Not Sculpting

My mental model of writing portrays the act as something like sculpting, but I have to remind myself to not sculpt (at times repeatedly) when working on an initial draft.

The first draft (in my mind, anyway) is a raw block of marble, and each subsequent draft—each rewrite, each edit, everything—is the process of sculpting that big hunk of stone into something beautiful.

Rough drafting, though? It’s a comparably ham-handed task, more akin to hewing a shapeless block from a mountainside than chiseling the Pietà.

This distinction helps me fly through initial drafts, but it can be a difficult stance to maintain because as I write, I know there are mistakes, I know there are awkward phrasings and cumbersome plot points, I know there are things that need honing, refining, correcting.

But that’s for later (I remind myself, once more).

When I stay on task, when I am assiduous about not sculpting, I can sometimes knock out a 100,000-word draft in a few weeks or months (on occasion far less than that).

This timeline sprawls when I fail to make this distinction, however. And the work almost always require more reworking and polishing when I try to do everything at once, because I’m not tweaking said work from a place of full story, pacing, and stylistic knowledge: I’m sorting out the big picture stuff even as I tend to incredibly minute details (which may disappear later, when meta-scale considerations change).

Compartmentalizing this process, allowing myself to rough things out before I start whittling an unrefined hunk down into something readable, makes the whole shambling affair a little more organized, intentional, and efficient (and often effective, as well).