125. Like A Living Heart

To write from a blank page can be daunting. You begin with nothing other than perhaps a single idea and from there you must somehow create language. What necessarily emerges from such a process is a text that is raw and rough. It lacks the smoothness that comes with revision, with the careful work of rounding the edges and improving the flow.

But despite its blemishes and idiosyncrasies, a first draft can be captivating. For it expresses not only your original thought process but also the predominant feelings you have as you write. This is the text that is closest to you, as it has not yet been subject to the refinements that would help it fulfill the requirements of a possible reader. It is only and exactly what you intuitively felt it must be in the moment of writing.

Realizing this, you might worry that editing will wash away the best qualities of your newly born text. And something like this really can happen. You become too analytical and you start to see the text as a puzzle to be solved rather than as an artwork to be polished. You take apart your draft and you mechanically construct another text that is more rational and functional. You do so with the intentional goal of producing something closer to what your reader would expect to find.

While this process results in a text that functions well, it also diminishes its beauty. The text is no longer alive and vibrant, but rigid and suffocating. The original feeling has been lost by the overzealous application of norms and standards. The text communicates a meaning but the music is all wrong. Its near perfection makes it sound jarring when you read it aloud.

The dissonance of the text is a strong indicator that something has gone wrong. If the text has lost its harmony, if its energy has been muted, if its rhythm cannot be felt, then it will be incapable of invigorating the reader. The text the reader always needs is one that gracefully spills off the tongue, that nourishes through its beauty, and that beats like a living heart.