I’ve often told my wife that if I should die while working on a new story and I haven’t completed at least two or three drafts that she should cremate us both.

My first few drafts bear little resemblance to the story which will eventually exist, with sentences reordered, scenes added and deleted, subtext altered, points of view changed, characters added and deleted, tone tinkered with, tenses switched, endings trashed, and the whole often so transformed that sometimes I wonder whether readers would actually be able to tell that the first and final drafts related to the same story. Sometimes, in the midst of revisions, I even realize that I want the story to say the opposite of what it started out to say.

So until I get to the end of that second or third draft (better make that the third draft at minimum) I wouldn’t want the story to have any kind of independent life. By then, maybe it can clumsily hint at my point, but until then, it’s not yet anywhere near truly mine.

Based on an interview with Kenzaburo Oe in the Winter 2007 issue of the Paris Review, just received in the mail, that 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature has it even worse that I do. Oe, author of A Personal Matter, The Silent City, and Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! seems even more adamant about the destruction of certain of his works than I am.

Here’s an exchange from near the end of that interview:

When you look back on your life, do you feel that you chose the right path?

I’ve spent my life at home, eating the food my wife cooks, listening to music, and being with Hikari. I feel I may have chosen a good career—an interesting career. Every morning, I have woken up knowing that I will never run out of books to read. That has been my life.

I would like to die after I’ve finished a work—when I’ve finished writing and can just read. The novelist Natsume Soseki had a very short career, from 1905 to 1916. The famous story about him is that just before he died, he said, It will be a problem if I die now. He never intended to die. In Japan if a writer dies and leaves an unfinished manuscript someone will publish it. Before I die I want to burn all of my unfinished manuscripts and all of my notebooks. I would like to select the books that I want reprinted and everything else I want not to be reprinted.

Don’t most writers say that but not mean it?

For truly great writers, there might be important discoveries among the unfinished manuscripts. But in my case, even what’s published is not completed. My writing process is not finished after a few drafts. It has to go through a long process of revision. Without revising, those are not my works.

Nice to know that I have at least one thing in common with a Nobel Laureate!

On the one hand, I don’t believe I’m a writer of sufficient stature, or ever likely to be one, to have people poring over my unpublished manuscripts after I’m gone and wanting to publish them or have others complete them. But that hasn’t stopped me from feeling protective about my incomplete, unpublished works, and wanting to make sure that when I’m gone, they’re definitely gone, too. And actually, my completed, unpublished works as well.

Twenty years ago or so I destroyed around 25 of my earliest stories, leaving no copies. While I kept my very first story, because it had a kind of innocent charm to it, I didn’t want the others to exist. And while I no longer send to market certain unpublished stories from 10 to 15 years ago because they no longer represent who I am, I haven’t yet decided to shred those. But who knows? Even that may come.

Certain of my readers might wish that I’d destroy all of my manuscripts, both published and unpublished—but I don’t think I’ll ever be that accommodating!