Do Not Polish the Unsettled

A memoirist, an invented composite, spends two weeks on the opening paragraph of a chapter about her father’s workshop. The rhythm is exact, and the smell of cut cedar arrives in the second sentence. When she finally shows the chapter to a friend, the friend points out that the workshop never comes up again and that the chapter is really about her sister. The paragraph is beautiful, and she can’t make herself cut it. Those two weeks made the right decision more expensive without improving the chapter.

Polish is the most expensive thing to spend on a passage whose job hasn’t been decided, and the cost rarely shows up where it was spent. A polished sentence seems to carry weight an unpolished one doesn’t. It turns into evidence of competence, something the writer wants to have written, and it starts to resist the very judgments that would have moved it. Finished prose makes changing the structure beneath it look like a bigger loss, so the writer starts defending a paragraph by arguing that the chapter shouldn’t change, and honest diagnosis fails there, because the argument is no longer about the Work. A rough sentence is easy to cut, which is the best reason to leave it rough.

Polish on a settled passage is part of the craft. Hemingway told The Paris Review that he rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms, the last page, thirty-nine times before he was satisfied, and that the problem was getting the words right. A 2012 edition carries an introduction by his grandson Sean Hemingway, who told NPR he had found forty-seven alternative endings among the papers, which he said pretty much bears out the statement, depending on what counts as an ending, since some are fragments. The numbers differ, and neither should be treated as exact. The function of that page was never in doubt. It had to close the book, and the open question was which words did it.

Any passage whose function you can’t state in a single sentence (“this exists so that the reader learns X, or feels Y, or can no longer believe Z”) is unsettled, however good it sounds. Mark it and forbid line editing there. You may move, merge, cut, and annotate. You may not swap in a better adjective, adjust a rhythm, or reread the passage for pleasure.

Some passages, the fair objection runs, have to be sung before their function can be known. A poet may need a line’s sound to learn what the poem wants, and an essay’s voice may have to be tried at full strength before anyone can judge whether it fits the subject. That polish is exploratory, a test and not a finish, and should be treated as disposable. A passage polished to find out whether it works can be lost without harm; one polished because polishing it feels good is probably being protected.

Practice. Choose one chapter or section, and for every paragraph finish the sentence “This is here so that the reader ___.” Mark with a visible tag, in your own notation, every paragraph for which no honest one-line answer exists. Over the next week, make no sentence-level edit inside a tagged passage. At the end of the week, either write the function down, and polish if you like, or cut.