I still have pages of fiction at home that have more red than black on them (I really like editing by hand when I want something to read really well). Unfortunately the red is very discouraging and that novel will likely never make it past the first two chapters.
When I was in high school, I spent a summer interning for a TV writer. It was laborious and menial work. Essentially, I would take his heavily redlined and annotated scripts, type up the revised versions, then drive them back to his house. Then I'd repeat this exercise the next day. At the time, I remember thinking what a chore it was, and wondering -- sometimes aloud -- why he didn't just save different versions in a folder on his computer, skipping the intermediate step -- me -- entirely.
At the end of the internship, he asked me what I thought of the script. And I found myself able to speak with candor, precision, and something approaching intimacy about the way it had evolved over the months I had seen it. At that point I realized that he had basically Miyagi-ed me. Wax on, wax off. Paint the fence. Etc. It was a humbling, but (in retrospect) cool experience.
