Writer’s Log, April 11th: You & Your Delete Key
Every writer has a uneasy relationship to her delete key, sitting there in the Siberia of the keyboard, ready and willing to make everything that isn’t working just disappear, like some kind of literary fairy godmother or hit man. And for those of us artistic, perfectionist types, we can sometimes get into the space where disappearing everything is so much more appealing than any other option.
But we’re not Mob bosses or victims of our muses, sure to turn into pumpkins when they misbehave; we’re writers. Which means that we must be willing and ready to make plenty of messes, and let them sit as messes whenever our intuition tells us they should. In fact, if we’re doing our jobs right, we should be generating at least twice as much material as we ever need for a given project – and oftentimes a lot more. Because good writers don’t write things down like they’re taking dictation. They use the writing process like alchemists, mixing and stirring and watching reactions, using their materials to discover new things for all of us.
When we delete these messes too quickly, we get into the habit of trying too hard to perfect the work while it’s still in the process of developing. This is the creative equivalent of peeking constantly in at the dough, or flipping the lights on while the film is still developing. It may not seem that those misfit ramblings or endless variants on a scene are worth holding onto, but they are. Not because everything we write needs to be clutched onto jealously in the hopes that it might one day prove to be critical to our masterpiece instead of the scribbling it was meant to be, but because for some odd reason, it just works well to let the drafts exist, even if they’re just fertilizing the creative soil you’re cultivating to support new growth.
You don’t even need to look at them. You can file as many versions of your work as you want – in fact, I highly recommend it when you decide to try something new – it’s much less frightening to try a new path when you leave a few breadcrumbs behind. And while you might go back and look at them, what’s far more important is that you give your work the space to sprout all sorts of branches before you start trying too hard to shape it.
How we treat the work along the way is much more important than we generally acknowledge. We tend to get so wrapped up in how close we are to the next step, or how near what we’re producing is to what we want to produce, that we sometimes allow a mentality of better-faster-quicker-more sneak in and railroad an activity that seeks to break the mold. And on the flip side, the more we value the process, the more it offers us in the way of result. That doesn’t mean we mollycoddle everything that appears on our screens, but it also doesn’t mean that we jettison everything before we’ve really allowed ourselves to figure out what we want to say.
It may seem illogical, to hold onto drafts we may never work on again, to leave a record of what we’re moving beyond. But it’s important that we let the process be as expansive and strange as it needs to be, to not spend too much of it wrapped up in concerns about where it will go. And in fact, its oftentimes the oddest journeys that lead to the greatest revelations, especially if we keep ourselves good company along the way.
But we’re not Mob bosses or victims of our muses, sure to turn into pumpkins when they misbehave; we’re writers. Which means that we must be willing and ready to make plenty of messes, and let them sit as messes whenever our intuition tells us they should. In fact, if we’re doing our jobs right, we should be generating at least twice as much material as we ever need for a given project – and oftentimes a lot more. Because good writers don’t write things down like they’re taking dictation. They use the writing process like alchemists, mixing and stirring and watching reactions, using their materials to discover new things for all of us.
When we delete these messes too quickly, we get into the habit of trying too hard to perfect the work while it’s still in the process of developing. This is the creative equivalent of peeking constantly in at the dough, or flipping the lights on while the film is still developing. It may not seem that those misfit ramblings or endless variants on a scene are worth holding onto, but they are. Not because everything we write needs to be clutched onto jealously in the hopes that it might one day prove to be critical to our masterpiece instead of the scribbling it was meant to be, but because for some odd reason, it just works well to let the drafts exist, even if they’re just fertilizing the creative soil you’re cultivating to support new growth.
You don’t even need to look at them. You can file as many versions of your work as you want – in fact, I highly recommend it when you decide to try something new – it’s much less frightening to try a new path when you leave a few breadcrumbs behind. And while you might go back and look at them, what’s far more important is that you give your work the space to sprout all sorts of branches before you start trying too hard to shape it.
How we treat the work along the way is much more important than we generally acknowledge. We tend to get so wrapped up in how close we are to the next step, or how near what we’re producing is to what we want to produce, that we sometimes allow a mentality of better-faster-quicker-more sneak in and railroad an activity that seeks to break the mold. And on the flip side, the more we value the process, the more it offers us in the way of result. That doesn’t mean we mollycoddle everything that appears on our screens, but it also doesn’t mean that we jettison everything before we’ve really allowed ourselves to figure out what we want to say.
It may seem illogical, to hold onto drafts we may never work on again, to leave a record of what we’re moving beyond. But it’s important that we let the process be as expansive and strange as it needs to be, to not spend too much of it wrapped up in concerns about where it will go. And in fact, its oftentimes the oddest journeys that lead to the greatest revelations, especially if we keep ourselves good company along the way.
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