By Meaghan O’Connell
In the many, many years I spent wanting to be a writer but unable to write anything other than very long emails to men who didn’t care about me, I would read books and essays and wonder how the people who wrote them were so consistently brilliant. How did they make their brains work so that a joke or a cutting insight or a clever turn of phrase occurred to them every other sentence? I imagined their writing process was like mine at 23 and 24 and 25, when I sat down and expelled a single meandering draft, except that theirs was in The Paris Review, and mine was posted to Tumblr at 1 a.m. without reading it over once.
It’s not like I hadn’t heard of the concept of multiple drafts, or editors, but subconsciously I must have been imagining everyone’s writing process to be like mine: typed along with an inner monologue, rapid fire. I didn’t understand yet, in a real way, that these writers were coming to their drafts over and over again, over many months or, more often, years, with new insights, new ideas, new metaphors, and new verbs. That they reread their work in all different moods and times of day, that they squinted at their drafts and painstakingly made them better. I didn’t realize that the insights and clever turns of phrase did not come all at once but accumulated over…
