Editing Principle 15: Waste Will Be Generated

Many beginning writers think: Start with the blank page. Fill it. Read it. Add more. Revise a little. Tighten your sentences. Done.

Experienced writers will tell you to expect a creative process more like this: Start with a blank page. Fill it. Add more. Add stuff that you’re not sure belongs. Add stuff that you initially think is brilliant but is actually putrid, though you will not realize this for four days. Revise but continue to miss your own central point. Re-revise. Realize that a thing you’ve explained over three long paragraphs can be crystallized in a sentence. Create an “outtakes” document in which you paste lines and anecdotes that don’t survive your revisions. Get upset over how large this document is getting. Tighten sentences. Wait a few days. Tighten more. Achieve some measure of self-satisfaction. Rest knowing that your outtakes word count is AT LEAST 20 PERCENT of the word count of the piece you’ll publish and present to the world, and that this is good, possibly great.

UPDATE: I just came across this thought of choreographer Twyla Tharp‘s. She says it better in this interview with the Harvard Business Review:

The business literature nowadays talks a lot about the need for failure in the pursuit of excellence. Do you accept that?

Of course I do. Sooner or later, all real change involves failure — but not in the sense that many people understand failure. If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are that you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion. True failure is a mark of accomplishment in the sense that something new and different was tried. Ideally, the best way to fail is in private. In my office, the ratio of failure to success on the dances I create is probably something like six to one. I create about six times more material for my dances than I end up using in the final piece. But I need that unused material to get my one success. I have also sometimes failed in public, and that’s very painful. But failing, even in this way, is not useless. It can force you to get yourself together and to produce something new.

Six to one? She’s putting the percentage of created “stuff” that actually makes it to the performance stage at roughly 14 percent. Waste will be generated, sure, but the process depends on it.