Editing
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Fictions. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Once upon a time, I edited Larry David. He was writing an entry for the contributors’ blog of the Huffington Post, of which I was then (or shortly afterward, maybe on the strength of my edits of Larry David) managing editor.
I remember how well he took my notes as we spoke on the phone—me, a 22-year-old. Even when the discussion touched on which was the funnier placement of a comma, he didn’t say, “I see your point, but let’s keep it the way it was.” He just assented, not grudging or patronizing or sending a BlackBerry message to my boss. He actually seemed to feel that I was making his work better, or at least not worse.
Maybe this did too much for my professional confidence, but the memories I have from that time of people validating my judgment—celebrities and, mostly, otherwise—still stick out. These were gracious down payments on the idea that someday the hole in my brain would fill in with a prefrontal cortex.
The more valuable lesson in that episode, though, was how to be edited. Larry David taught me that the benefit of the doubt should rest with someone who is not you.
By the time I started working on my novel, I’d been a professional editor for a decade and a half. My biggest worry was that I would edit myself too aggressively in real time to generate anything, like an overactive immune system that leaves you with a bald spot. So I adapted my morning pages practice, writing three more pages in a notebook each day—longhand, thus deterring edits—than I had before. These were the beginnings of the story that I would make from Joseph Smith’s life, and in them were some episodes that remain not only key narrative points but also proofs of concept: that within me lay a story whose contours would reveal themselves through the bodily act of writing. I want to emphasize that. The story could not be known by any amount of outlining or sketching or sitting around with pals over a second round of martinis. It would come alive only—and only sometimes—when the tip of the pen in my hand touched down.
An athlete is an editor, in overlapping ways: You can’t sustain a serious training program when other elements of your life are working against it. So foods and drinks and recreations and even relationships that were fine for a life less specific in its accounting of energy must sometimes be reconsidered. This extends so far as editing out extra physical activity, as I was reminded last weekend when I did a hard yoga class after a nine-mile run, instead of a restorative one. It tanked me.
The big editing puzzle is always what to leave out. The last time I wrote for The Atlantic, and got my first draft back, I was reminded of the files I used to email my friends during a period when they were writing application essays for grad school and asking me to edit them—a sea of red ink. Total bloodbath. It’s hard to replicate this effect on your own work, but, just so you know, I struck out the whole first paragraph of today’s newsletter. You’ll never see it.
To get a little mystical, I believe that our choices about what we do with our bodies, what types of spaces they occupy and with whom, are reflected in our creative work. One place to start, if you’re stuck, is by editing the scene of your labor. Is this where someone doing what you’re doing would do it?
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.