The Death of a Draft - My struggle with writing

This draft has issues. And yet, I am posting it. A typo hare, an grammatical error there, an out, of place comma, or a sentence fragment that. Irritates you. And, yet I am posting it. Maybe the arrangement of the sentences is off, or maybe the paragraphs are out of order, or maybe - the examples, the analogies, and the metaphors - don’t hit. And yet I am posting this draft.

The last draft I posted, had the same issues, and yet I posted that, and the one before that. They are live on the internet, for all of you to read. The errors bother me, and I know that they bother you, and yet they are alive on the internet, they are flawed, but they live. This draft explains why.

The Death of a Draft

When I first started writing, I wanted my posts to be perfect. So, after I wrote a draft, I rewrote it, and then I rewrote it; if I didn’t like it, I would delete it; if I didn’t delete it, it sat unpublished, for months, sometimes years, waiting patiently for its uneventful demise. The road was so long that most of the drafts didn’t make it.

First came all the manual cleaning up — I re-read my draft and fixed all the obvious objective errors - the grammar, the typos, the punctuation, etc. Then came the cleaning up with apps like Ginger or Grammarly. And then, whenever I could, I asked people to peer-review my draft. This 3-step process took more time than actually writing the draft, but this was only the beginning.

After all the obvious objective errors were fixed, the real pain started. Every time I re-read my draft, I ended up rearranging the sentences and paragraphs. On some days one arrangement looked good, and the next time I read it, maybe a week later, the same arrangement looked awful. How do I fix that? Should I go with the first arrangement or the second?

The pain just kept piling on. Every time I learned something new about writing clearly, I felt an obligation to change the draft. Let’s say I learned somewhere that passive voice should not be used I should use active voice. Now, should I spend time refactoring my post and removing all passives? Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn’t.

Dilemmas. Dilemmas. And more dilemmas. What about logical correctness? What about factual accuracy? What about <pick your poison>?

The dilemmas led to delays and the delays to a dreadful death of the draft.

The Strangulation of Desire

In my head, the road to posting started with a first draft and reached a state called a final draft. Posting was just a mechanical formality, a click of a button. The goal was to reach this state of final draft - a writer’s nirvana. I was wrong.

I think the desire to write is directly linked to the dopamine hits of writing, closely followed by dopamine hits of posting. Translation: I want to write more because I feel ‘great’ when I write and I feel ‘good’ when I post. What this means is the more I write and post, the more I tend to write and post in the future.

The dopamine hit that I get due to writing is highest when I write the first draft, but by the time I come back to it, the hit is cut by half. The farther I get from the first draft, the lower the hit gets. Before I know it, I lose the desire to get to the final draft, and off I go to grab a greater dopamine hit from another ‘first draft’ that I started. The final draft always seems so close, and yet I never get there.

This feels great in the short term, however, in the long term, it is depressing. After days of jumping from one draft to another, the reflective self kicks in and I ask myself - What have you produced in the last few months? How many posts have you completed? Zero, Zilch, Nada.

And, how many corpses, gassed by delays, lie rotting in this mass grave - this folder that you call “Drafts”? How many of them are ready - final? Soon, the thoughts spiral out of control - Why can’t I finish what I started? Should I even be writing? Maybe I shouldn’t. Can I write? Maybe I can’t.

The pain piles up, first slowly, then suddenly, and soon it overpowers the pleasure of writing. The mass death of drafts slowly strangulates the desire to write.

The Final Draft

If you think of the process of writing like a journey through the desert, then the final draft is the mirage of an Oasis - it does not exist and it will kill you if you chase it.

There was a time when the phrase ‘final draft’ meant something. It was the state of your draft before it was sent for publishing. There was a clear demarcation between the final draft and all the other drafts. It was final in the sense that after that stage, it literally could not be changed.

The machines roared, the type casts slathered with ink forcefully struck thin sheets of wood called paper and demarcated the final draft from a published post. The inability to change marked clear boundaries between a draft and a final draft.

That demarcation is long dead.

Most of us no longer publish in print. We publish on the web. And, on the web, drafts just go from being private to public. There is never any finality to them, they are in constant flux. The concept of something being final makes no sense.

Each draft that you make, can be the final draft if you want it to be. You can publish whatever you want, in whatever state it is in. The best part, you can keep changing it and improving it for the rest of your life, even after it’s published.

But how to decide, what is worthy enough to put out in the world?

Ugly - Imperfect - Alive

To me, writing, like speaking, is just a medium for communicating my thoughts and ideas. To mere mortals like me, the art of writing has become secondary, and the utility of writing - the primary objective.

I still appreciate and aspire towards style but I think, writing that is ugly, imperfect, and alive is always better than writing that is beautiful, abandoned, and dead.

I also read somewhere, “the only form of writing is rewriting”, I agree, but not at the cost of killing someone’s desire to write, to communicate, to say what they think.

I believe, that if you think that you have something worth sharing, share it, and if you think that writing is the best form of communication suited to it, write it. Maybe, just maybe, someone out there likes your thoughts for what they are. Maybe they find it interesting. Maybe your thoughts are brilliant. Maybe they are so brilliant that people just ignore the mistakes that you have made.

Without giving your writing, life, they will never know, and you will never know.

People can, and will point out the mistakes - syntactical or logical. Some people will even embarrass you when they point out the obvious errors that you have made. That’s just the part of the game. That’s how you learn.