Literary Digest LITERARY DIGEST MAY 2020 | Seite 4

TURNING NOTES INTO BOOKS
What does it take to turn
handwritten or typed notes
into books? What does it
really take to finish a book?
We’ve witnessed writers
complete their work, and
many others stumbling
along the way and being
disillusioned. We honestly
believe it’s important for
the upcoming writers to
understand that it takes a
different set of skills to
finish a book than it does
to produce pages. Finishing
a book demands that we
think about a score of
issues that we needn’t
concern ourselves about in
the earliest stages of our
work. It requires us to
assess what we’ve already
written to determine
what’s working and what’s
not; to revise and refine
our work. It requires our
willingness, in effect, to
rethink what we’ve written
as we decide how to shape
our work, and to jettison
what doesn’t fit, and to
write completely new
material as required. The
late historian Robin W.
Winks, once spoke about
his book 'The Historian as
Detective'. The writer,
Winks said, must live with
the knowledge that any
book will be incomplete
and imperfect. He
suggested that we think of
each work as an essay: an
attempt to get at
something and not as a
definitive work.“I work
until I’m finished, not until
the book’s finished,”Winks
said. The book is never
finished. To complete a
book, we must accept that
it won’t be perfect. And our
pages will never become
books, unless we take the
necessary steps to
complete them, imperfect
as they are.
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LITERARY DIGEST / May 2020