How Many Rewrites Should I Do?

So I read something interesting the other day in a book about writing poetry, which was incidentally written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. It was an ok book (probably prose isn't her thing, but the publishers thought it would be a fabulous, money-making idea). The thing that I found most interesting was a line towards end where she wrote something like the following:

Some poems need to be revised 500 times.

Now if you're like me, you look at that sort of statement (and perhaps spit out your beverage) and the first thing you say to yourself is, "What?! That's crazy." And then after that, you say to yourself, "If that's really true...well hell, what's the point then?"

A lot of writers wonder how many rewrites they should do. I'm one of those also. And as such, I look for advice from "successful" writers (I write that in quotes because really, success is subjective) to try to guide me along.

But when I read that statement about the 500 rewrites, it was perhaps the first time in my life that I vehemently disagreed with something stated about the craft of writing. Or, more likely, it was the first time in my life that I allowed myself to really disagree with an idea from someone who was supposed to be an erudite writer.

Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, "The first draft of anything is shit." And I subscribed to this notion for a really long time. In fact I still think it's true probably 75% of the time.

But the other 25%? Honestly sometimes I think the first draft of something (a paragraph, a sketch, a musical composition) can be brilliance.

I'm still working my way through The Artist's Way and part of its teachings are that you don't really "create" creativity. What you do, in actuality, is harness the creative thoughts and ideas that already exist out there in the ether somewhere. You grab them and channel them down onto the page or into your painting.

And when I think about it this way, then my 75/25 model sort of makes sense. Because I think 75% of the time we get in our own way. We stifle ourselves. We drown out the voice within that perhaps is the voice of God or energy or whatever it is you believe in that is greater than yourself.

But I think 25% of the time we are in the zone. We have tuned in to channel "Universe" and we pick up our brush or our pen or our guitar and we simply document what we hear in our heads. And in that scenario, the stuff that comes out is pretty close to perfect. Just the way it is.

In my own writing life I find that I have moments of brilliance. A portion of what I write is actually pretty badass from the start. It's only a portion, yes, but it exists. And in that case is the first draft really shit? Do I really need to do a bunch of rewrites on something that came straight from my internal radio?

The rest of the time, yep, it's shit. And I usually know it. And it's beyond a fear or ego sort of thing where I'm afraid that it's bad. Sometimes I just read it and I know in my psyche (or my soul?) that it's not all that great.

But here's the kicker and what I've found to be true in my own work. Every piece of junk has a little diamond in it somewhere. It's that part of what you created that was pulled from your radio, unfiltered by your brain. I think you should look for that part in anything you create and use it to try to tune back in. To figure out the rest of what you missed.

So how many rewrites should you do? It depends. How tuned in were you?

Sometimes Who You Are Can Be Surprising

So I've been writing every day for the last month or so, like I said I was going to do in my last post about committing yourself to doing the work. Now I haven't written in this blog during that time, but that's because I've been going through this strange and interesting process of discovering who I am and what I am actually inclined to do.

And I've found it all to be a bit...surprising.

I was an English major in college. I focused on literature (not teaching, not creative writing - just books. And no, I didn't know what I was going to do with that degree). My degree plan required me to take a creative writing class in order to graduate. Just one, no big deal. Except that it was a big deal to me because I hadn't really done any creative writing up to that point.

(Well, unless you count the story I'd tried to write about my cat on the word processor when I was about 8 years old. I'd failed miserably in that single endeavor, typing out approximately two pages of prose describing the back of my house, the garage, and how black my cat was. The end.)

So from that point on I'd decided I had no talent for creative writing. A fateful decision, perhaps, but we can't rewind our lives.

It was my junior year of college when I signed up for the poetry writing class. The circumstances around why I chose this particular class escape me, but I feel like it was because I didn't know how to write anything longer than a poem. Or because the idea of trying to do so was sort of terrifying.

Part of the experience of college is loving some classes, hating others, and having the rest fall somewhere in the middle. Up to that point (and honestly, after that point too) I hadn't particularly liked poetry. It fell somewhere in the middle because I just couldn't get into them. A lot of the ones I had to read were dark and twisted like an old oak tree in a cemetery. Some of them were indecipherable gibberish and I was left with a scrunched face, wondering what the hell I'd even read. Ok, lots of them were indecipherable gibberish.

And then there was Sylvia Plath, who'd killed herself by sticking her head in the oven.

Anywhoo...

I worked hard and did the best work I knew how to do, but the poetry class didn't go well for me. It turned out my professor didn't like anything I wrote. In fact, he hated my work. Hated it so much that with each poetry submission, he'd bring my poem to class and stick it on the overhead projector as an example of what not to write.

Can you imagine how that felt? Not good, I tell you.

I eventually grew tired of being the class guinea pig, scheduled a conference with him, and finished out the semester. But the experience left a bitter, ugly taste in my mouth that has probably stifled me for more than a decade. I think I became even more convinced that my 8-year-old brain was correct in its initial assessment of my (lack of) talent.

Hindsight is an interesting thing, though. You get older, you begin to understand yourself more, and you learn some things about the human condition. And you start to wonder what's really going on in a person's brain when they feel the need to single you out and put a dunce hat on your head. After all, his poetry was extra dark and twisted. His wife had also hung herself from the ceiling fan.

Over the course of my work through The Artist's Way I've pummeled through the baggage left over from that experience. And I've decided that, 15 years later, his feelings about my work don't matter anymore. And just around the time I was coming to that realization, I discovered that I was writing poetry at night.

I didn't really set out to do it. In fact, I just said I'd get myself a notebook for when I wanted to write but didn't want to stare into the light of the computer. So I bought said notebook (a nice black one that has a soft cover), put it on my nightstand, and proceeded to ignore it for several weeks. And then I picked it up randomly while I was listening to some music and I wrote something. I didn't consider it poetry, it was just something that came out of my brain.

And then the next night I wrote another one of those somethings. And the next night, another one. And as I flipped the pages and examined my work several days later, I asked an interesting question of myself: "Am I writing poetry?"

I thought that perhaps I was, but I needed confirmation, you know. So I went to the bookstore's poetry section and Mary Oliver's books leaped off of the shelf and into my palms (The Artist's Way tells me this is synchronicity in action). I skimmed quickly and realized that her words were like mine. They were poems. The book said so, and she said she was a poet, and, well, she'd won that little thing called The Pulitzer Prize for her words. So I must be writing poetry.

Huh.

And so I've begun walking down a new path. I've also reached back through time to see if there were any hidden signs I'd missed. And indeed there were. I was surprised to find that I've actually been writing poetry for many years in my personal blog, although I'd never thought of those writings as such. And believe me, for someone who says she's always hated poetry, this is a flabbergasting discovery. But I'm exploring it.

So the lesson to take from this long-winded post is that if you simply let yourself be, if you stop forcing yourself, if you just do what feels nice...perhaps you'll discover you're actually someone you never thought you were. And if it goes the way my experience has gone, you'll find that it reignites the fire in your life and excites you in ways that you'd forgotten about. Ways that you hadn't experienced since you were a kid.

And isn't that nice?