As a writer, I always envied the visual artist his opportunity to create and hope to sell, say, sketches of various heads that he has to have in the final, or even whole different versions of the same painting. I do literally scores of substantial revisions, all of which are valueless as soon as I move on to a later version.
(Of course, the flip-side interpretation is: How too bad for the painter who can sell his painting only once. The playwright or novelist can think of his royalty on each ticket or book sold as selling his work yet again. I'd always taken my necessity to revise again and again as a reflection on me (Poor guy can never get anything right!) Then I read Paul Valery's remark to W.H. Auden (which Auden evidently agreed with): "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
