The paradox of writerly rereading
by James Somers, April 2, 2012
Writing on a sentence level has this feeling, for me, of “flights and perchings,” where for a minute I’m tackling the sentence itself–the cursor is tracing out letters–and for a minute I rest. What do I do in those perchings? Well, I put my head in my hands sometimes, or I look into the distance, or, more often than not, I re-read what I’ve just written: the local context of the part I’m working on, going back maybe a few paragraphs. This last option is partly just a tic, something to do when I’m thinking hard about where to go next; and partly it’s a conscious attempt to make every sentence feel like it’s growing out of the last sentence, the idea being that to write sentence n in a flow-y way you need sentences (n – 3), (n – 2), (n – 1) in your local mental workspace.
But there is a dangerous side effect to all of that re-reading: After a while, if you do it enough, the life will drain out of your sentences. It’s not exactly like that phenomenon where you repeat a word over and over again until it looks weird–but surely it’s related. By the time you’ve finished a draft you’ve read the same sentences so many, so many times, that the experience is nothing at all like what a fresh reader would feel on a fresh reading.
You have to remember that you’re not reading those sentences at the pace of a fresh reader, or in anything like a fresh reader’s state of mind. It’s entirely different, to read sentences when you know what they’re going to say. In fact you’re not actually “reading” when you re-read one of your drafts. You’re swallowing thoughts whole, one sentence at a time. By the time you get to a sentence you know exactly where it’s going; the cluster of thoughts it represents come instantly to mind.
Where in the fresh reader a sentence constructs mental structures, in you, it merely refers to them. And the more you re-read your own sentences, the more that activity slides from construction to referring. Each sentence becomes “that sentence.” The referents calcify and fade; the re-reading becomes shallower and shallower.
(Another way of describing the effect is to say that each time you re-read your draft, the distance between what you think going in and what you think coming out gets shorter and shorter. The needle moves less and less. And of course this is because you develop an ever more stable picture of what your sentences stand for.)
This is probably why writers need editors, or early readers, and why it’s hard to spot your own typos.
I’ve been working on a long article for the last month, and this phenomenon bit me in a big way. By the time I handed it in to my editor I had no idea what it was doing. In 7,500 words it felt like I wasn’t saying anything. The sentences didn’t feel fresh to me, or full, and that’s because they’d been reduced to shallow pointers, and it’s hard, short of not looking at the thing for a week or two, to undo all the work that made such a tight mapping between sentences and swallowable-whole mental structures.
(I wonder if something similar happens to an actor delivering the same monologue over and over again. Much of the challenge of that art must be in continuing to actually read the words, read them full, the way you do the first time.)
Do you see the paradox here? In order to write well you must attend to your words; you’ve got to attack them with insane scrutiny. But as you do, you blunt your own perception. The words deaden over time–precisely because you’ve paid them such close attention.
A less bunko-cognitive-science way of putting all this is that you never really read your own stuff the way you read other people’s stuff. Or at least you need to wait awhile before you do. So it seems to me to be very difficult to take Seymour Glass’s advice to his brother Buddy:
If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.
Sadly that might not be possible, if only because all writing is not just rewriting, but rereading–and rereading is slow poison.
I’m reminded of the Persians and their decision-making process of trying out any decision both drunk and sober. I do think that is sometimes another option: get drunk and read it. Really though the best is to give it time.
I think of it like this: if we had a machine to record our dreams and/or thoughts, we would use that and play them back to our heart’s content. We’d also share them with friends to communicate. However, it turns out that language is the best thought record and transmitter we have. The problem when you’re reading something you’ve been working hard on is the novelty of the thought path you’re communicating is just totally worn off. As such the mind finds it boring. As you write here, that has nothing to do with how a new reader experiences the piece.
I guess what I’m saying is this phenomenon isn’t restricted to writing. Anything that is a transcription of a mental pathway repeated endlessly–for instance, even a musician/composer playing the same piece for the umpteenth time in a row, I imagine–is going to lose the novelty of its creation. As I wrote above, given a little time, I think it comes back quickly.
Your end quote is interesting. I think that if you set out artistically with some very concrete preconceived goal, it’s going to take forever to get to as you keep having to reboot/refresh your mind. However, if you set out with a vaguer goal and let the organic creative process lead you where it may, I think it’s possible to end up with something lasting (On The Road rings a bell) in a very short time. These two attacks at the problem of accomplishing the beautiful are interesting to consider.
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Speaking of one’s own typos….
“By the time I handed it in to my editor I had no idea what it was doing.”
;)
Very nice catch, thanks. Although you have to ask whether I left it in there on purpose, just to make the point… :)