One try, one draft—no, that never works in writing. It is one of the great mysteries of our already mysterious enough human mind why putting words to the ideas we have is so often so difficult. We try to get past that obstacle with the get-it-done-with-one method, but the first and final draft that method produces never seems to be worth the effort.
One explanation for all that unproductive work is that we’re trying to do too much at once. There seem to be vast tracks of land behind our eyes as well as in front of them. We’re watching, waiting for an animal thought to cross our path, but most of the time thoughts travel in packs. And how do we catch a klatch of roaming thoughts? We usually think a compound sentence will trip them up, or even better, a complex sentence will dig a ditch deep enough for all of them to fall at once. But even if we snare them, we’ve got another problem on our hands: a throng of unruly ideas, one nipping at the next.
What to do? Thin out the herd before setting the trap. Here’s what that looks like. You’re on vacation, you’ve rented a small cottage on an island off the coast, and one lazy afternoon you decide to write a paragraph describing the landscape around you. You throw the net and happen to catch this:
I would like to describe the charming view off my porch here at my cabin in the woods where I am for a short vacation this summer, after I did not take a vacation in a long time. There is a very tall pine tree to the east of my cabin and it is so close to the cabin that its branches touch the roof. Some birds are in the tree every morning and sometimes when I am watching them I can see the ocean through the branches when there is no fog, although there is fog almost every morning here.
And so you go. That net is three sentences wide by eleven clauses high, ample enough to tow in more thoughts than a reader can digest at one sitting. To cull that haul, let’s begin by counting the clauses of the first sentence, this on the principle that each clause (a group of words with a subject and a predicate) speaks a thought we wish to communicate. That’s its logical purpose, but this same technique will also give us a chance to decide whether a particular clause-thought is worth stating at all. And by any good measure, the first thought of the first sentence here is not worth the saying: I would like to describe amounts to saying you are going to say something; it’s warming up, not playing the game, and that’s reason enough to delete the clause. But the view was charming, you might object. Well, then, begin with that: The view off my porch here at my cabin in the woods was charming.
But that same first sentence has two more clauses whose ideas are not relevant to the purpose of the piece—that you are on a short vacation and that you haven’t taken a vacation in a long time—neither of which ideas will affect the view you wish to describe (unless by some chance you are intending to write a psychological study on the relation between fatigue and the perception of beauty). So let’s reduce this first complex sentence to a simple one (The view off my porch here at my cabin in the woods was charming) and then go on to count the clauses of the second sentence. There we find another complex sentence with yet another three clauses. This technique of isolating the clauses within a sentence also gives us the chance to look closely at the grammatical construction we chose in our first drafting, and here we see that two of the three clauses employ the verb is—a weak choice when we’re describing a landscape, because the verb to be depicts stability, not movement. But for all that it appears otherwise, the natural world is never standing still, and strong sentences face what’s happening: so not, there is a very tall pine tree to the east of my cabin, but a very tall pine stands on the east side of my cabin; or better, a pine tree towers over the east side of my cabin. And note in that last version, the adverb very has no longer become necessary, because anything that is not very tall would not tower. It’s a good rule of thumb to guard against overusing such adverbs of degree. They make exaggeration easy, and amplification to the point of overstatement always reads as fishily uncritical. If we then abridge the second clause, we can trim this second sentence into a sharper picture: A pine tree towers over the east side of my cabin, so close that its branches touch the roof.
The third sentence is yet again complex, this time with no thinner a herd than five clauses. This gives us an opportunity to see how combining them can restrict the scope and tighten the grip of a long sentence. The first clause speaks of birds and the second of watching them, so why not find a stronger verb for the first verb and then combine the two: I watch the birds perch in the tree every morning. Then add the fifth clause to establish the physical condition: and if the fog has lifted; and then what happens as a result: I can see the ocean through the branches. This effectively deletes the need for the fifth clause, but we could attach the closing idea it contains into our new third clause, producing this final version: I watch the birds perch in the tree every morning, and if the fog, which is there every morning, has finally lifted, I can see the ocean through the green branches. We add the adverb finally to extend the clause by three syllables and avoid the abruptly clipped has lifted.
With all this, the observation to be made is that one draft is never the final draft. Human perception is too fine and human language too rough to ever get the two to match without a close inspection of our first try. And that is all to the good, because it compels us to look more closely at what we think we see, outside at the world and inside our mind. The craft of language will help us adjust our vision, and as we do, we might just find all manner of hidden subtleties that escaped our notice at first.
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