Is Writing Anything More Than Elaborate Editing?
Let's ask Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust and James Joyce
People tend to have a romantic image of the art form known as “writing”. Even though I love Jack Kerouac and the beatniks, their creative process has been severely misunderstood: we think of them as “automatic writers”, geniuses connected to some esthetic heaven, downloading images and ideas, penciling feverishly on a never-ending scroll.
Suffice it to say that the worse writers I ever came across felt this way. They thought they’d been touched by the providence, had some sort of “gift” and just needed to jot everything down as quickly as possible, with few to no edits or re-writes. “I don’t believe in spelling”, someone told me once after sending their manuscript. He wanted me to give my opinion on “the underlying idea”, even though said idea was buried under a pile of badly written, mistake-riddled shit paragraphs.
I admit I have many deficiencies when it comes to writing. I’m very bad at editing and rewriting my own stuff, although I have no problem doing this for other people’s work. I guess it’s an ego thing, something I should go over with my therapist (if I had one).
Editing is a very serious affair. I just finished re-reading my manuscript for the second time in a row, and still feel it’s lacking… How do you motivate yourself to do the same chore again, and again, rinse and repeat, with little improvement? You refer to the masters, the ones that paved the way, the ones that understood the sublime art of writing.
In this regard, one of my favorite quotes is from James Joyce. The Irishman, hard at work on The Ulysses, was asked by one of his patrons how the writing was going. “I made a lot of progress, today”, he answered. “In the morning, I erased a comma, and in the afternoon, I put it back in the text”.
If you ever have the chance to visit the Bibliothèque François Mitterand in Paris, go have a look at Marcel Proust’s manuscripts. This guy was even worse than Joyce, scribbling whole pages to be added after a sentence or a reference. He even died without completing his edit. His obsessiveness is remarkable: read the last tome of “In Search for Lost Time” and you’ll find an almost perfect book, even though Proust didn’t get round to editing it.
Editing is important, because writing isn’t an automatic art, like jazz improvisation (sorry, Kerouac). If you’re a witty, talkative and charming person, you don’t become a writer. You become a comedian, or a politician. People become writers because we’re extremely fragile, shy and unsure. We’re the kind of person who misses a comeback in a conversation and spends the afternoon looking for the perfect phrase, trying to convince ourselves “next time” we’ll land the brilliant remark. Instead of facing reality, we shield ourselves from it and invent a fake world where our comeback strikes a chord with the imaginary audience in our text.
The “work” of a writer is to spend hundreds of hours hunched miserably over a text, trying to make it better at all costs (and failing in 90% of the cases). That’s why you’ll never see a reality TV show based on writers like “The Voice” or “Top Chef”. If they ever made “Top Writer”, it would probably feature long scenes of a writer sitting on the couch in his underwear, eating Doritos, wondering why he doesn’t kill himself. Cut to: bouts of heavy drinking, crying in self-doubt and whole mornings without getting out of bed. Call Netflix…
Editing is what gets you from OK to good, and from good, to great. Case in point: Walt Whitman, the quintessential American poet.
I was rereading Leaves of grass the other day and came across this verse:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son
which I found powerful and profound. Lo and behold, that particular verse took twenty-six years to write. A quarter of a century. For eight words.
The evolution is remarkable, when you look at it closely. Here’s the original sentence, written in 1855:
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos
an unpolished, a bit on-the-nose, sentence. “American” seems too general, and “one of the roughs” is what you get when you do automatic writing with no edits.
Then, in 1867, the poet changed the verse to
Walt Whitman am I, of mighty Manhattan the son
where he moves away from the “roughness” of the previous edit and introduces a clunky alliteration (“mighty Manhattan”).
Four years later, in 1871, Whitman went for:
Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son
with a capital “K” for Kosmos and the resounding “am I” which he will abandon in the final version.
In 1881, he settled for the last version, the one you’ll find in your copy of Leaves of grass:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son
an epic, profound verse, devoid of capital letters or declarations in the first person. What started in 1855 ended in 1881 after many intermediary versions.
Whitman was a genius, but he was also a rabid perfectionist. Writing isn’t about having some talent and pouring it out in one go. It’s about hard work and dedication. There’s a difference between a typist or a stenographer and a writer. Creation rarely happens on the first try, and sometimes I feel the real, grueling work of “writing” is lost on students and young people. Unfortunately, we’re not in the dead poet’s society: writing isn’t about “being free” and “letting your real self manifest” on the page, it’s about work, work and more work.
I’m sorry to say so, but writing isn’t “romantic”. Of course you can write bad poems for your girlfriend in one go or scribble idiocies in your Hemingway notebook. We all have the right to do that. But when I doodle a silly drawing on the back of a page, I don’t go around calling myself a painter. However, any Tom, Dick or Harry with a pen thinks he’s suddenly the second coming of Allen Ginsberg. Don’t get me wrong: you can become a writer. The question is, are you willing to edit your text during tens or hundreds of hours?
If you are: welcome to the club. Have some whiskey, you’re going to need it.
"Editing is important, because writing isn’t an automatic art, like jazz improvisation" you wrote. Hey, this sentence needed some editing, don't you think ? Well, it's a bit amphibological... Does it mean "like jazz improvisation writing isn’t an automatic art" ? Or rather "writing isn’t an automatic art, like jazz improvisation is" ? Now, if this last sense is what you meant, then disabuse dear friend, jazz improvisation IS NOT an automatic art. If you think it is, why don't you try to blow in an alto saxophone to see if your automatic blowing is as brilliant as a Charlie Parker's solo ? Well, no need to try that, I'm sure you know for sure that a correct, good, great or amazing jazz improvisation is, above all, A LOT OF WORK. Same thing than correct, good, great or amazing writing... Abrazo, Oscar