Creativity is revision

“You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

— Legendary sports writer Walter Wellseley “Red” Smith in 1949, when asked whether writing a daily column was difficult*

After 25-plus years as a professional writer, I’ve come to believe that the essence of creativity is not in the moments that words are first set down but in revision.

For any writing project, whether it’s this weekly missive, a blog post for a client or a feature story for a magazine, I spend as much time, or more, on revision as I do the initial draft. Sometimes first drafts come quickly. Sometimes they come slowly — drops of blood from an unwilling vein.

In either case, though, the first draft is usually rife with wordiness, unclear ideas, missing or incorrect facts, and many other flaws. The first draft is just the start. My writing process tends to go like this:

1. Write the first draft. Don’t pay too much attention to details or word count. Don’t spend time fact-checking obscure details.
2. Let it sit. An hour or two at a minimum, a day or two if deadlines allow.
3. Print it out and go over it with a pen. Note errors, cut unnecessary verbiage, mark missing information and facts that need confirmation.
4. Make all those edits.
5. Then read it again. Make more edits as I uncover more shortcomings. Repeat until I feel good about the draft (or deadlines loom).

Then run the whole thing through grammar checkers and spell checkers. At a minimum, I’ll use Microsoft Word. But I often use other applications as well, including the online tool Grammarly and whatever’s built into other software I write with (Evernote frequently, Scrivener and Google Docs sometimes, Hemingway occasionally).

Finally, the draft goes out. Most of what I write goes to a client, often a professional editor.

As often as not, the recipient will make further edits and ask me to make more changes. Sometimes it’s just double-checking a fact, reworking a sentence or adding a detail. Sometimes it’s recasting the entire piece.

That happened this week. I’d written something that was, in hindsight, just OK. The client asked me to rework it. So I revised the piece, reorganizing and rewriting most of it. The result was much better. (Thanks, Allison!)

This is a long-winded way of saying that the creative process happens mostly during revision. It’s not about a burst of inspiration. It’s not always fun, and sometimes it really does feel like you’re cutting yourself open. But revision is magical.

And it’s not just for writing.

Professional photographers take hundreds of images they discard during editing. Films and music reach their final state only after uncounted hours of editing, mixing and post-production — often involving dozens or hundreds of people. Books, including best-sellers you’ve probably read, are often substantially revised by the combined efforts of the author and editor after submission of the initial manuscript.

The same drafting-revision-refinement process also happens with business plans, medical treatment protocols, teachers’ lesson plans and countless other tasks and activities.

Want to be creative? You need to revise, revise and revise some more.

* Most often, the quote attributed to Smith is “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.” But in 1946 another sports writer, Paul Gallico, wrote that “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.” While the meaning is not the same, you have to wonder if Smith wasn’t at least a little inspired by Gallico. Read more about Red Smith on Wikipedia.