How Many Rewrites Should I Do?

So I read something interesting the other day in a book about writing poetry, which was incidentally written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. It was an ok book (probably prose isn't her thing, but the publishers thought it would be a fabulous, money-making idea). The thing that I found most interesting was a line towards end where she wrote something like the following:

Some poems need to be revised 500 times.

Now if you're like me, you look at that sort of statement (and perhaps spit out your beverage) and the first thing you say to yourself is, "What?! That's crazy." And then after that, you say to yourself, "If that's really true...well hell, what's the point then?"

A lot of writers wonder how many rewrites they should do. I'm one of those also. And as such, I look for advice from "successful" writers (I write that in quotes because really, success is subjective) to try to guide me along.

But when I read that statement about the 500 rewrites, it was perhaps the first time in my life that I vehemently disagreed with something stated about the craft of writing. Or, more likely, it was the first time in my life that I allowed myself to really disagree with an idea from someone who was supposed to be an erudite writer.

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, "The first draft of anything is shit." And I subscribed to this notion for a really long time. In fact I still think it's true probably 75% of the time.

But the other 25%? Honestly sometimes I think the first draft of something (a paragraph, a sketch, a musical composition) can be brilliance.

I'm still working my way through The Artist's Way and part of its teachings are that you don't really "create" creativity. What you do, in actuality, is harness the creative thoughts and ideas that already exist out there in the ether somewhere. You grab them and channel them down onto the page or into your painting.

And when I think about it this way, then my 75/25 model sort of makes sense. Because I think 75% of the time we get in our own way. We stifle ourselves. We drown out the voice within that perhaps is the voice of God or energy or whatever it is you believe in that is greater than yourself.

But I think 25% of the time we are in the zone. We have tuned in to channel "Universe" and we pick up our brush or our pen or our guitar and we simply document what we hear in our heads. And in that scenario, the stuff that comes out is pretty close to perfect. Just the way it is.

In my own writing life I find that I have moments of brilliance. A portion of what I write is actually pretty badass from the start. It's only a portion, yes, but it exists. And in that case is the first draft really shit? Do I really need to do a bunch of rewrites on something that came straight from my internal radio?

The rest of the time, yep, it's shit. And I usually know it. And it's beyond a fear or ego sort of thing where I'm afraid that it's bad. Sometimes I just read it and I know in my psyche (or my soul?) that it's not all that great.

But here's the kicker and what I've found to be true in my own work. Every piece of junk has a little diamond in it somewhere. It's that part of what you created that was pulled from your radio, unfiltered by your brain. I think you should look for that part in anything you create and use it to try to tune back in. To figure out the rest of what you missed.

So how many rewrites should you do? It depends. How tuned in were you?