How to write?

Revision, writes novelist Colson Whitehead, is a cardinal rule of the art of writing:

Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t. It’s like washing the dishes two days later instead of right after you finish eating.

Just as days-old unwashed dishes could get encrusted with food-residue, something that you want to revise out of contention, could stubbornly leach back into your writing. But as the graphic above shows, you can always see the progression from the "I didn't want this" to "yes, this is what I want to say!"

On the whole Whitehead writes a mighty engaging set of rules. I really took to "rule #9":

Have adventures. The Hemingway mode was in ascendancy for decades before it was eclipsed by trendy fabulist “exercises.” The pendulum is swinging back, though, and it’s going to knock these effete eggheads right out of their Aeron chairs. Keep ahead of the curve. Get out and see the world. It’s not going to kill you to butch it up a tad. Book passage on a tramp steamer. Rustle up some dysentery; it’s worth it for the fever dreams alone. Lose a kidney in a knife fight. You’ll be glad you did.

I always wonder about the discrepancy between the books that people write and the lives that they live. Take for instance E.L. James, the scribe that produced the bestselling trilogy of the grey shades of kinky sex.

Take a look at her photograph--yes, she is an amply endowed female with a British face. She must be one of the "effete eggheads" who cut pasted sex-descriptors from the entire oeuvre of western erotica, ranging from the classic to the moronic.

Wonder if the writing would have been less reviled had it come from James' direct experience of and participation in the adventures of sadomasochism/violent sex.