Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/175

 THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS that he cannot map out his whole work in all its details before writing his opening sentence. There is no hard and fast rule as to the point at which the real drudgery of writing shall begin. Some authors have served their time in the ranks, as it were, before their first book has ever seen print; they have learned their craft pretty thoroughly by a thousand abortive efforts that have either never been set down on paper at all or else have gone speedily into the scrap-basket or the furnace fire. This does not mean that they will be relieved of the necessity of pruning and polishing; but it does mean that a long and faithful apprenticeship reduces the amount of such detail work to a minimum. Then again some writers have the trick of doing most of their verbal sand-papering in advance, turning and twisting each sentence a thousand times in their brain, before ever committing it [161]