Writing and Patience

Me: You have to love it when someone you truly admire writes something nice about you. Especially when that person is an excellent writer himself. Our magazine staff hosts a private blog that we share with a magazine class on campus. Here is our editor’s blog post. I don’t think he will mind my sharing it. Wherever he says “author” he’s talking about me. In case you are wondering, this made my day:

I just finished working with an author on an article, and the progression is really rather remarkable. I thought it worth describing to you.

A few weeks ago, the author gave me the first draft. There were elements of brilliance in the writing—poetic, beautiful language in a couple of places. The structure of the text, however, wandered a little and needed a bit of direction and focus. I offered some ideas for how to structure it differently and gave it back to him.

Last week, the author gave me a second draft. As he worked through it, the structure I had suggested wasn’t working for him, so he tried something different in parts of it. I thought it was working better for the most part, but a few elements now seemed outside the focus of the story or didn’t fit with the organization. Some of the things I recommended, actually, in the first revision didn’t seem quite right with the new direction. So I suggested cutting several parts (saving them for caption material) and moving a couple of things around.

Earlier this week, I got a third draft. I didn’t read it this time, knowing he had mostly done what I suggested. Instead I passed it on to two other editors for review. Those editors responded to me mid-week with their recommendations. Most of their edits were small things (now we’re getting into correcting grammar and style and so on), but they each commented on the focus of the piece a bit.

There were a couple of paragraphs that still seemed tangential and the focus wasn't as clear as it should be.

Yesterday I discussed this feedback with the author. Today he gave me the final text. I read it. I was amazed.

The transformation from the first—even from the second—draft to the final was dramatic. There were more instances of great language use. The focus was clear and the flow was logical. The conclusion, which was a bit abrupt in the third draft, was beautifully handled.

It struck me as I read this last draft that great writing—and great writers—often need this sort of refining process. Yes, the editors along the way gave some good suggestions, but the author is the one who, in the end, solved the problems and surpassed our expectations. Often as writers we simply need a few critiques, someone to point out weaknesses in the writing and suggest we try again, and again, and again. And in the process of leaving the text alone and then coming back to it we come up with new ways of approaching things. And the text gets better and better.

I’ve given a presentation about multiple-draft editing a few times. And in that presentation I use a few quotes that seem appropriate here:

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.

“Revising is part of writing. Few authors are so expert that they can produce what they are after on the first try.”
—Strunk and White, The Elements of Style

“Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you’re out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you’ll hit the ball.”
—Neil Simon

To me the message of this is to be patient. As you are writing, be patient with yourself and remember you may have to go through it a few times to get it right. And you may need someone to give you some critiques to help you in the process. And as an editor, remember to be patient with your writers. Your job is to help them create great writing. Sometimes—often—that takes more than one draft. If the first draft isn't what you wanted, don't despair. And even if the second draft isn’t quite there, remember that sometimes it takes a third or even a fourth. And that is just fine. If Ernest Hemingway and Neil Simon can rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, certainly we can.

Me, again: I admit it, I am a slow and tangent-plagued writer. I will exceedingly try an editor’s patience (and my own) as I work through a piece. Patience, with yourself and others, really is the key. All of this talk of multiple drafts reminded me of Anne Lamott’s great book, Bird by Bird. In there she describes the writer’s block, the self-doubt, as well as the joy of finding and sharing truth through writing. The main piece of advice I gleaned from her is to allow yourself to write crappy first drafts. (If you read her book, be forewarned, she does not say crappy.) Getting your ideas out is the hard part. Allow yourself to write something truly awful, then refine it into something that others might enjoy. That technique has been truly liberating when I blankly stare at a blank white screen.