The blue pencil: self-editing is so painful
Writing isn't just a matter of your best shot: there's a lot more to it than that
Sometimes two entirely different experiences meet in your brain, pause for a casual conversation and discover that they have unexpected areas of common interest, and they can produce a train of thought which you didn’t see coming but which actually has a cargo worth examining (if that metaphor isn’t burdened beyond belief). In this case, they are instances not wholly in different areas but still making unusual common cause.
The first experience was writing my weekly column for City AM, which will be published on Monday (it’s about the Illegal Migration Bill, do have a look: it’s not un-spicy); because I appear at the beginning of the week, I have to write at the end of the preceding week, submitting on a Friday, so there’s always a frisson to selecting a topic and hoping it has legs enough to survive the weekend, as well as praying it won’t be overtaken by events.
My approach to writing means that a lot of preparation and construction takes place in my head, so something close to my final intended product emerges on to the virtual page at first draft. This is turn means that I don’t revise very much because it starts off pretty much as I wanted. This week, though, I drafted the column on Thursday evening, then was suddenly struck early on Friday morning that the structure and balance of argument was all wrong, the emphasis uneven, so I went back to it and ended up making much more substantial changes than I usually do. At the end of this process, however, I was much happier with it than I generally am (and got positive editorial input from St Magnus House).
The second part of this chemical (alchemical?) reaction was listening to my former editor at The Daily Telegraph, Asa Bennett, as a guest on the fascinating Hacks and Flacks podcast, talking about speechwriting for politicians and his experience as wordsmith-in-chief for Liz Truss: from the Department for International Trade through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to (albeit briefly) the centre of power in Downing Street. (Do listen: Asa’s insights are really interesting and some of them are unexpected and slightly counterintuitive, and I think anyone will learn a lot.) He says a lot of informative things about the construction of a speech, the different influences contributing to the text, thinking about how it will transmit to difference media and how much you have to shape your narrative to the personality, style and strengths of the person delivering the speech.
All of this made me think about editing, and the job of editing which writers, as opposed to full-time editors, undertake. Before I say anything else, let me make it unmistakeably clear that I venerate good editors: the job they do is both exceptional and indispensable, and they bring a dispassionate approach which the writer can never do, but they also have skills which the author of the text may often lack. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky in having only good editors across all the publications I’ve written for, but I must give the laurels to Allie Dickinson, who edited my copy when I worked in reputation management, and never failed to improve the text: not only did she rein in my rococo flamboyance as a matter of instinct, she has an unerring sense of audience and reception, and will always tell you what to do to make a text land more effectively.
Editing your own work is horrible. Of course there’s the obvious element of waste. That great literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, whose Oxford Book of English Verse I first encountered as the cherished source of wisdom for John Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole, gave brutal advice to writers:
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
I feel this burden acutely. Partly it’s an instinct to laziness, which I mostly overcome but lurks deep: if I’ve produced this work, whether it was a matter of minutes or a long toil, it seems self-wounding to discard it and leave no trace behind. In addition, I am sometimes guilty of being too easily pleased with the product of my own craft (and perhaps subconsciously afraid that it might run dry), so I am loath to be so profligate as to throw away perfectly serviceable phrases.
But I overcome it because I have to. And there are many explanations for why clear-eyed, hard-hearted editing will always be a benefit. It stands to reason, as any creative artist will tell you, that your first attempt at anything is—even if only statistically—unlikely to be your absolute best work. The fact that it is a noteworthy rarity to compliment actors for getting a performance right on the first take tells you a lot about the balance between inspiration and perspiration. None of this means your first draft will necessarily be bad, only that it can almost certainly be improved.
This improvement could take any number of forms. With my City AM column, while I twisted the linguistic dials a little bit, it was a structural issue, smoothing the allocation of argumental weight and switching around the informational and anecdotal ballast. On other occasions, it may be much more about the choice of words and phrases, the use of imagery. I have sometimes pursued a metaphor which can seem fitting and illustrative, but on second—or third, or fourth—examination is either redundant, or tortured and over-extended, or inappropriate, or just replaceable with a different one. Equally, I choose words very carefully (however it may seem from the outside), particularly at the centrepiece of an argument, and so revising one’s selection is always worth at least consideration. For example, Monday’s City AM column is extremely critical of the home secretary, and I think if I’m going to take aim at Suella Braverman, however humbly, then I have a duty to take my time over the selection of the barbs.
The ultimate catastrophe, of course, is that you return to a piece to edit and re-examine and discover that it simply doesn’t work at all. The reactions can take many forms: Gerard Manley Hopkins burned all his early poetry in 1868 before starting his study as a Jesuit novitiate in Roehampton; Thomas Hardy destroyed the manuscript of his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, after it was rejected by several publishers; in 2017, after his death and according to his wishes, Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works were destroyed (and the hard drive of his computer crushed by a steamroller). For a columnist, essayist or commentator (into which category I primarily currently fall) the challenges may not be so drastic or dramatic. And I am either stubborn enough or intellectually self-confident enough to be able generally to save an article or essay when it seems to be going awry, no matter how much remedial work is needed.
Sometimes, though, there’s just no hope: you have started writing, and you discover that the task is impossible. Perhaps your argument is wrong, or the evidence takes you in a different or more nuanced direction, or there is a lack of evidence and you find your principal ideas evidentially unsupported and unsupportable. (This last was certainly a hallmark of my work on my still-to-be-completed doctoral thesis. The evidence of the restoration of the English monasteries between 1553 and 1558 is so fragmented, so scattered, so partial and so vague that it is often impossible to make more than tentative suggestions, and certainly cannot always support bold, sweeping assertions which make for a pleasingly muscular narrative.)
And I have a small but still rather sad graveyard on my computer’s hard drive of introductions or paragraphs or notes or longer passages which had great futures ahead of them: the oldest, I think, retained because I am sentimental and used to be a terrible hoarder, is the first 200 words of a piece on Victorian civic pride which I began as an undergraduate, meaning, perhaps to submit it to our actually-not-bad student newspaper, The Saint, now more than 25 years old, before realising I had run out of inspiration and it was a little speculative and dreamy for them, anyway. (I do think there is mileage in an examination of how and why cities have lost that extraordinary self-confidence which the great urban centres of Victorian Britain possessed, though I can guess at some of the answers.)
My basic message is that writing is hard. And writers know this; Thomas Mann, that gloomy, conservative, unhappily homosexual genius, famously said that “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”. Simultaneously self-deprecating but also intangibly self-aggrandising—it is Mann, after all—he nevertheless identified a fundamental truth: being a writer, whether you’re the most inexperienced hack in regional news or a Booker-winning novelist, is a matter of setting yourself very high standards and then finding out how hard it is to reach them. And editing is a huge part of that, because it is, at its heart, an exercise in self-appraisal and self-criticism. Very few people enjoy that, and it is even less appealing if you earn your living by assessing and criticising other people.
As I say, none of this is to diminish the professional role of a proper editor. Their part in the production of text of whatever kind is often overlooked but enormous and influential, and I hope anyone who has edited my work knows how much I value them. Editors are not final polishers, tweakers, set dressers, waxers of cars on the forecourt of print. They are much more intimately involved than that. My friend, business partner, guru, sounding board and general inspiration, Mark Heywood, is a writer of novels and screenplays, as well as running the Writing Salon I go to every month at the Union Club in Soho. One of his fundamental pieces of advice on editing is that your first draft will never be right, so you shouldn’t waste time getting it wrong. It’s good advice, not only to encourage you to write, but also to accept the burden of editing and get on with it.
Maybe this is an exercise in catharsis, my acceptance on the one hand that (self-)editing is a necessary part of being a writer and my admission on the other that I find it difficult and testing. If that is all it is, thank you for being with me. But I hope there might be a bit more here than that, some useful observations on the role and importance of editing for writers of all kinds. But fear not, I’m sure I will be back to constitutional pedantry and parliamentary backbiting before long.
P.S. This essay was not edited…
P.P.S. He doesn’t like to name-drop, but the portrait of Mark Heywood above was taken by Rankin.
I worked for Nato for several years as an analyst. The writing and review process was brutal. It had to be. I regularly verbally briefed the Supreme Allied Commander of Nato (Saceur) or his deputies. It could and did form part of material connected to kinetic operations. Dropping bombs etc. So the topic was either self generated or requested. Then a specific title or question was formulated, which when approved formed genesis for creation of a writing plan. This was then briefed to a panel of supervisors, their input was generally accepted and implemented. Intelligence and information was collated, hours if urgent, days or weeks if not. A chosen method of analysis was discussed and decided upon. Then writing began. So a verbal briefing to Saceur was 3 minutes or 1 page A4. First two sentences formal introduction,last two were use formulaic language of assessment and probability. That left rest for writing. Usually first draft was circulated amo g team members, as a native English speaker it didn't require language check, but my team had Americans, Brits, Hungarian, Romanian and Norwegian staff. They all read it and critiqued it. Discussions, often animated explored their comments, then when a mutually agreed draft was completed, it went to another team for Blind assessment. Usually the team I choose had spanish, French, Swedish, American and Dutch staff. Same process again. Read over, pulled apart, redrafted,language honed, simplified and polished. Then when asecond draft was achieved, it went ro my Senior Team analyst, a Hungarian officer of exemplary standards and stout communication. It was generally disassembled,reassembled and qusruins asked, lots of questions, and then discussion, often free and Frank was held. That led to a agreed draft that went to Strategic analyst, a Brit officer and full time highly professional analyst. Final polishing and alterations again and again. Then, if especially important or sensitive, the Deputy Commander or DComm cast his eye over it for potential political landmines or strategic faults that would incur wrath from someone wearing Stars. Then and only then could it be published and Saceur briefed. But we knew we had done a good job as we possibly could and the final product as good as we could make it.
Thanks for sharing these excellent insights, Eliot. Hope you continue to write about the art and craft of writing now and again.