Drafting Hatred

I hate myself until the fourth draft. That’s how a friend summarized some article he read about writing process. When he said it, my writing feelings suddenly made sense. In the first draft, I drop ideas far and wide. Part of that feels fun, but it feels like it will never be anything organized or coherent. Most of what I need to say is in the first draft somewhere. Sometimes my sprawling shapeless drafts don’t have most of what I need to say. That makes them notes, or what my wife calls a zero-draft. Mistaking a zero draft for a first draft is painful, as is any mistake where I think a draft is farther along than it is. In writing the second draft, I develop a dense of what I’m talking about and why, I give the thing a less blob-like shape, and I find some new ideas. When the writing becomes an actual second draft, it has a structure and a flow, however imperfect. In the third draft, I put things where they go, with actual organization of the prose and a progression that makes sense. Summarizing what I’m doing becomes possible. In the fourth draft, I hone sentences.

Fourth drafts are rare in the huge electronic mounds of writing I’ve done. Those heaps of words consist almost entirely of notes, zero drafts, and first drafts left to die and rot. I’ve written quite a few second drafts and sometimes mistaken them for finished, and inflicted them on others. Given the realities of my life, those are pieces I wouldn’t have finished (won’t finish!) but which had some meaningful content that it’s good to have out and in conversation with my friends, so it’s better to have shared that stuff than left it in the draft hole. But the thing is I mistook where they were in the process. I’ve written a decent amount of third drafts, and a handful of fourth drafts, though when I try to think of examples my mind goes blank like when I walk into a CD store and I’m like “do I even like music?” (Of course none of this is meant to make claims to the quality of the pieces I wrote. A third draft or maybe even a second draft of a really awesome piece could be better than a fourth draft of a mediocre piece.)

The steps in this process differ from each other in a big way. Getting to finished prose is sort of like a triathlon - there’s a stage where you run, a stage where you hang-glide, and a stage where you … uh… wrestle a rhinoceros or whatever. Each stage feels different, and the skills required differ, and there are different requirements to managing the emotional life of each stage. And all of this varies by person. I like riffing on ideas, so getting to draft one is the most fun. Everything is worse after that in my opinion. Friends of mine really like revising, and their work shows it. They struggle to get to the point of revising, while I struggle to revise. What I want from other people changes with each stage as well. In the early stage, I love to talk with people about the content - let’s riff together about ideas, bang rocks and see what strikes a spark - and I don’t really want to talk about how to structure the piece of writing. I really, really don’t want to talk about that stuff, it’s annoying and it gums up my gears mentally, making it harder to think. At some point in the middle, that flips to the mirror image: I become desperate for conversation about the specifics of the writing - how to organize what I’m doing, input on how the piece works as writing and not as ideas, advice on how to keep myself working productively - and I become overwhelmed by further content-based input. Please, no more riffing, no more ideas, I am swarmed with ideas, clawing at me, nipping with their needling teeth, and I am desperately trying to cage them all and first I need to build more cages. Don’t add any to this room, get a bucket and scoop up some of the ones that are here, help me figure out where to put them, and which ones to drown.

The satisfactions, disatisfactions, and temptations of each stage vary. Late in the process, I move forward out of duty, obligation, commitment, and a sense of propriety: I’ve committed to this project in front of others; the threat of their judgment keeps me in the project. I become tempted by other projects, hints and whispers and subtle glances that raise my pulse, make me stop with a new sense of wonder. I allow myself to have coffee with these ideas, and jot down some notes, but then I go back to my mature project, the one which is the real achievement because it challenges me. In a sense, part of what makes this worthwhile is ethical, but this ethical sense mostly kicks in later for me, and is less necessary early on. It is good and right to master lazy inclination, and satisfying to be someone who says ‘this is hard, I will do it anyway.’