reader mail: on editing

A very thoughtful reader (whose emails are especially subtle and intricate when it comes to politics) asks as follows:

“Incidentally, I wonder whether you might make an advice post at some point in the future in regards to your editing process. I find myself compulsively editing my writing as I go – which I know is a destructive thing, leading to digressive expansions that require research and more extrapolation and overwhelm the goal by deferral or qualification til the project just gets abandoned or stalled indefinitely, but which I find I can’t do without – i.e. in forcing myself not to edit my work until the end, the final result comes out poor, and not just by my own distorted judgment of it: I’ve asked others to compare, as well as submitted essays at university where I’ve done this, and the quality drops substantially. Apparently, at least when I’m writing a sustained essay and not thinking off the top of my head, in bricolage fashion, I need to catch my thinking as I go, or else I make errors or misrepresentations of other’s positions I find I can’t fix later, and it does show in a way that isn’t really even good enough. Does this sound familiar to you in any way? If you had any thoughts on this, I’d be truly grateful.”

A question well worth addressing, always. It’s possible that I won’t be able to add anything new to what I’ve said in the past about the topic. Here I’ll just relate my thoughts and experiences and hope that some of it turns on a light in some brains out there.

First, I can certainly understand the problem. My own experience was as follows. I defended my Ph.D. proposal a month after turning 27, already a year or two later than I should have, based on the fact that I started graduate school pretty young. At that point I was still stuck with about 3 incompletes, and had to finish those off over the next 6 months before really getting to work on my dissertation. I didn’t really have “writer’s block,” I just never enjoyed the dynamics of graduate school. The doctoral program I was in was mostly fine; much of the problem was on my own side.

I’d have to go back to check the records, but essentially I spent a couple of years continually rewriting the first five sections of Tool-Being. I mean, I was trying to polish every sentence and make sure every transition was perfect. At that rate I was never going to finish.

There are other things I can tell about the story. For one thing, you’re inevitably going to seek procrastination strategies when you’re polishing things too finely like that. Don’t feel guilty about it, just make sure your procrastination strategies are of long-term value. My #1 procrastination technique during the dissertation, for instance, was pulling another Heidegger Gesamtausgabe volume from the shelf and reading it. It was relevant to the dissertation, despite not being entirely necessary to read that many of the volumes, and in that way I turned procrastination (a universal human fault that one never finishes fighting) into my ally.

But back to the main point, editing… I don’t worry about it too much anymore. It’s better to have 150 pages that feel sloppy than 30 pages that feel perfect. On one condition: the sloppy pages should only be stylistically sloppy and perhaps lacking in a few footnotes and containing a few gaps in logic. But everything ought to be in the correct order already. That’s why I swear by outlines. When your outline is good, you can do the writing quickly, and you know the fix-up work is going to be easy.

The person I always remember is General Grant. He came after, what, six predecessors were fired? I may be off by a number, but it was something like half a dozen Union generals that Lincoln fired pre-Grant, simply because they were almost all dithering and getting nothing accomplished. What was great about Grant and Sherman, by contrast, was that they realized that forward movement created momentum, and that you could always go back and clean out the stragglers and snipers later on. It’s a good strategy when dealing with written work.

The most recent book I completed was the book on Meillassoux. Here as usual, I started by deciding what chapters there should be, how many parts each chapter should have, what each part needed to deal with, and then I simply went and did it, as quickly as possible. The end product of the first draft was sloppy, but again, it was sloppy only in the sense that the prose was poor and there were a couple of jumps in logic (don’t worry too much about those until the end, or they will slow you down; the best time to overthink is at the end when your self-confidence is boosted by holding 300 pages in your hand rather than 10; it is simply not the case that philosophy is like geometry, a deductive enterprise where you cannot move forward until each step is definitively settled– Whitehead has argued this best; instead, you sketch the whole map, then you go back and fill everything in, or at least that’s what works for me).

And I will close by repeating what this particular reader said elsewhere was very valuable for him to hear: you’re trying to write something excellent, not something perfect.

The aspiration to write something perfect is, first of all, impossible. My 17-year-old students poke holes in Plato every semester, often new ones I’d never thought of before. Plato’s still possibly the greatest philosopher of all time. Even if you do something as great as Plato, 17-year-olds will be poking holes in your arguments 2,400 years from now. So who cares about the hole-pokers? Forget about them for now. In this business we all have too much superego to begin with. Don’t take on more of it voluntarily.

It’s not only impossible, it also represents a fear of being judged. Unfinished work can’t be judged. And there are two kinds of people to whom this maxim is applicable: the masochists, and the sadists. The masochists are the depressive ones who don’t finish anything because they don’t think they’re worthy of it, and sink ever deeper into depression. The sadists are the aggressive ones who don’t finish anything because they don’t think anyone else is worthy of it: they tell themselves that they themselves will finish someday, but in the meantime they stroll around denigrating others, even as they begin to age. (Eventually some alibi is produced whereby they don’t feel the need ever to finish a project, and they vanish into some other professional field, having spent a decade or more cutting down everyone else in sight.)

Finally, I think it’s a good strategy not to lose all your fears, but simply to change them. If your fear is not being perfect, or being criticized, try to change that into a fear of stagnation. I have a mortal fear of going a whole month with nothing interesting or new happening, which is precisely why I write up a summary at the end of every month (and again at the end of every year) assessing whether anything has really changed. I’m horrified by the thought that at the end of some month or year, I’ll have to tell myself: “no, you just wasted a whole/month year and are exactly the same as you were when it started.” In order to avoid that experience, which scares me more than anything, I try to do as much as I can: see new things, read new things, write new things, come up with one or more new thoughts, visit a few new countries each year just to make my world a little bit larger, change a few daily routines if possible, and say “yes” to as many things as possible so that the whims of others are doing much of the work for me in generating new experiences.

In fact, I think going along with other people’s invitations and suggestions, while refraining from trying to modify them as much as we possibly can, is the best way of breaking out of our own narrow circles of prejudices and impulses and being startled into new experiences. No doubt I fail to live up to this a lot, but it’s a good strategy to keep in mind: people who dominate every situation they’re in always end up seeing nothing but themselves.

All right, time to call an end to this post. I’m talking off the top of my head here, and have no time to go back and organize things.