Thomas Mallon’s eight novels include “Henry and Clara,” “Bandbox,” “Fellow Travelers” and “Watergate,” a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also published nonfiction about plagiarism (“Stolen Words”), diaries (“A Book of One’s Own”), letters (“Yours Ever”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Mrs. Paine’s Garage”), as well as two books of essays. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. A recipient of the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style, he is currently professor of English at George Washington University.

◆ ◆ ◆

By Cheryl Strayed

I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.

Image Cheryl Strayed Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

When pressed by my siblings and me as children about whom among us she loved most, my mother always replied that she disliked us all equally — a japing answer she had also received from her mother about such inquiries, and one I’ve taken to giving my own kids when asked. This sentiment came to mind while I grappled with the impossible question of whether the labors of the first draft or the seventh (or 17th) are more important in my work. Each is essential in such equal measure that it’s impossible to separate them in order to single one out. Like a great mental seesaw, every thought in one direction is immediately counterbalanced by a thought in the other. I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right. There would be nothing to revise if the initial prose didn’t exist. Without revision my work would be too ridiculous to bear, a pile of almost-good pages I’d rather burn than publish. The truest thing I can say about either one of them is, like the mother who loves her offspring beyond measure, I dislike them both equally.

It’s immensely harder for me to create sentences and paragraphs and scenes than it is to fiddle around with them. There are so many more reasons to make something better than there are to write it at all. The question describes the generative phase of writing as an “initial rush of prose,” but in my experience the pages seldom accumulate in much of a hurry. Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, whether the plot is an act of imagination or a life I’ve lived, the characters invented or known, I’m haunted always by the thought that the act of writing is itself absurd. Filling an empty page or computer screen with words can strike me as inane work that ought to have more to show for itself by the end of the day. How many bookshelves does a carpenter build that don’t ultimately become bookshelves in the actual world? I’d guess none. How many paragraphs does a writer write that go to the invisible, forgotten place where deleted paragraphs go? In my own work — including the work I did in the course of writing this very column — I’d estimate it approaches a 50-50 split.

Yet once a piece of writing exists, the idea of taking it all apart and putting it together differently often feels even more insurmountable than creating it did. In his book “On Becoming a Novelist,” the great John Gardner observed that writers attempt to create “a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind.” Revision is the ruthless god who disrupts that dream. Or rather, revision proclaims the dream wasn’t all that vivid or continuous in the first place, which can be a harsh reality to wake up to. When my editor sent me a long letter in response to the first draft of my book “Wild,” it took me a week to so much as remove it from the envelope in which it came. Reading about what was good, bad, beautiful and horrible about my book meant I’d have to do what I call diving back in, a phrase that accurately describes the profound immersion into the deep, dark river of language and story one experiences when revising a long work.

It’s little wonder to me that the writing process is so often spoken of in such dreamy, fairy-tale-like terms. My dictionary defines magic as “a power that allows people (such as witches and wizards) to do impossible things,” and the act of writing feels a bit like magic to me. Out of nothing something is born — a story, a poem, an essay, an entire book — and the creation and revision it took to get that work done cannot be disentangled, one from the other. They are the mystical and mundane siblings that demand the same immeasurable devotion.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times best seller “Wild,” the New York Times best seller “Tiny Beautiful Things,” and the novel “Torch.” Strayed’s writing has appeared in “The Best American Essays,” The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Salon, Tin House, The Rumpus — where she wrote the popular “Dear Sugar” advice column — and elsewhere. The movie adaptation of “Wild,” starring Reese Witherspoon, was released in December. Strayed holds an MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Portland, Ore., with her husband and their two children.