My version of this started the moment I read a line by Robert Graves, who said that there is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. Please see the photograph below.

I found this to be doubly true, if this is ontologically possible, when I combined it with a comment from F.R. Leavis, or I think this is who it was, in an essay called "Technique as Discovery." This essay made the point that if you changed the form of what you wrote from, say, drama to poetry, you would discover something about your subject you didn't know before.

It occurred to me that if this worked when you moved from one form to another, then the same thing should happen when you changed the basic elements of a novel.

Take point of view, for example. Let's say you are writing a scene in which a man and a woman are breaking up. They are doing this while they are having breakfast in their apartment. But the scene doesn't work. It is dull and flat.

So, applying the two notions mentioned above the solution would be to change point of view. That is, if it is told from the man's point of view, change it to the woman's, and if that doesn't work, tell it from the point of view of the neighborhood, who is listening through the wall in the apartment next door, and if that doesn't work have this neighbor tell the story of the break up, as he hears it, to his girlfriend. And if that doesn't work tell it from the point of view of a burglar who is in the apartment, and who hid in a closet in the kitchen when the man and woman who are breaking up came in and started arguing.

It seems to me that each time you add a new point of view and tell the story again, you will discover something you didn't know before. And if this is true for point of view, it should hold true for structure, language, and all the other elements that go into a piece of fiction.

Of course, in the real world, in the day to day work, you discover a lot, and in fact it has happened to me that near the end of a book or what I thought was the end, I found some one, or something like the famous wooden leg in Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," or the theft of that wooden leg, which would force me to go back to the beginning and work towards it or perhaps even begin with it.

I think the basic belief behind this way of writing a novel is that the entire business is one long discovery, and no one, or no novelist I know, sits down one morning, the complete book in mind, and types it straight off. At least, with the writers I know it is one long slog through the most trying parts of the imagination and memory.

I would like to add one warning here. Or make that two. You do come to the point of diminishing returns, and at that point it is time to stop. You have what you are going to have, and that's that. After a certain point, the novel will get worse the more you write.