Draft #1
Ernest Hemingway once said, "The first draft of everything is shit."
When I told my professor that I was stuck on certain chapters, she replied, "Take it slow — the page will wait."
A few years ago, I asked Min Jin Lee how she had worked on her novel for thirty years. "That's all my life," I added. With a warm, knowing smile, she answered, "Because the questions I had posed in my book mattered to me greatly."
—
My editor hasn't responded to my email for days now. Every morning I checked my phone in case the email had arrived, an email which she'd finally explain why she had made such a critical editorial mistake in my recent publication, and state her decision regarding my request for a possible revision in the future. But nothing came in my inbox. No emails or messages — just a bunch of promotional emails from various clothing brands and online bookstores. What should I do? I wondered. What would the wise do in such a situation, I asked myself again and again.
—
I could almost hear a loud thunder striking. The sky outside was calm; it was my therapist who did it. She was massaging the back of my head, which felt like she was splitting my brain in large pieces. I shut my eyes, hoping this moment to be over soon. "What did you do," the therapist asked in amazement, "to have your brain muscle so tense like this?" I couldn't answer: I was still in pain.
In my mind, though, I thought. What did you do, she said. I tried to think about everything that happened to me in the past year: there was my nephew's fancy birthday party, my father's unexpected health issue, and long, lonely hours of me working on my K-drama script. I could still see it: the gold-covered walls of a fine dining restaurant where the baby celebrated his first birthday, my trembling voice as I called for an ambulance, the sleepless nights I had spent on writing, wondering if one day all my effort will pay off in any way.
Amongst many, my most recent subject of agony was this essay publication. It came out in such an unexpected shape that I couldn't face it for a day or two. I had given them two essays; they chose one. But the result was a weird combination of both, connected without a separate title or any smooth transition. I immediately sent them an email, saying there was an error in the writing, and that I wished to cut out half of the writing. No answer. I sent another: this time, I attached the new writing I had originally envisioned to be on their website. Again, there was no answer. I began to contemplate practicing the last resort, the most cruel option a writer can make: asking the publisher to take down my writing entirely.
Could this have caused so much stress that my brain muscle was tightened? Come to think of it, I did have pounding headaches lately. And there was a day when I couldn't do anything: reading, writing, yoga, chatting, sleeping. When I learned that even listening to the audiobook in bed — a trick I had come up with in order to reach my annual 100 reading list — was not possible as well, I knew something was wrong. I mean, at least something was definitely weighing me down.
Early this morning, I made my friend read my essay, the one that gave me headaches. When I asked how it read to him, he said, "It was so raw and honest." I again pushed him by asking follow-up questions: what about the weird transition, the tone of the writing, themes and symbols? Still, his answer was the same: “It surprised me, but I thought you were being very brave.” When I finally confessed my concerns, he said, "Maybe it's a good draft then. How can you be perfect all the time?" I sighed — half in relief and half in distress.
If anything valuable I'm learning with writing a memoir is patience: I'm learning how to be okay with hundreds of pages of my zero drafts. By nature, some of them look out of context, unfinished, and disorganized. Most days I don't mind them, but some days, I feel like giving up on writing or forcing a new table of contents that I know for sure won't make sense when the entire writing comes together in the end. At this point, I just need to continue. 'Til the end. But how? Also, when is the end?
By then my head felt like spinning again. Oh this, I realized in that moment. This sort of thinking was giving me a headache, a tight muscle on the head, shoulder, and back spine. Each week I spared a lot of time to destress my frozen body, my tangled mind. While my brain tells me that the only solution for the matter is to gain a clear-cut answer, an immediate and palpable result, I'm slowly learning to distance myself from the voice. What if, I ask myself in reverse, I don't have to have everything at once? What if a draft is enough for being a draft — filled with occasional typos, mismatched tone and manner, arbitrary structure? What if that is life? Most importantly, what if that's the "natural," and I had been taught too much to be otherwise? What if I can still be messy and be able to finish the journey with great beauty and truth, the two things that I care most about with my writing?
In the afternoon, I discarded a new email I had drafted to my editor the previous night. Instead of giving up, I told myself, I'm adjusting. After all, isn't nature like that all the time — it changes according to temperature and season, but still stays rooted, vulnerable, and wonderful as it can be?
With such words, I returned to my desk and resumed my draft.
