Painting

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Painting, another delicate process requiring something of art as well as skill, also implies substantial reformulation, though less than occurs with sculpting. Gore Vidal uses painting imagery when he claims that he has altered his rewriting process over the years, like a painter changing materials.

I write first drafts with great speed but the older I get (a familiar observation, I know) I rewrite more and more.... I’m more an oil painter now. More deliberate. A good deal less certain. (1971, p. 337)

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With oils (as opposed to the “egg tempera” of his early years), Vidal has more opportunities for change, more thoughtfulness. Alberto Moravia also compares his writing process to a kind of painting that builds up layer by layer.

Each book is worked over several times. I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding, as it were, from layer to layer. The first draft is quite crude, far from being perfect, by no means finished; although even then, even at that point, it has its final structure, the form is visible. After that I rewrite it as many times—apply as many “layers”—as I feel to be necessary. (1957, p. 220)

Moravia highlights the changes and additions of revision, its ability to alter the text subtly or dramatically at any stage, even late in the process of writing. Similarly, Harry Mark Petrakis indicates that with his constant revisions, “Each layer added is a layer that will change the shape and totality of the whole” (1977, p. 99). Helen MacInnes (1964) also makes an analogy to painting: She “retouches” as she goes along. Unlike the refining and casting analogies, the analogy to painting emphasizes a kind of work that is delicate, only mildly physical, guided primarily by aesthetic principles, and focused on developing a product that is valued for its particular uniqueness and significance. The essentials are not necessarily hidden or buried in the rough draft, waiting to be discovered and brought to light, nor are they in potential in the text: They are realized, though “crudely.” In effect, the “layering” results in a series of changes and reformulations; the final product may go far beyond the initial sketch in richness and texture because of the enhancements of revision.