I miss the cool glow of the first draft. The steady patter of confident fingers on the keyboard, the faith of production stemming not so much from a certainty of brilliance but the sweet enjoyment that comes from putting off one’s problems to another day. Problems, being, rewrites.
I have a dear writing friend who is in the blissed days of the barf-on-the-page stage of writing. The time when there is nothing wrong, when every word is perfect just because it exists in your print. As I sit in the murky middle of a bottomless pitcher of editing and revisions, stumbling into the blurry end, I envy her in these, the early days of love.
Rewriting is hard. It’s an unrewarding slog where word counts don’t matter, but rather where achievement is awarded when I can say with honesty that I probably spent a few minutes less on Facebook today than yesterday. Get off the internet, all of us, and get back to our work.
Rewriting is scraping out the guts, it’s questioning and digging and there’s little of the glory that can come with a satisfying pile of fresh pages.
Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe the vile view I have on shuffling my words is really just a form of resistance, of delay and of my old friend, procrastination. Maybe I can find my cool glow again, find my love of shuffling commas and chopping paragraphs and rewriting and reimagining because it’s all the glory of the first draft along with all the guts of what makes writing sing.
And it’s what the professional does with her work. She polishes the stone until it gleams.
It is work, though, and work is hard. There’s no doubt about that. It’s painstaking, and ultimately rewarding, and it needs to be done. Writers who give just a quick pass of their first draft before sending it out in the world are unpracticed. There’s not as much reward as the piled-up word count but the fourth draft is just as necessary as the first. It’s time to do the work.