ON REVISION SUBSTANCE AND STYLE

First drafts are for learning what your story or book is about. 

Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge or enhance an idea, to re-form it. The first draft... is the most uncertain— where you need the guts, the ability to accept the unperfect until it is better.1 

The great writer/director Ingmar Bergman speaks of writing and rewriting in an interview from the 1980s  

They [the first images] are often veiled and secretive and actually a little incomprehensible, and I don t really know what they want to tell me. But then I don t stop there, I continue, for I want clarity. I have an important need to communicate and in communicating I try the whole time to make concrete what s in my mind, in my imagination and to untangle it so that it will become comprehensible. 

For some writers, revising is more pleasurable than writing a first draft, while for others, the process can be slow and painful. We aim to lessen 

---