In the beginning of my writing career, a friend of mine told me, “Write with fire, revise with flame.” The “fire” part of “The Complete Story” took less than thirty minutes to write. The “flame” part took countless hours.

Below are ten quotes by writers on the subject of revision. I chose these quotes because they rang true for me. Maybe they’ll ring true for you.

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.” —Robert Cormier

“In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don’t enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.” —Rita Dove

“The first draft reveals the art, revision reveals the artist.” —Michael Lee

“Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.” —Bernard Malamud

“Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing.” —Richard North Patterson

“I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever written.  My pencils outlast their erasers.” —Vladimir Nabokov

“Everything comes out wrong with me at first, but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it until it offends me no more.” —William James

“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.” —Oscar Wilde

“Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush.” —Pete Murphy

“To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.” —John Hersey

As an autobiographical writer, I don’t know the complete story until a character I’ve written about fills me in on his or her side of the story. Many years ago I wrote a chapter in a published novel about my “almost” first sexual experience at the age of 17. I recently met that woman who “almost” gave herself to me. After she read the chapter about the two of us, she filled me in on something that completely blew my mind. It was an extremely important aspect that never entered my thought processes. It was a revelation to me. What I’m getting at is: Revelation is another reason why writers write. Here then is the complete story:

As soon as the senior prom was over, Penny and I drove up to the Hollywood hills. We were parked in an empty lot, the shimmering lights of Los Angeles below us. We were in the front seat of my mother’s Plymouth. Soon she was sitting on my lap, facing me, kissing me passionately and rubbing my lower region with her hand. And there I was, caressing her breasts, something I had never been able to do with a girl in all my years. There was no doubt we were on the brink of coitus—when all of a sudden, interruptus: two flashlights were shining through my car’s steamed-up windows that scared the holy hell out of us.

I wrote a chapter about this incident in my novel Morning Pages and called it “My Almost First Woman.” Last month, at Fairfax High School’s 50-year class reunion, I brought several copies of the novel as a donation for door prizes. When I saw Penny (who really hadn’t changed much in all those years), I gave her a copy of the book and pointed out the chapter I had written about the two of us. I wanted her to know how special that senior prom night was to me. In a letter I received from her a few days ago, she said she “flushed” when she read the chapter, then startled me with a confession.

Penny revealed that she and a guy by the name of Ronnie Separsky had set me up. According to their plan, Separsky was to shoot his mouth off to me in civics class about his sexual exploits with her. He started this “bragging” a few weeks before the senior prom was to take place. He was letting me know how easy Penny would be so that when she asked me to the prom I would not hesitate in accepting her invitation. In her letter, Penny explained that Separsky was only her friend and dancing partner, that she had never had sex with him or anyone else in high school. She admitted that she had had a longtime crush on me and figured that their scheme was the only way she could get me to go out with her. I must say it was pretty ingenious plot on their part.

When she asked me to the prom, I of course accepted. What teenage boy who had never gotten to second base with someone of the opposite sex would turn down an invitation from a girl who was not only attractive but who, according to Separsky, was “hot to trot”?

But all of Penny’s and Separsky’s conspiring, all of her pre-prom fantasies and mine, were foiled by two flashlight-wielding cops whose duty, I remember them saying, was to warn “lover’s lane” couples of potential robbers and rapists.

In her letter, Penny divulged that she would have kept up with what we were about to do in my mother’s car if we had gone out again. But like the unthinking, unaware fool that I was back then, I never did call and ask her out.

Over the years I’ve often thought of that prom night and wondered, “What if those cops hadn’t interrupted us?” A couple of scenarios crossed my mind. Penny and I might have started dating, maybe even gotten married, had kids and eventually divorced. The second scenario was, what if she had gotten pregnant the night of the prom? In those days when abortion was prohibited in the United States, we might have driven 130 miles to Tijuana and walked into a sleazy abortion clinic where she might have hemorrhaged and possibly died.

Now that I think of it, maybe those cops really saved us a whole lot of trouble.

My answer to them is, “An idea will eventually come to you if you keep on writing.”

Julia Cameron, a woman who makes you want to write if you read her many books on writing, says, “It is the act of writing that calls ideas forward, not ideas that call forward writing.”

If you have a deadline to meet or an inclination to write but don’t know what to say, should you think before you write or write before you think?

I say, “Don’t think, but keep on writing until an idea comes to mind.”

Let me give you an example. Many times, since I began this project, I’ve said to myself (and I’ll probably say it again), “What am I going to write about today?” What I do is sit down to write and invariably, if I keep on writing without thinking, an idea will float to the surface. If I try to think about what I want to write, most of the time nothing materializes.

So, if you don’t have an idea to write about, keep on writing without thinking. I swear you’ll come up with an idea.

When I was a young writer living in Berkeley, my girlfriend and I broke up after living together for four years. Soon after the split, I witnessed the death of my father in Los Angeles. To overcome those two losses, I decided to hit the highways of America in my VW bus. I wrote in my journal, every day, on that three-month journey. After I settled down in Portland, Oregon, I used my journal entries to write my second novel, Highway Sailor: A Rollicking American Journey.

For my third novel, Morning Pages: The Almost True Story of My Life, about a writer overcoming writer’s block, I wrote in my journal, every day, for three months. Again, I used my daily journal entries to write that novel.

Do you see a pattern of how those novels came into being? I wrote in my journal, every day, for three or four months.

I’m not saying you should follow my pattern. What I’m saying is, if you write in your journal, every day, for a month or two or three, it’s one way to get a writing project off the ground. At the very least you’ll have plenty of material to work with.

I’m sitting in a coffeehouse, located across the street from the San Francisco Zoo and three blocks from the blue Pacific. It’s almost 6 p.m., which means I’ll arrive home later than I want to, but I swore I wouldn’t let my pen stop until I finished writing at least two pages.

I just got over a very bad cold. I was sick for a whole week. It just hung on and on and wouldn’t go away. Today’s my first day out of the house.

When we’re sick, all we wish for is to gain our health and strength back. But as soon as we get better we forget how lucky and blessed we are to have our health and strength.

Writing as fast as I can in my journal is so important to me. It tells me what’s going on in my mind and many times, as a bonus, it generates a story or essay idea. That’s why I love speedwriting.

I read an interesting article today in the San Francisco Chronicle by sports columnist Scott Ostler. Ostler actually admitted, like I do every so often in these weekly pieces, that his well for column ideas was as “dry as a good martini.” To overcome his dry, empty well, he wrote whatever came to mind today, whether it was connected to sports or not. In other words, he was releasing his subconscious, which was a pleasure for me to read since I espouse such a philosophy.

There’s a hell of a lot of noise going on in here. A few people are talking on their cell phones, not in low, muffled tones, but in very high voices, as people tend to do on cell phones.

I have a cup of coffee in my left hand and my unstoppable pen in my right. All of a sudden I can’t wait to finish this piece because of the loud chatter going on around me. Noise is a great distraction to this writer. But I’m not going to let it deter me from finishing two pages.

I’m reminded of Larry David in one of his Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes. He was sitting alone in a restaurant while a man at the next table, also alone, was talking loudly on his cell phone, just like the three people around me are doing. What did Larry do? He struck up a conversation with an invisible person across the table from him, talking as loud as the guy next to him. So the guy on his cell stops talking and complains to Larry that he can’t hear the person he’s talking to. The nerve of the guy! That’s what I feel like doing now, talking in a loud voice to an invisible person across the table from me—except I’m not a comedian with a TV series.

You, out there, why don’t you try writing as fast as you can? It might do you some good to find out what’s stored in the crevices of your mind.

“Should I write or not? I’m really not up to it. What I want to do is get in bed and sleep. No one is going to miss what I have to say, so why not take a day off and think of my health? On the other hand, I promised myself in early February that I would write an essay each week for a whole year and post it on my website. I have to keep to my word.”

If a writer is sicker than a dog, should he or she take a day off and go to bed?

Well, as you can see, a writer should NOT take a day off from writing. I learned this from William Saroyan and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom wrote every day no matter how sick or hungover they were. And so that’s what I’m doing, feeling like a dirty rag, but still writing.

You can be sure, though, that as soon as I finish this piece, I’m going straight to bed with the hope of regaining my health as soon as possible.

Sutton invited the Sunset Beacon to join him at the Tennessee Grill on Taraval as he talked about his book and a bit about his life. “I was 29 in 1969. I was single, young and idealistic. So much was happening back then: drugs, the sexual revolution, Black Power, the Vietnam war…it was a very turbulent time in our nation’s history and I got caught up in it.”

The novel is written with actual student comments taken from an “Ideas and Complaints” box that Joshua Sampson, the teacher-character in the novel, has set on his desk. “I really had an ‘Ideas and Complaints’ box for the students to freely express themselves,” said Sutton. “Each day they would write down what they thought about the subjects we discussed in class. The comments concerned the powerful social and cultural changes that were taking place as seen through the eyes of African-American students.”

Sutton settled in San Francisco in 1977. For several years he divided his time between teaching at a few public high schools in the City and writing. Since the mid-1980s he’s been a full-time writer.

When asked why it took so long for his novel to get published, Sutton answered, “I kept sending my book out and it kept getting rejected. I also revised it at least a dozen times. Because I never gave up on A Class of Leaders, it finally found a publisher.” —Jonathan Farrell, Sunset Beacon