rewriting undigested remnants

going backwards – regression belongs to the digestive mode ... a good deal of remembering, its pain, its shame, is recapitulation, revising the chapter again before it can close ... Writing ..., then rewriting and editing, belong to its therapy, healing the fiction of its ill-considered moments, its undigested remnants ... need to purge our writing of the fashionable jargon of borrowed ideas, conventionalism, and self-reflecting conceits ... to notice adjectives, prepositional phrases, even commas, that make for precision and sharpen the images to essentials. ... follow-up in writing is our digestion