this, I wouldn’t emulate

But it may be of interest anyway.

I just printed out a chart showing how many words each section of the book draft is, and how much time it took to write them. It helps give me an overview of where the strong and weak points are in the existing draft.

All told, there are 26 sections in the draft. 17 of them are too long, 1 is just right, and 8 are too short.

As a general rule, the long sections are the ones where I know with absolute clarity what I want to say, and just need to discover how to say it a bit more concisely.

The short sections are either places where a couple of mild puzzles remain (the bigger puzzles are in the still undrafted second half of the book), or where I did know exactly what to say but was very tired while writing and hence satisfied myself with a few passing notations.

I think I’ll dig into some revision tonight instead of leaving it until tomorrow.

Once all of this is done, I’ll post the promised table showing the length of each section and exactly how much time each one took to write. But I can confidently state that it’s a lot easier to revise existing junk drafts than to try to create new prose ex nihilo.

Existing rough drafts are a safety net to protect you from the horror of the zero. They can also put vanity to work in your favor, because when you read these rough passages you’ll find yourself saying: “man, I’m so much better than that. What is this junk?”

Chapters 1 and 2 are going to need significant cuts, but that’s always easier than lengthening, so those could be finished relatively quickly if I wake up feeling on a roll.

Oh yeah, an obvious point… You have to make lots of backups for safety reasons. You don’t want to shoot yourself after losing 300 pages of dissertation. Send your drafts to gmail. Print them at a certain point. Whatever it takes. Nothing is more devastating than losing a whole bunch of writing.

My worst-ever story with lost work isn’t as bad as many people’s worst-evers… In order to audition for one of the book translations I did, I had to send a sample translation of 25 pages of the book (to the publisher’s credit, they paid me immediately for the sample at their normal translators’ rate; it wasn’t a scam on their part to get free translation work). I finished the sample, and was just letting it sit for a day or so to fine-tune the style before sending it to the publisher.

And guess what happened? My computer simply erased the whole document. I wondered at first if I had accidentally deleted it myself, but that same computer would pull similar tricks over the next year or so (but I had learned my lesson from the first incident and had turned into a fanatical maker of backups).

Luckily, I was in a very good mood at the time for other reasons, and this little disaster rolled off my back with a fairly easy laugh. But translating 25 pages from German to English is not so fast an exercise, and when having to redo pages I had already done it was highly frustrating.

There must be some unspeakable tragedies out there with graduate students and erased dissertations. Don’t add your name to the list.