It’s a truth universally acknowledged that first drafts are too long. Even in conversation, working through an idea for the first time usually requires a meandering recipe of spontaneous seasoning and invented methodology–you respond to your listener, divert into interesting tangents, and hem and haw until you risk losing their interest entirely. In the process of working from this haphazard assembly toward a winning piece, most writers have trouble stepping back from the mess to clearly evaluate what’s worth keeping.
To envision a final stew, you have to be able to imagine how the individual ingredients might come together to create something more than the basic sum of their parts. If we think of the mess-en-place stage as an initial trimming of the fat or inedible components, then the straining is what comes next: we’ve partially completed the marination and cooking stages, but what we have is a lot of kinda tasty water rather than a rich stew boiled down to its most satisfying essence. Magic is in the making but isn’t quite here yet.
If we get too attached to any single tomato, the final product isn’t going to create the kind of experience we hope for our customers.
Ok, that’s the easy part; it makes sense, right? That we don’t want to just hand our first or maybe even our second attempt to a reader without first doing our best to make sure it communicates our vision clearly? Just like we wouldn’t dish out a bowl of stew that simmered for all of ten minutes. The hard part, of course, is how to do that.
In an ideal world, this would be the outcome of all those mandatory composition and English classes through our school careers–we’d all just know, from practice and guidance, how to move from a mess to a masterpiece. But this is reality and most of us don’t come away from public or even private school with a clear methodology that applies to all our various needs to write. (I mean, there may not really be such a thing, but that’s a separate series.)
Ultimately–and this is the bad news–it takes teamwork. It is nearly impossible for any of us to get far enough out of our own internal mono/dialogues to truly understand how our writing might read to someone else. The best way to find out is to ask someone to come in fresh and taste a spoonful. The good news is, those readers are all around us. You can incentivize feedback from regular customers, you can use your team as a test audience, or you can hire outside help (đź‘‹) to give you some advice. It can feel awfully lonely while you’re stuck in the kitchen, but usually it’s teams that produce the most enticing results.
Something Polished 