Fearing Garbage First Drafts

I censor at the most basic level; within my thoughts. Censorship is so pervasive within me, a constant desire to make sure that I am presenting one likeable view to the world. Not that I have a problem with people seeing that bungled up, unprocessed, incoherent me but rather that it is so scattered that not everyone will process it and understand it with a first glance. So when it comes to writing, I have the constant tendency to rewrite every basic phrase. Do I have a misspelling? I can't stand to stare at that word any more without having to correct it right this moment. And why shouldn't I? My terminal lets me glide the cursor over one word, dangle my fingers over the backspace key, and then release, only to start again, with a perfect ideal in mind.

See, you didn't notice, but I was just about to write a completely different sentence here. I erased it completely. The sentence has already begun fading in my head and you, the reader, have no clue what I was about to dispense to the world. I deemed it unsuitable or incomprehensible in context. It just didn't make sense for it to be in this paragraph or in this location. For some reason, I have told myself that the reader would not enjoy that sentence just as it was. It wouldn't have fit any context and would have deemed me a poorer, reckless writer. Reckless, reckless, reckless!

How could I let the masses consume the little threads of knowledge floating around in my head? They connect terrorism with teapots, chocolate ice cream to fishing for shrimp in Maine to the subway system consumed in Helvetica. This hyperlinked potpourri of ideas? It's my job to take the glob of thoughts and formulate them into a coherent fashion for consumption. Or else, what respect has the writing itself have developed? I could put a smattering of ideas that have no connection whatsoever and consider that to be my writing. But in reality, it really isn't. It shows a failure on my part to curtail the information, to process it, and regurgitate it with all the unintelligent thought process already removed.

Some writers can pour their heart out on the first run with the garbage first draft. But Ben Jackson struck a deep chord within my slow, iterative writing process. I tried to understand, why is it that writers like him and me are forced to stare at the screen and confront our obsessive compulsive disorder, this hatred of poor grammar, terrible spelling, the period in the wrong place, and can't seem to get over the fact that we will always be making mistakes in our writing?

I take for granted the beauty of the brain. How I can lie here on this sofa on the 3rd floor of my college library, intermittingly blinking at the overhead lights, my head reclining on my bookbag, and think so passively. I start automatically weaving a networking of ideas from what I took in this morning on Instapaper, Google Reader, my discussion in my US Government class, the music bobbing in my head, and somehow, someway, produce acceptable intelligence. The very fact that my brain is at the core of building the next great idea so passively, without even a moment's notice, is astonishishing. Even while half sleep, I'll instantly retreat from my slumber and pop open my laptop to hammer it out, lest I forget it the very next second.

There must be some value hidden within that garbage first draft. To do the same thing that my brain is doing, except recording it all in constant, reckless hammering out of sentences and words, even if it scares me. And trust me, it scares me to see writing from the first stage. I fear not the thoughts that come out from that first draft, were I to take the approach, but thatt the power of saving, combined with Dropbox and pixi-magic, may make my first draft easy to retrieve in the future by some unsuspecting passenger of the web. Someone else can see how I foolishly composed this essay in stages, maybe even ask "how could he have even thought about that at the moment?"

Do I really want people tracing my lineage of garbage text all the way to the sterilized, clean form writing I've exported for the world to view?

So I censor at the basic level, right here in the basic terminal editor, moving the thick cursor from side to side, erasing, rewriting, integrating the editing process straight into my writing. There maybe value in those first few jarring keystrokes but knowing that the world may see that garbage first draft is enough to invoke fear within me to censor my thoughts. Besides, it's not limiting the output of something incredible from this laptop keyboard. I think.

Last updated: 2011-05-06T13:24:32+10:00