I'm a fan of all the Latin that made it into this piece! Years ago I worked on a project building large compute clusters to process DNA assays for genomic research. This essay helped me map how the assay effort of my writing is helping me get deeper into what makes me, me. Much like assessing my own DNA.
There's a whole other bit to this though. Once one can produce essays and assays with regular frequency, one gains super powers of more accurate self triage as issues arise and perhaps, concentrated expression towards a desired state. You captured this opportunity well with the Stephen King quote and reframe. I wouldn't mind reading a piece from you focused on this idea alone.
No suprise here that Becky was apart of this. This one is so rich I know I'll read it again and again and get more from it. Well done.
I love the alchemist metaphor, it’s a topic I fell into last year through a book called “Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter” by Brian Cotnoir—been fascinated by ever since. The word alchemy alone makes anything feel more fun and exciting to me, which is exactly what I need when it comes to my editing mindset. 🧪
Your diagram showing the rearrangement named paragraphs of bullets works really well for my visual mind, and reminds me a bit of my process for UX design. Naming your paragraphs to do this is such a solid pro tip.
I have two podcast recommendations for you or anyone else interested in digging more into this topic:
1) The Ezra Klein Show: This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor — talks about the process of creating something from nothing, super relevant to drafting and the experience of the “rewrite” from a visual artist perspective.
2) The Ezra Klein Show: Best of: George Saunders on Kindness in a Cruel World — talks about how editing allows you to explore different perspectives or lenses of your own mindset… by the time you’re done, you may have actually changed how you feel or who you are in some small way.
🌱 Thanks for planting the seed in my mind to explore this metaphor further.
Thanks for these recommendations! (including the Alchemy book). Two other alchemy books I've started are "Alchemical active imagination" by Von Franz, and "Initiation Into Hermetics" by Franz Bardon. Glad to hear the metaphor helps re-frame editing.
Recently, I've been paying extra attention to topic sentences too, which are kind of like an extended version of a paragraph title. During one of the live sessions I wrote, "Clear topic sentences for insane paragraphs." A clear topic sentence helps frame the sentences ahead, and links the whole unit to the larger point of an essay.
Whoa! Thanks for sharing this. His handing writing is incredible, and I'm very curious to know if/how the margin markings get integrated into future drafts.
It's fascinating to see his annotations, isn't it? 🙂 The website I shared behind to the French national public library, they've numerized it so you can leaf through the original document online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k11718168/f7.item
The text accompanying the short video describes what happened to the original document: it was not integrated into a new edition until 1802, more than 200 years after his death in 1592.
Historians have debated whether this "Bordeaux edition" is to be considered the final version written by Montaigne. Comparison to another revised edition published by Marie de Gournay in 1595, after his death, indicate that, very probably, there was another updated manuscript annotated by Montaigne that has been lost.
This website is a wonderful online littérature rabbit hole; you can download for free most of French classic littérature (en français of course!) and browse medieval manuscripts, Victor Hugo's drawings and original manuscripts, etc...
Its interesting to see this theme of thinking vs. feeling mind coming up in the realm of "creative crafts" (like architecture, photography, or writing) — that making quality work requires a grasp and balance of the technical (analytic) and creative (intuitive).
I think you make a valuable point about what a timeless modern essay is in, the sense that being a marriage of the personal / idiosyncratic, observational and sometimes journalistic...but rarely if ever "academic". Its funny, I'll have family members ask "why don't you go into academia if you like writing so much?", but there is a part of me that feels a bit allergic to what I assume would be more rigid and formulaic writing (maybe the actual opposite of Montaigne's style of writing?).
As for the logging stuff, along with trying to figure out what ideas are worth working on, it's also been a struggle for me to try to figure out a cadence to stick to in a way that there's accountability, but also in a way that doesn't lead to burnout. Like, how do I cater my creative process to fit within that without turning into some think toxic and rigid? And how do I balance that right now with a full time job?
Anywho, thanks for another valuable framework! The extrapolation on the reverse outline process is particularly helpful to me as I focus on improvement through iteration/editing instead of impeding killing my momentum and cadence by trying to get it "too perfect" the first go around.
Also, after the Jason Silva mention in the live session today, I randomly unearthed a talk show interview he did. Turns out he does all of his philosophy videos in one fell stream of consciousness swoop. Philosophical beat poetry he calls it.
He then references fMRI scans done on freestyle rappers and on jazz musicians when they improvise. And how they found that the lateral prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for self editing) goes quiet. It's pure expression.
There’s definitely a place for stream of consciousness. My sense is that the more analytical, slow, and entrenched my editing process for long form is, the better my one-take typewriter essays are. There’s a world in which the patterns of the craft become automatic, and over 50% of what you make is ready to go. I think it’s extremely rare to start here, but in most cases it’s something you can work towards.
Yeah, it really does feel like so much of developing writing skills is about: honing those (patterns of crafts) skills until they almost become habits, AND simultaneously training your brain of when to use the intuitive vs. analytical parts of it. Like you said in your essay — assay vs. essay.
Break everything you built and then build something else. If the original iteration returns, consider returning it. If you can't get a refund, consider re-reing (an alternative act of do-doing). Sometimes I feel like everything is a rewrite of a different idea done the same way. Love how you think out the math to the process. Something to the idea of essay, the art of saying, assay the art of listening. I also like using sassy, bassy, spacey, heresy and saucy to improve my rewrites.
Any thoughts on the alchemists?
Words are magic. What if words were objects too? Words represent objects, but can't actually be them. I imagine there are a lot of words that wished they were more physical and material. I want to see a word walking the street with too much hair listening to a book on tape about itself. Have you ever seen "The Holy Mountain"? In the movie Alejandro Jodorowsky plays a magician who turns his crap into gold. It is one of my favorite movies about magic (right next to Garbage Pail Kids:The Movie").
What am I missing on Montaigne?
We should use "gne" more. We are the knights who say "gne".
“Saying/listening” — that’s so helpful. Listening has all these connotations that come with it. There’s an act of listening to what your draft wants to become instead of talking, talking, talking (saying) around your old vision of it.
...dude tell me when you plug into that...such a killer film...also not sure if yr a DUNEr but the latest DUNE was hella inspirato by Jodorowsky's Dune which is also a killer doc...
'I like to think the first draft is for me to discover my idea, and the second draft is to best convey that idea to a stranger.' - This is one of those maxims that seems so simple and obvious when you read it, that it seems incredible that thousands of writers don't have it tattoed on the back of their writing hand.
I'm currently in the middle of the 7th redraft of a novel, the most intensive of the redrafts so far, and I can definitely relate to what you say about shying away from the responsibility of putting yourself through a sort of ego-death. But reading about the art of redrafting through the lens of alchemy has given me a new burst of motivation, at least for now haha!
So curious to hear what a novel rewrite is like and how’s that’s different from an essay rewrite. There must be an additional dimension. In addition to melting down the parts within a chapter, I imagine there’s a melting of whole chapters too.
Your step-by-step method for a rewrite — locked in step with the stages of alchemy — is actual gold. I’m definitely going to try your “name each paragraph” approach and see how it goes. I usually approach that step of a reverse outline by thinking about claims and evidence. I have one-sentence headers for each of my main claims (usually in a different order than they appear in the first draft) and bullets as evidence or sub-claims beneath each of those. I’ve always found that helpful because it detaches me from the structure and the prose of the first draft.
The whole essay/assay distinction is spot-on too. My problem is that I don’t do enough essay-ing, because assay-ing comes more naturally to me. I get stuck in the middle of my first draft way more often than I get stuck in revision. But this gives me a new way to frame that problem. I need to lean into the mystical until the whole v1 is done, so that I have enough material to melt down into some goo that’s interesting and has potential.
Really cool essay, Michael. I have a question for you -- do you EVER have instances where your first draft feels like the real thing? Since finishing WoP in the fall, I have been leaning into the idea of following my own process. For me, I usually start with pages of bullets then just start writing and as I go I figure out which bullets are part of this essay and which are either (a) crap or (b) another idea. And once I arrive at a draft it doesn't feel like it needs to be totally crumbled and rearranged usually, since I've kind of been doing a lot of that testing as I write the first one.
Love the philosophizing in the second half of this essay about the broader applications / implications of letting go. Thank you for writing this!
I'm a fan of all the Latin that made it into this piece! Years ago I worked on a project building large compute clusters to process DNA assays for genomic research. This essay helped me map how the assay effort of my writing is helping me get deeper into what makes me, me. Much like assessing my own DNA.
There's a whole other bit to this though. Once one can produce essays and assays with regular frequency, one gains super powers of more accurate self triage as issues arise and perhaps, concentrated expression towards a desired state. You captured this opportunity well with the Stephen King quote and reframe. I wouldn't mind reading a piece from you focused on this idea alone.
No suprise here that Becky was apart of this. This one is so rich I know I'll read it again and again and get more from it. Well done.
I love the alchemist metaphor, it’s a topic I fell into last year through a book called “Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter” by Brian Cotnoir—been fascinated by ever since. The word alchemy alone makes anything feel more fun and exciting to me, which is exactly what I need when it comes to my editing mindset. 🧪
Your diagram showing the rearrangement named paragraphs of bullets works really well for my visual mind, and reminds me a bit of my process for UX design. Naming your paragraphs to do this is such a solid pro tip.
I have two podcast recommendations for you or anyone else interested in digging more into this topic:
1) The Ezra Klein Show: This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor — talks about the process of creating something from nothing, super relevant to drafting and the experience of the “rewrite” from a visual artist perspective.
2) The Ezra Klein Show: Best of: George Saunders on Kindness in a Cruel World — talks about how editing allows you to explore different perspectives or lenses of your own mindset… by the time you’re done, you may have actually changed how you feel or who you are in some small way.
🌱 Thanks for planting the seed in my mind to explore this metaphor further.
Thanks for these recommendations! (including the Alchemy book). Two other alchemy books I've started are "Alchemical active imagination" by Von Franz, and "Initiation Into Hermetics" by Franz Bardon. Glad to hear the metaphor helps re-frame editing.
Recently, I've been paying extra attention to topic sentences too, which are kind of like an extended version of a paragraph title. During one of the live sessions I wrote, "Clear topic sentences for insane paragraphs." A clear topic sentence helps frame the sentences ahead, and links the whole unit to the larger point of an essay.
Montaigne did in fact edit and rewrite his Essais, multiple times. Most of those editions are lost, but one is still preserved, called "the Bordeaux copy" (l'exemplaire de Bordeaux, in French) where you can see his corrections and annotations in the margins. This URL has a short video showing some of the pages. It's in French but might have automatic English subtitles and even if it doesn't, you get a glimpse of Montaigne's handwriting. https://gallica.bnf.fr/blog/06072016/comment-montaigne-ecrivait-ses-essais-lexemplaire-de-bordeaux?mode=mobile#:~:text=La%20naissance%20de%20l'Exemplaire,y%20apporter%20corrections%20et%20additions.
Whoa! Thanks for sharing this. His handing writing is incredible, and I'm very curious to know if/how the margin markings get integrated into future drafts.
It's fascinating to see his annotations, isn't it? 🙂 The website I shared behind to the French national public library, they've numerized it so you can leaf through the original document online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k11718168/f7.item
The text accompanying the short video describes what happened to the original document: it was not integrated into a new edition until 1802, more than 200 years after his death in 1592.
Historians have debated whether this "Bordeaux edition" is to be considered the final version written by Montaigne. Comparison to another revised edition published by Marie de Gournay in 1595, after his death, indicate that, very probably, there was another updated manuscript annotated by Montaigne that has been lost.
The 1595 original edition is also numerized & you can read it on the same French national library website: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10425938/f9.item
This website is a wonderful online littérature rabbit hole; you can download for free most of French classic littérature (en français of course!) and browse medieval manuscripts, Victor Hugo's drawings and original manuscripts, etc...
Its interesting to see this theme of thinking vs. feeling mind coming up in the realm of "creative crafts" (like architecture, photography, or writing) — that making quality work requires a grasp and balance of the technical (analytic) and creative (intuitive).
I think you make a valuable point about what a timeless modern essay is in, the sense that being a marriage of the personal / idiosyncratic, observational and sometimes journalistic...but rarely if ever "academic". Its funny, I'll have family members ask "why don't you go into academia if you like writing so much?", but there is a part of me that feels a bit allergic to what I assume would be more rigid and formulaic writing (maybe the actual opposite of Montaigne's style of writing?).
As for the logging stuff, along with trying to figure out what ideas are worth working on, it's also been a struggle for me to try to figure out a cadence to stick to in a way that there's accountability, but also in a way that doesn't lead to burnout. Like, how do I cater my creative process to fit within that without turning into some think toxic and rigid? And how do I balance that right now with a full time job?
Anywho, thanks for another valuable framework! The extrapolation on the reverse outline process is particularly helpful to me as I focus on improvement through iteration/editing instead of impeding killing my momentum and cadence by trying to get it "too perfect" the first go around.
Also, after the Jason Silva mention in the live session today, I randomly unearthed a talk show interview he did. Turns out he does all of his philosophy videos in one fell stream of consciousness swoop. Philosophical beat poetry he calls it.
He then references fMRI scans done on freestyle rappers and on jazz musicians when they improvise. And how they found that the lateral prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for self editing) goes quiet. It's pure expression.
There’s definitely a place for stream of consciousness. My sense is that the more analytical, slow, and entrenched my editing process for long form is, the better my one-take typewriter essays are. There’s a world in which the patterns of the craft become automatic, and over 50% of what you make is ready to go. I think it’s extremely rare to start here, but in most cases it’s something you can work towards.
Yeah, it really does feel like so much of developing writing skills is about: honing those (patterns of crafts) skills until they almost become habits, AND simultaneously training your brain of when to use the intuitive vs. analytical parts of it. Like you said in your essay — assay vs. essay.
What’s your approach to rewriting?
Break everything you built and then build something else. If the original iteration returns, consider returning it. If you can't get a refund, consider re-reing (an alternative act of do-doing). Sometimes I feel like everything is a rewrite of a different idea done the same way. Love how you think out the math to the process. Something to the idea of essay, the art of saying, assay the art of listening. I also like using sassy, bassy, spacey, heresy and saucy to improve my rewrites.
Any thoughts on the alchemists?
Words are magic. What if words were objects too? Words represent objects, but can't actually be them. I imagine there are a lot of words that wished they were more physical and material. I want to see a word walking the street with too much hair listening to a book on tape about itself. Have you ever seen "The Holy Mountain"? In the movie Alejandro Jodorowsky plays a magician who turns his crap into gold. It is one of my favorite movies about magic (right next to Garbage Pail Kids:The Movie").
What am I missing on Montaigne?
We should use "gne" more. We are the knights who say "gne".
“Saying/listening” — that’s so helpful. Listening has all these connotations that come with it. There’s an act of listening to what your draft wants to become instead of talking, talking, talking (saying) around your old vision of it.
Adding the Holy Mountain to my list.
...dude tell me when you plug into that...such a killer film...also not sure if yr a DUNEr but the latest DUNE was hella inspirato by Jodorowsky's Dune which is also a killer doc...
'I like to think the first draft is for me to discover my idea, and the second draft is to best convey that idea to a stranger.' - This is one of those maxims that seems so simple and obvious when you read it, that it seems incredible that thousands of writers don't have it tattoed on the back of their writing hand.
I'm currently in the middle of the 7th redraft of a novel, the most intensive of the redrafts so far, and I can definitely relate to what you say about shying away from the responsibility of putting yourself through a sort of ego-death. But reading about the art of redrafting through the lens of alchemy has given me a new burst of motivation, at least for now haha!
So curious to hear what a novel rewrite is like and how’s that’s different from an essay rewrite. There must be an additional dimension. In addition to melting down the parts within a chapter, I imagine there’s a melting of whole chapters too.
i like "melting your prose"
“Show up, channel the universe, spasm onto the page, and call it art. No wrong answers.” 🚀
Your step-by-step method for a rewrite — locked in step with the stages of alchemy — is actual gold. I’m definitely going to try your “name each paragraph” approach and see how it goes. I usually approach that step of a reverse outline by thinking about claims and evidence. I have one-sentence headers for each of my main claims (usually in a different order than they appear in the first draft) and bullets as evidence or sub-claims beneath each of those. I’ve always found that helpful because it detaches me from the structure and the prose of the first draft.
The whole essay/assay distinction is spot-on too. My problem is that I don’t do enough essay-ing, because assay-ing comes more naturally to me. I get stuck in the middle of my first draft way more often than I get stuck in revision. But this gives me a new way to frame that problem. I need to lean into the mystical until the whole v1 is done, so that I have enough material to melt down into some goo that’s interesting and has potential.
Great work on this one, Michael!
Really cool essay, Michael. I have a question for you -- do you EVER have instances where your first draft feels like the real thing? Since finishing WoP in the fall, I have been leaning into the idea of following my own process. For me, I usually start with pages of bullets then just start writing and as I go I figure out which bullets are part of this essay and which are either (a) crap or (b) another idea. And once I arrive at a draft it doesn't feel like it needs to be totally crumbled and rearranged usually, since I've kind of been doing a lot of that testing as I write the first one.
Love the philosophizing in the second half of this essay about the broader applications / implications of letting go. Thank you for writing this!