Re-vision and Re-Writing

Several years ago, before the blog as we know it was born, I was subscribed to an enormous and extravagantly rich blog-like series of postings by a UCLA professor with what seemed to me, the unlikely name of Phil Agre (“filigree?” Delicate, twisted, convoluted ornamentation). He covered in depth an incredibly broad range of subject matter. He is one of those men so intelligent and learned, who seem to exist on a different plain. Occasionally he set his thoughts down in writing.

We don’t know what we have written, Agre claims, until we have heard it read by someone else. We should read, aloud, our own writing. That is the best way to get a sense of the rhythm of our language; in the process, we catch many typos; we become aware that this should be deleted, or that should be added; and, we get a feel for how well it might communicate.

But, Agre notes, we don’t know what we have written until we hear it read by someone else. Our writing and speaking voices are so intimately linked in our mind that we can’t hear, objectively, our own writing. When we hear another read it, we really catch those benefits mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Listening to someone else read our words commonly evokes complaints from us. No, we say, you are not reading it as it should be read; no, that is not how I mean it, and in many other ways we are annoyed by their misrepresentation of what we believe we have written. But we are wrong. We are not writing for ourselves, we are writing for an unseen and unknown public readership. We cannot follow our published work and explain it to each reader. It must speak for itself.

When someone else reads our work aloud to us, we now know, Agre concludes, what we actually have said. If they didn’t get it right, they have done us a great favor, for now we know what revision is needed.

It was John Kenneth Galbraith, if my memory hasn’t failed me, who said it is not enough to write so we can be understood. We must write so that we cannot possibly be misunderstood.

Among the best writers it is common knowledge that all good writing is rewriting, but no one has said it more cogently than Galbraith (and I know he said this). He said he was often amused by those who praised the spontaneity with which he wrote; he called it, “that note of spontaneity that creeps into my work after about the fifth rewrite.”

Our first draft should be written spontaneously, with little consideration of how it will read or sound. Anne Lamott, the wacky and completely uninhibited author of Bird by Bird, directs us to write “shitty first drafts.” The object is to get the core story, idea, or essay down in words. Only after the free and spontaneous “down-draft” has been written, does the real writing begin. Now we have material to edit, rewrite, edit and rewrite, right up to the last minute when it moves out of our control. We are ready now to be read by the public.