(No armored generalities here. Just a few remarks.) First, because to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading. You write in order to read what you’ve written, and see if it’s OK and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it—once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread. You are your own first, maybe severest, reader. “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself,” Ibsen inscribed on the flyleaf of one of his books. Hard to imagine writing without rereading. But is what you’ve written straight off never all right? Yes, sure: sometimes even better than all right. And that only suggests, to this writer at any rate, that with a closer look, or voicing aloud—that is, another reading—it might be better still. I’m not saying that the novelist has to fret and sweat to produce something good. “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure,” said Dr. Johnson, and the maxim seems as remote from contemporary taste as its author.
