Sometime in the past couple of years I read a note by a writer who said that they preferred to write early in the morning because their inner critic hadn’t had enough time to wake up yet, allowing this writer the ability to just let the words flow. This wouldn’t work for me because I am such a complete zombie early in the morning, regardless of how much sleep I’ve had the night before, that I cannot coordinate well enough to switch on my laptop, let alone spell out actual words onto the page.
But I took this writer’s point. Ernest Hemingway has been credited with advising “write drunk, edit sober”, although it is doubtful whether he actually did. Regardless, this saying often makes the rounds on Twitter as advice as to how to get a first draft down. I am not advocating substance abuse here, but acknowledging that when writing a first draft, where, to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, you need to tell yourself the story first, it is best not to get too particular and nit-picky so that you constrain a flow of ideas.
But what about the second, and subsequent, drafts, the ones where, after you have told yourself the story and understood what you are really writing about, you have to mould your manuscript into something that engages other people? (Interestingly enough, I used to find the same when I did choreography. I would have to make the work before I knew why I was inspired to make it).
When shaping work for other people’s consumption you have to make a lot of choices, including what to edit out and what to leave in. In this, you have to weave and dodge the workings of your own ego. Plus, you have to avoid conflating the memories of your enjoyment of the making of your work with a sober assessment of the actual quality of that work. Just because you felt good doing something doesn’t mean it actually is good.
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