I find many parallels between the various arts. One that I often think about as I write is its similarity to sculpting clay— I did a little bit of live figure sculpting in grad school (UW-Madison MFA ‘96).

Sometimes you have to make a radical change in a piece of art as you work. In the case of a drawing, that’s easy— you just make new marks, while optionally erasing the old. But for some reason, when I was working on my first sculpture, I found myself unable to make big enough changes. Modeling clay is a (literally) very flexible medium, but somehow nothing I did seemed to be enough. For the life of me I could not figure out why not— I had a perfectly well-formed idea of what I was trying to do. What was preventing me?

Then my amazing professor strolled by and pointed out that I was never going to make any real changes in my sculpture if I just kept pushing around the same chunk of clay.

OMG, I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me. I felt like it was some unwritten law that the amount of clay on the board = that’s what you gave yourself to work with, and it was cheating to cut off a chunk or add more.

Of course, once I realized how stupid I was being, it was easy to rework the sculpture.

So in writing— same thing. Never feel that just because you put something down in words, now you have to keep rewriting those same words. You are NOT required to! It’s true that “Writing is rewriting”. But part of rewriting can be scrapping text that isn’t working— or adding more, just to give yourself something to grab onto, even while knowing full well that most of it will eventually get cut.

In fact, now I think of the first draft as “putting the clay on the board”.