Jargogled Impressions.

I have been trying to level up my writing since a long time and one of the suggestions I often come across from authors and established bloggers is the ability to edit and rewrite your sentences, passages, and pieces. The effort taken to re-look at your first draft and going through the motions of a 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th … nth draft is seemingly the most important exercise you can undertake to become a better writer. And yet, I end up dissociating myself from my first-stab writing the moment I find a well-rounded corner to seal of my essay. Sometimes, I do end up tidying up some ideas or sentences to make the story flow better, but that’s about it.

What does it take to rewrite? Its often also suggested that when you read what you have written aloud, you end up making a lot of changes since the sound of the sentences you have put down is often dramatically different than when it was sitting inside your head. Writing like you speak is an oft repeated dictum from bloggers and from writers I respect and follow. What does it mean? It does not always mean that simplicity in your vocabulary and how you craft your sentences is the right way to go, although that seems to be the case most of the time you are sitting down to write something. What it means though is that the clarity of your thought and the ideas you are espousing through your writing can be made better if you read it out loud. In a way, reading aloud is a proxy for ensuring your messaging is clear to someone other than you.

Rewriting is also often described as a greater intellectual exercise than the first version of your draft because that’s where you are focused on the core message (the “so what”) of your sentences rather than scrambling to make the word counts.

It’s hard for me to do the rewrites because I lack the patience to go back to something that I have written down and take a deeper, more involved look at what I am trying to say. Hate to say it, but when it comes to power points (my tool of choice as a consultant), I end up spending a lot of time rewriting the bullets and the sentences that would make my decks more focused and clearer to my clients. I wonder then, why is it that when it comes to my blog posts, I end up dithering on making significant edits or spending an adequate number of hours doing the rewrites. I used to wonder how it was that these writers I admired came to have such immense knowledge about the things they wrote about. And I have now come to realize that it’s the effort and the sincerity that you bring to bear during those re-writes that make their final, finished product what it is when I come by them. It’s easy to discount the hard work because its not visible to the consumer of the end-product.

The first draft always stinks. And you must deal with it. Writing to me is as much about generating new ideas and forming my own thoughts as it is to communicate out to an audience other than me. Writing in that sense, is sort of a polished journal entry, the way I approach it. Rewriting doesn’t mean that you lose the natural air and the flair that you want to make your own. In fact, the process of editing is exactly that – making your writing as much you as you can by bringing your inner thoughts and channeling them into something that readers can understand and interpret knowing its your voice. Finding you voice as a writer is also about finding the writer for your reader. There is this marketplace element of discovery when it comes to bloggers. Readers like to see consistency and a sense of discrete personality in the writers they read.

I think there’s also an element of doing away with writer’s block when it comes to focusing on rewriting. You see, the first draft, if you know it, is going to stink badly, you don’t spend too much time fussing over small details and about how your draft is going knowing that you are going to come back to it. Knowing that you can re-read what you have written and add flavors and details as you come back to it again and again through those different versions of the draft. You put in all your raw thoughts and ideas into this first draft which may not find its way into the final version. The first draft gives you that freedom to let your mind explore far and wide the realms of practicality and articulation.

I have read (and re-read) this post here on Quora about what it means to be an advanced writer. Summarizing the learning from this post, to be an advanced writer you need to make strategic decisions about:

1. Do you want to be a writer-thinker or a thinker-writer? i.e., do you want to emphasize your writing on the ideas it represents or the precision with which you craft your sentences. Both involves a choice that writers need to make and usually cannot make both work together unless you are a super-level advanced writer (which I am not)
2. How good of a writer are you? i.e., if you appreciate good writing, read a lot, and knows whether the oxford comma is a thing or not, you may have an ear for good writing. That’s the first step. How quickly you learn from those that you respect and emulate and then quickly evolve into finding a voice of your own defines how good of a writer you are on the path to become
3. How much can you practice? i.e., the more you write, the better you become with your writing. If I were to distill one piece of advice I have gathered across the multiple books I have read on learning to write, it is this  – the ability to constantly and reliably stare at the blank page and make something work by actually putting in the hours, putting in the words, and coming back to it again and again every day to write something.
4. How good a rewriter are you? i.e., this post here. There are essentially two types of rewrites, like the two types of writers. One type of rewriting focuses on the idea you are trying to convey and tries to make it more powerful and more anecdotal and more conclusive by factoring in perspective, layering in data, and bringing in a level of metaphor that helps clarify or reframe the idea for better understanding; the other type is the writer rewrites, which focuses on the messaging and the articulation you develop through your sentences and making them as precise as possible. Being concise by eliminating the useless details and instead focusing on the clear “why” behind the words that form part of your whole piece of writing.