When we see works of art across movies, books, paintings, music, etc. what we see is the finished product. It’s the culmination of hard work, editing, decisions, revisions, abandonment, feedback loops, etc. and yet all of that is mostly hidden from us because we see the final version that the creator then puts up for the world to see. With a movie it starts with an idea, then the script gets written which gets turned into an advanced narration, development, pre-production, production, photography, wrap, post-production, and then distribution. An average movie in Hollywood purportedly involves close to 300 people in different crew roles from producer, director, screenwriter, production designer, art director, costume designer, cinematographer, editor, etc.! When we watch a great movie, it’s fascinating to realize the combined efforts of so many people that helps brings the craft in the movie to the silver screen.
As amateur artists, these final products are always intimidating. The finesse that jumps out when we peruse the work of masters of their craft taunt us with their perfection. It’s similar to when we see sportsmen perform at their peak – we are seeing the result of their intense training and it seems magical to us because we see this result and not the underlying effort.
When I read the works of some of my favorite authors like Salman Rushdie, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, George Saunders, Alice Munro, or with non-fiction those of Vaclav Smil, Walter Isaacson, etc. I am often de-motivated to continue writing for then my writing seems comparatively childish and too basic. Ditto for some of the high-quality newsletters that generate such amazing content consistently – Marginal Revolution, Stratechery, Ribbonfarm, Platformer, Works in Progress, etc.
But the concept of shitty first drafts is important to understand that what we see on the pages when we read a good book is the culmination of a long-drawn effort to make sense of shitty first drafts, and shittier second drafts, and rough third drafts, and decent fourth, and ‘getting there’ fifth, and many more. There’s an art with editing and with rewriting that starts to shear off the noise and the drivel from the gold and helps shape the edges into the finessed work products we see in the end.
This isn’t new information. We know that editing is where the analytical rigor meets the eccentric creativity. But what we often fail to realize, is that editing is also where we most often spot the ‘daemon’ that we are sub-consciously searching for with our writing. This daemon surfaces when we are prepared and we have something (anything) down on the paper with our rough thoughts and our rough ideas with no shape or form. It’s on us though, to identify the daemon and cede control. And that happens likely in the first pass at editing (more like rewriting) – the one where editing is interspersed with writing for you are moving beyond dumping rough notes and start to see faint outlines of your end product. This end product, if you are able to invoke the daemon, will most likely be very different from what you started with, that is if you started with anything at all. Reading about the writing processes of these idols I admire; it seems there is not one approach to writing. But what seems consistent is the fact that even authors who make detailed maps, tautological diagrams, and descriptive character sketches, they leave space in their writing for this daemon to fill because they recognize the draw of the novel and of the core when this happens.
It’s fascinating how, when you are learning to write actively, i.e., by actually writing, you start noticing a lot of things in the books you are reading than you would otherwise. That is to say, if you are actively ‘being’ a writer, you are sensitized differently to good writing. You tend to notice the idea behind the writing, the structure of the novel, the voices being harnessed, the characters taking shape, the devices being leveraged, the beginnings and the endings, etc. And that’s when those great books start baring their skeletons in front of you. You can start understanding how the chisels were performed on these blocks of writing by noticing the omissions. Developing an eye for good writing becomes a game of how much time you spend reading and writing. More writing helps you find the gaps in your own skill, and more reading the time-tested works of art lets your mind understand the craft and the postures needed to shape these ideas and words of yours. But what helps further, per this response on Quora (link) is how adept you become at rewrites.
The surprising aspect here for me has been that those rewrites – or second passes at your shitty first draft, is not the manual, grunt-work of looking at syntaxes, looking at grammar and substituting thesaurus words with each other. It’s actually a lot more strategic, creative, analytical, and important work that defines how good a writer you become. From personal experience, I hate rewrites and I daresay haven’t done much of it on this blog most times. I somehow cannot find myself being serious enough for doing that with the blogposts I post here for no good reason other than inertia and possibly ADHD. I like moving away from my pieces once I am done with my first pass – which means that I also loosen the grip on any percolating ideas and thoughts before I have had the chance to identify them through a rewrite. I have started changing my approach here and I do take some editing into consideration once I have posted it online but that’s more to weed out some structural errors or ensure that my writing is at least coherent.
Something tells me that whatever the reason behind my apathy towards editing/rewrites, it also is a driver behind why I do not re-read the books that I have loved. I got a wandering mind which is constantly looking for new and shiny things and concepts and ideas. Except for when I want to re-read certain paragraphs that my writer’s brain registers as a feat of wordplay, I do not go back to these books. Maybe it’s time that changes.
Jargogled Impressions. 