The Secret to Revisions

As crime writers go, Raymond Chandler was rather cerebral. He didn’t write with the fevered intensity of Jim Thompson or Mickey Spillane. His fiction, which featured detective Philip Marlowe drifting around Los Angeles, didn’t feature the wall-to-wall gunfights or the twisted freaks that stuff most pulpy literature. But Chandler’s writing process was definitely a little tortured, at least based on this quote I found the other day:

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”

Or as someone else once memorably phrased it: write with your heart, re-rewrite with your head.