Writing and Rewriting
Hello everyone! Thank you for indulging me during the brief hiatus. I have turned in my thesis and am going to begin writing more often (ideally, I will share bits of it with you soon! I need to figure out the regulations there.) I think it is fitting to begin with some reflections on the process.
Because I have not finished everything, I have decided to write this in a slightly different format. I have included separated and numbered thoughts below, in hopes that you might find at least one of them interesting.
Before my senior year, I thought I had written before. But what I’ve been through over the past few months has been so different in kind from any final paper or writing assignment I’ve done.
I am still not quite sure how to articulate these differences. Broadly speaking, the project felt like it had a shape to it — like I was working towards something.I want to focus on one specific part of writing that was new to me: the constant writing and rewriting. So often would I write a draft, decide it was horrible, toss it, and then rewrite it. As I rewrote it, I would attempt to integrate feedback that I received.
I noticed a couple of things in doing this.
First, the more I rewrote, the easier it was to rewrite. Why was this? Here is a preliminary answer: I was further clarifying what I wanted to say, getting a better idea of what I had in my mind. But that can’t be right. If I started with the answer already in my mind, and it was just a matter of getting it onto the page, why was it so hard? Why did it take so many tries? I can’t believe I started knowing everything but simply unable to say it (also, that would be way too hubristic). In what sense did I know it if I couldn’t say it?
Wittgenstein mentions this in quite a different context (Section 210). Impersonating someone he disagrees with, he writes, “‘But do you really explain to the other person what you yourself understand? Don’t you leave him to guess the essential thing? You give him examples — but he has to guess their drift, to guess your intention.’” He responds in his own voice: “Every explanation which I can give to myself I can give to him too…” He is responding to the person who believes that when we teach someone, say, how to add, though we just give them examples, we are trying with each one to communicate some understanding we have yet cannot share. But Wittgenstein notes that anything I can tell myself I ought to be able to tell the other person. And so it goes for writing: how could it be said to have an idea if I am unable to say it, to just write it down as I think it? Why must I approximate it with rough draft after rough draft?
Here is another answer: maybe each time I rewrote, I refined the idea itself. Perhaps. But I did feel guided by something. Each rewrite, I felt as if I were inching closer to some ideal. I was not merely making an idea better; I was getting it closer to what I knew it could be. But this would seem to require what we just rejected outright—that I started somehow aware of the final idea. Aware enough to move towards it, but not aware enough to write it down or articulate it in the quiet of my mind.
There is a real tension here. Between a feeling that I was guided by something, charging towards an ideal from the very beginning, and the feeling that it was only as I iterated on the writing that it began to take shape.Also, each time I rewrote it, the argument changed a bit. It became more compact and more honed. When I began the process, I was interested in writing about a big topic. But as it stretched on, although the paper itself grew longer, its scope grew thinner. Why should this be? Why should it not become more general over time, as I think about it in the context of other projects and ideas?
With this, I’ve begun to wonder what the most fundamental part of the writing process is (I was challenged on this by another person recently.) — I used to think it began with an outline: you refined the outline, put it to paper, and then edited it so it was in accordance with what you envisioned at the start, the idea you had at the beginning. — But now I am not so sure. Is the outlining process the most important part? I did not have a clue what I was saying, to myself or in my outline, until I forced myself to begin drafting.
But why? I think when I was forced to draft, I was forced to elaborate my views. To see them as I envisioned presenting them to someone else. This is different from the way we (or at least I) outline. The outline is strictly for the writer — it is supposed to be an abbreviation of the idea, without all of the blemishes added for wider consumption.
The presumption behind this is that such things are unnecessary to the idea but necessary for it to be understood, and so they must be included in the final version if it is to make sense to anyone who cannot read the mind of the writer.
I now wonder whether this presumption is right, whether it is a mistake to think of the process of writing as just ‘executing’ the outline, making it intelligible to those who do not have the vision the writer has. I now think it adds something, but I do not know what.
I don’t take myself to have answered any questions here. I only hope to have asked them. For the writers who read this: do you find yourself thinking these things? Do you disagree with them? Think them in perhaps different ways?
I look forward to hearing from you.