder how geniuses know when a piece is finished ... it seems to me the answer is either:

1. They are never truly finished.

2. That's why they are geniuses.

 

Let's let some geniuses, such as  Leonardo da Vinci, Roald Dahl, Claude Monet, and Kurt Vonnegut, weigh in on the subject:

 

"I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times–once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say." – Bernard Malamud

 

“A painting that is well composed is half finished.” – Pierre Bonnard

 

"Books aren’t written – they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it." – Michael Crichton

 

“In painting, the gravest immorality is to try to finish what isn’t well begun. But a picture that is well begun may be left off at any point. Look at Cezanne’s water colours!” – Matthew Smith

 

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” – Leonardo da Vinci

 

"I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil." – Truman Capote

 

“The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.” – John Berger

 

"By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this." – Roald Dahl

 

"The painting is complete when the idea is obliterated." – Georges Braque

 

“To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.” – Pablo Picasso

 

“A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.” – John Cage

 

“When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while.” – Arshile Gork

 

"Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." –  Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

 

“That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.” – Alberto Giacometti

 

“Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.” – William Baziotes

 

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." – Richard North Patterson

 

“Perhaps the sketch of a work is so pleasing because everyone can finish it as he chooses.” – Eugene Delacroix

 

"Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying." – John Updike

 

“How do you complete a painting, really? There are paintings by so many different artists that are interesting precisely because they haven’t really been completed.” – Peter Doig

 

“Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool…” – Paul Gauguin

 

“When you’ve just done it, you’re not sure. But when you’ve sat with it for a couple of hours and you don’t want to do anything more to it, that’s a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet.” – Damien Hirst

 

“It is difficult to stop in time because one gets carried away. But I have that strength; it is the only strength I have.” – Claude Monet

 

“I always work out of uncertainty, but when a painting’s finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns… your thought process goes on.” – Georg Baselitz

 

“At the end of the day, the only thing that counts is your insight, your reaction, and the way you convey your feeling towards the subject.” – Alvaro Castagnet

 

"Rewriting is the essence of writing well – where the game is won or lost." – William Zinsser

 

"I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers." – Vladimir Nabokov

 

“One always has to spoil a picture a little bit in order to finish it.” – Eugene Delacroix

 

"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina." – John Irving

 

“A painting is complete when it has the shadows of a god.” – Rembrandt

 

"Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away." – Helen Dunmore

 

“I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.” – Pierre-Auguste Renoir

 

"Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out." – Kurt Vonnegut

 

“How do you know when you’ve finished a painting? How do you know when you’re finished making love?” – Jackson Pollock

 

"There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them." – Elie Wiesel

 

_________________________

 

*Why write so many endings? Hemingway told The Paris Review's George Plimpton that he was [g]etting the words right."

Reporting on a special 2012 edition of A Farewell to Arms that included all 47 endings, the New York Times reported that the alternate conclusions ranged in length "from a short sentence to several paragraphs." 

In No. 1, “The Nada Ending,” Hemingway wrote, “That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.” 

The “Live-Baby Ending,” listed as No. 7, concludes,“There is no end except death and birth is the only beginning.” 

And in No. 34, the “Fitzgerald ending,” suggested by Hemingway’s friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway wrote that the world “breaks everyone,” and those “it does not break it kills.” “It kills the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially,” he wrote. “If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

_________________________