Listener's Digest: August 24, 2024

Writing is revision—as every serious writer knows.

This principle has a painful side. You think you’ve written something good, only to find on second reading that it isn’t clear, it doesn’t flow, it lacks vitality. So you rewrite. The next draft is excessively ornate, self-conscious in its striving for rhetorical effect: you must assassinate its darlings. And even when you reach a decent version of your piece, you know it isn’t perfect. There’s always room to re-revise.

Still, we make a virtue of necessity. The fact that writing is revision is an argument for tolerance of “shitty first drafts.” You are going to have to rewrite, anyway, and perfection is impossible—so don’t worry that the words you are putting down now are palpably flawed.

I learned from Iskra Fileva, a philosopher who writes a column for Psychology Today, that this insight applies even to Ludwig van Beethoven. When her students face the paralysis of the blank page, she shares with them a clip of Robert Winter playing ea…