Pentimento

When you are read­ing a book it’s easy to feel the con­ti­nu­ity and arch of the sto­ry, espe­cial­ly when it flows right along. But what about a writer’s mis­takes, the wrong turns tak­en? Hope­ful­ly you don’t see the evi­dence. You don’t see them because, if the writer and edi­tor have done their jobs, they are no longer in the book. Those false steps were erased. Who was it that said the writer’s tool—a pencil—has two equal ends—the lead­ed end and the eras­er end?

Now I’ve been work­ing on a book for a good num­ber of months. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing it was going well. Then, per­haps a month and a half ago I decid­ed on a big change, and worked accord­ing­ly, so that that change man­i­fest­ed itself every­where. But after all that was done, I decid­ed I had made a poor deci­sion. That meant going back and erad­i­cat­ing all traces of that choice. It was as if, hav­ing paint­ed the house a cer­tain col­or, cel­lar to roof, I real­ized my selec­tion was poor. Even before I repaint­ed, I had to remove the old color—(hopefully) all of it. 

So on one lev­el I lost a month’s worth of for­ward progress. Yet I have learned, that even this kind of work—and some of it is drudge work—brings the writer into a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the work in hand. 

There is a per­fect art term for this: pen­ti­men­to. “A sign or trace of an alter­ation in a lit­er­ary or artis­tic work; (spec. in Paint­ing) a vis­i­ble trace of a mis­take or an ear­li­er com­po­si­tion seen through lat­er lay­ers of paint on a can­vas.” OED

Every book has such layers.