The Importance of Rewriting

The secret to good writing is good editing. It doesn't matter how good you think you are as a writer--the first words you put on the page are a first draft. Writing is thinking; it's rare that you'll know exactly what you are going to say before you say it. At the end, you need, at the very least, to go back through the draft, tidy everything up and make sure the introduction you wrote at the start matches what you eventually said. The time you put into editing, reworking, and refining turns your first draft into a second--and then into a third, and, if you keep at it, eventually something great. The biggest mistake you can make as a writer is to assume that what you wrote the first time through was good enough.

Harry Guinness, The New York Times, April 10, 2020