The one that got away.


Why is it that we always seem to assume that the lost copy of something was also the best? This seems to be the writer's corollary to the fisherman's fish that he couldn't hold on to. It's taken me a long time, but I honestly think that I've learned to rewrite. I've learned to read what I've written and then, unsentimentally, cross out words and whole sentences, change my sentence structure, rework a paragraph, and ultimately admit that the final product is better than the first draft. Still, after losing even a few paragraphs of work (that I've saved and acknowledged, to myself, as finished) I rarely if ever feel that my reconstructed version gets anywhere near that original, lost, version.

Garrison Keillor expressed this wonderfully in his preface to Lake Wobegon Days in a passage that I used years ago when I lost a vast amount of work on a project that was nearing completion. Reconstructing that project took much longer than desired, but in the end I have to admit that the result was better than what was lost.



Go to: My greatest fear.