7 March 2024
This evening I had a productive discussion about the process of developing an essay. I was allowed to look through a series of drafts the led to a just-published essay, and discuss the author’s process with the author. Although different people obviously have different processes, it was a great exercise.
I was struck by the length of the first draft – slightly longer than the final essay – and by how well formed it was at the sentence and paragraph level. The length because the first draft was ‘cumulative,’ in that she made additions to it over the course of several weeks (or perhaps months). She recorded a lot of examples and experiences that were relevant to the essay, without trying to develop a narrative or arc; sometimes these were well developed pieces, and other times they captured confusion or things that she needed to figure out. She also commented that she often ‘wrote’ the paragraphs in her head first – this makes the well-formed nature of what I saw a lot more plausible. In contrast, I don’t write in my head – I work things out on the page, often a sentence at a time. All I have in my head are images or examples I want to write about… but I rarely know what the words will be.
By the time she had finished the second draft, she had, I would say, about 2/3 of the content, often in a very close-to-final form. There was another draft where she reworked material she’d already had, at least in part, into a coherent narrative – this piece was based on research she did, rather than an account of her personal experiences or feelings. She commented that she had a lot of trouble writing this, and was unsure of what its scope ought to be, and how to present in in an interesting and effective way.
After this, in my view, most of the later drafts were more focused on the structure of the essay, and the connection between its parts. In particular, the last couple of drafts show how she worked and reworked the last section, finally developing a great ending, simply by exchanging the penultimate and final paragraphs. The essay was about a piece of music, a topic that I thought would be challenging to write about because it is not concrete. But that was not the case (or, at least, she rose to the challenges). I was struck by the ways in which she made the music concrete. These ranged from talking about the instrumentation of particular parts of the song and the feeling it produced (the chugging piano with one note trying to catch up), to the materiality of vinyl recording she played in her apartment (the groves on the record), to dancing (socks on the floor) to the song at various points in her life (with friends, alone in her apartment, and with her husband).