The “write it perfectly” trap reached out and caught me yesterday. It’s hard to write when every sentence feels like it needs to be perfect. Yesterday wound up as a down day – a weekend, break, rest day, day at sea – and that was probably overdue anyway. Clearing mental space by dealing with the practical details of an impending snowpocalypse turned out to be the right match for my Friday. This morning I feel more refreshed.
To start back up, and to engage more productively with the happy intensity of editorial work <grin>, I have had to remind myself that this is the draft, not the final written word. The time to play with written rhythm and turn of phrase will come, but right now my horizon is narrower and more specific: the argument.
Note from the side-chorus: it is, truly, “happy intensity” once I get into my editorial zone, it’s just that sometimes it takes a long moment or two (or even hour or two) to get there. of writing is sitting with it until the writing actually happens. This is a separate problem from editing—but it often gets confused with it. See The Silence of Not Writing and What To Do About It or Starting From A Place of Blah for suggestions on handling the not-writing part of one’s writing practice.
That reminder matters, because “editing” often gets treated as a single, all-purpose activity. Sit down, fix everything, be done. But that’s not how writing (or revising or editing or making it better) actually works. Different kinds of editing ask for different kinds of attention, and trying to do them all at once is a reliable way to freeze. Tracking ideas across a chapter, noticing gaps or redundancies, and judging how a reader will encounter an argument require a different mental stance than choosing words or shaping sentences. Mixing those tasks usually means neither gets done well.
I think about it the way I think about practicing. You can play through a passage and tell yourself you’re working on everything at once. But real progress happens when you isolate each skill in turn, and give intonation, articulation, or pacing your focused attention. Tomorrow, it will be time to work on the same passage, but with the next skill in mind. Writing works that way too. You can “make it better” by flogging at it, but the best version will come by taking each task in turn.
So today I’m moving through the chapter segment by segment, and not in order. (I know enough about attention to avoid pretending it’s evenly distributed, and yeah, I should do section 7 while I’m fresh!) For each segment, I’ll ask the same series of questions. Does this make sense? Does it do for the argument the thing that needs doing? Might it better serve the chapter on reading, or does it belong here? When a section meets my standard for argument, I turn it green and move on. The polish can wait.
The goals for the weekend are simple: a lot of literal baking (is another “snowpocalypse” reference a cheat?), a lot of logic-checking (five sections today, five tomorrow), and some time with a few new readings that might reshape the argument itself.
That’s the lesson I wanted to share: set the right horizon for the work you’re doing today. When faced with editing, it's not failing if the draft isn’t elegant yet. You’re still drafting. Elegance comes later – after the argument knows what it’s trying to say.
