Final Drafts

The first draft can be anything; sometimes it’s anything but what the final draft wants to be.

Thinking and revising and reading out loud and editing transform the first draft into something else—hopefully closer to what the final draft wants to be. The subtractive part of the editing process is hard to get used to: throwing away the parts that don’t make sense, that don’t fit, that don’t support.

But what’s left afterward isn’t just smoother, cleaner and tighter; it’s layered. There’s the core or the seed that was planted or discovered, the found and the fabricated bits that fit just so, and the gentle rearrangements over time that anneal them into something solid.

Final drafts contain previous drafts. Every final draft is a palimpsest.