Work and Editing

Every year the Marino family sponsors the visit of an author of a book read by all Georgetown incoming first-year students. One of the set of questions posed to the author is often about work routines. Do you get up early in the morning to work? What happens if you find it hard to write on a given day? Do you plan out the entire book before you write it or does it evolve on its own during the writing? The answers are quite diverse but never fail to be interesting.

I recently encountered an interesting book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing, by Adam Moss, addressing how artists produce their works. The focus includes visual artists, fiction writers, playwrights, chefs, and others.

Reading in-depth interviews with over 40 different creators, one gets a sense of how an idea begins to form, often quite distant from the final product. An architect draws four or five lines suggesting curves of a building. After many iterations, one can compare the final form to the simple curves. A fiction writer learns about a murder that happened long ago, which becomes the seed of a whole series of imagined alternative versions of the real event. The memory of particular smells from a childhood kitchen motivates a whole menu of novel food creations by a chef, spawning a popular restaurant.

Some interviewed describe the act of creation as subconscious, mystical, divinely inspired, or even “demanded” by the object being constructed. Most agree that giving access to one’s imagination is key, but what happens next is described in quite varied terms. A novelist asserts that the characters spoke to them, and the characters demanded that the novelist write their stories. Or, more subconsciously cognitive, by putting the work aside for a while and doing other activities, the full vision of the work suddenly became clear and the creator felt a burst of activity to capture the vision. (This reminds us of Einstein’s claim that the theory of relativity came clear to him while he was playing the violin.)

A consistent theme of the stories is how long it takes to create work of some impact, cohesion, and meaning. Some begin with explicit designs in mind; for example, a novelistic device taking the characters through a 300 year time period. But then after a few pages of writing come to the judgment that it was a bad idea. Then later, the author goes back to the original idea repeatedly, succeeding only after many tries years later.

The artists sometime noted that the work process was often torture, but they couldn’t stop doing it, the work itself was a passion even when the product did not meet their standards. For example, what ended up as a novel might have begun as a short story or a play, left in a drawer, never to see the light of day. But the idea kept re-occurring to them over time. They couldn’t permanently avoid thinking about it.

While the book is focused on the creative arts, broadly defined, it seems that the “doing” of art often resembles the work of much scholarship in academia. Academic ideas generally don’t arise fully formed, ready for the world to acknowledge their brilliance. They are unpolished stones, filled with imperfections that obscure their real beauty. And so the work of scholarship is constantly trying to find the truth in an idea – shedding what is a distraction, constructing connections among subparts, inventing the new ideas that fill gaps.

And so editing, fixing, adjusting, dropping features, are part of the work of research as they are part of the work of art. Many ideas fizzle out upon inspection. It is common for scholars to have incomplete manuscripts that pile up over the years – ideas that just didn’t achieve enough novelty to merit dissemination. For both groups, however, there is evidence that unsuccessful attempts at one point never really exit the creative mind. The threads of earlier “failures” can be found in the successful later products.

There is another stage of the work of art that resembles the work of an academic scholar – deciding when the work is completed, or “good enough,” or “the best I can do.” Of course, history is filled with examples of levels of self-criticism so severe that the creator doesn’t ever expose others to the work. They never judge it good enough. There is always more to do. In the extreme, this is one reason for “starving artists” who never show their work and failed academics who never submit their work for publication.

For those of us in higher education, there are lessons here. All of this reminds us that most of the time of advancing knowledge or creating the new is devoted to self-criticism of the work, refining, editing, doing intermediate tasks over and over again. Hence, original scholarship produces final products that are only a small piece of the total labor involved. Most of the time of the author/creator is spent revising. Unfortunately most students are exposed only to the final products, the canon of a given area. They are cheated by never knowing about the 99% of the labor of the field that doesn’t make it to the level of accepted new knowledge or new forms.

On the other hand, what’s hopeful about the future of higher education is that we are increasingly moving to experience-based and research-based learning. The students want to learn by doing. The doing inevitably exposes them to the act of creation. Only through living the frustrations of revising, editing, supplementing, cutting, can we provide our students with the intense joy of the creation of something new — lessons never forgotten.