Give Yourself Something to Fix

A writer writes a sentence, finds it wanting, deletes it, writes another, finds that wanting too, and at the end of the afternoon has a clean page and a worse mood. Many stalled drafts, the authors suspect, come from composing and evaluating in the same act. Both activities are real and necessary, but they seem to draw on different kinds of attention, and the sentence that could have been the third stage of a good paragraph gets killed as the first stage of a bad one.

John McPhee, in a 2013 New Yorker essay called “Draft No. 4,” quotes a letter he sent to a former student, Joel, about being stuck. Say you are writing about a grizzly bear and for hours no words have come. McPhee’s instruction was to write “Dear Mother” and tell her about it: the block, the despair, and the bear itself, which he describes as a heavy animal that is very fast and would still rather lie down and rest most of the day. Go on that way as long as you can. Then delete the “Dear Mother” and the whining, and keep the bear. Nobody is graded in a letter to one’s mother, which is probably why the bear, withheld all those hours, arrives.

In a note to his daughter Jenny, in the same essay, he says the hardest part is getting anything at all in front of him, and he will sometimes do it in a frenzy. Once a draft exists, his mind keeps working on it in the gaps of the day, and the better phrase tends to arrive while he drives home or sleeps. Without a draft there is nothing for that work to improve: “Until it exists, writing has not really begun.” An unwritten page cannot be looked at, moved, cut, or corrected.

Maya Angelou’s slow composition is the alternative worth taking seriously. In her 1990 Paris Review interview she describes four or five hours in a rented hotel room that might yield a sentence about a rat on a mat, which she then pulls at for weeks. She writes in the morning, goes home, and in the evening reads what she wrote and cuts hard; of nine pages, she says, she might keep two and a half or three. Her judging runs hours after the writing rather than a minute after it, and like McPhee she always has an object for it to happen to.

The poor page has to be returned to. Pages written with no intention of ever being read again are a different thing, and a writer who produces nothing but provisional pages and never revises has found another way to avoid the work. Provisional material is also most useful while nobody else is reading it (see Chapter 3), because the first reader’s reaction attaches to the page you have not yet chosen.

Practice. Write one intentionally provisional page, about three hundred words or twenty-five minutes, on whatever your current Work needs next, and label it PROVISIONAL at the top. Correct nothing while you write: no deleting, no reread. Put it away. The next day, read it once and mark each paragraph KEEP, FIX, or CUT. You should end with three short lists, which is more than an unwritten page would have given you.