(no subject)

I'm reading a rather fascinating book right now: Creative Writing and Rewriting, edited by John Kuehl. Kuehl, who taught creative writing at Princeton for many years, put the book together out of frustration with the typical workshop-style creative writing class, which he feels places too much emphasis on product rather than process. He discusses the charge that creative writing is unteachable but doesn't do much to dispel it; rather, he suggests that teachers teach students not how to write but how to rewrite, how to take their own individual raw materials and turn them into art. To that end, he has assembled a collection of writings by some big-name authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, et. al.) and printed the published version alongside an earlier draft version of the same material.

It's very interesting to see the decisions that these writers made when revising their pieces, and I think the book could be a valuable resource, but I can't quite figure out how to use it. Should I read the draft of a story or excerpt straight through, and then go back and read the published version? Should I read the published version first, then the draft? Or should I bounce back and forth, paragraph by paragraph or page by page? I've tried all of these methods, and none of them has been entirely satisfactory. I feel a little bit bad about this, like it's my fault that I'm not getting more out of the book, but I really don't know what I should be doing to fix the problem. I think the book is designed mainly to be used for a class; perhaps I'd be able to draw more insight from it if I had a class with which to discuss the book.