Why must we learn the same lessons over and over? It’s true in life and true in art. Darn it.
Here’s the ever-so-basic writing
lesson I relearned this week: Write a first draft. Put it in a drawer. Wait a
week or so. Revisit it with new eyes.
You’d think I would have
remembered such an elementary lesson after writing for the public since 1977.
But I had lost that gem. Maybe I misplaced it because my years of freelancing
were followed by steady assignments in newspapers, magazines, and advertising –
where I learned to write fast and
meet deadlines. Then, last March, when I found three writing contests I could
enter for free, I ran amok and dashed off three entries in a fell swoop. I
wrote headlong and e-mailed them in one evening of hyper-inspiration.
Yesterday, three months
after I entered the contests, I pulled out the entries to share with my friend Liz Rhodebeck, an excellent writer, for critique. To my dismay, I read the first entry
and found it choppy and hard to follow. Here and there I found confusion with my descriptions of bodies in motion. Worst of all (and inexcusable)
was the fact that a character’s name suddenly changed in the story. Yeah…that
might throw a reader. That mistake was a result of careless editing: I had
changed the name every time but one. Had I simply used “Find and Replace,” I
could have remedied the problem. But I was rushing along too fast for that
sensible solution.
So today I rewrite…and swallow
my pride. As a lesson to myself, and to any interested writer, below you’ll
find the original bollixed essay (which appeared here as a blog post, in a slightly different form),
followed by a rewrite. The revision isn’t perfect. We writers know that no work
is ever perfect; we don’t finish anything so much as abandon it. But I think
the rewrite flows better and makes more sense.
Too bad I can't re-enter the contest! Haste makes waste. May I never bollix up such a
chance again.
