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I recently read An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, which is the first volume of the autobiography of Richard Dawkins, celebrated biologist, author, and outspoken atheist.
Dawkins is an elegant and clear writer, and thus his few words specifically about his writing process were particularly fascinating to me. They reminded me of my own novel-writing (during the many revisions of which I came to believe that nearly every word could possibly be replaced by another word).
Here’s how Dawkins described his creative writing process:
Pretty much every sentence I write is revised, fiddled with, reordered, crossed out and reworked. I reread my work obsessively, subjecting the text to a kind of Darwinian sieving which, I hope and believe, improves it with every pass. Even as I type a sentence for the first time, at least half the words are deleted and changed before the sentence ends.
If any of the foregoing leads you to read this refreshing memoir yourself, I suspect you’d be glad you did.
- See my post at my blog “Creative Atheist” for more on An Appetite for Wonder.
- Check out this short list by writer Dan Arel of 2013’s top atheist books, in which (to my great delight) both An Appetite for Wonder and my own Kylie’s Heel are included.
Copyright (2014) by Susan K. Perry, author of Kylie’s Heel
