Midnight Oil
What you remember isn’t what you find.
New York 2015
Yesterday I scribbled a few paragraphs that felt fresh and solid and precise. When I took another look this morning, however, the lines didn’t seem quite true. In the dim light of dawn the faults began to surface. What I remembered wasn’t what I found.
This isn’t an unusual experience although it occurs less frequently than before: as the paragraphs have piled up behind me over the years, I have a better sense for recognizing where each one stands when it arrives. Time does help you become more attuned to whether you’re on the right course. Writing is a bit like the operating room in this description, a place where the veteran surgeon labors with focus and precision, typically arriving at the intended destination; when things go awry, it’s obvious during the procedure. Editing is the equivalent of the check-up a few days after surgery—all is typically as one expects, but complications are occasionally discovered.
Painters might have the best sense of how time affects creation. Because light is their main ingredient, there’s an awareness of how the rising or setting sun shapes the canvas. With painters you get both the folly and the utility of lugging a giant canvas around simply to peer at the work from a different angle, and many writers could learn from that example.
An old saying about midnight oil touches on this concept although it has pretty much vanished from the language. For the written page, there were variations of the phrase, all emphasizing overwrought prose, the sentences that were clearly fiddled with throughout the night. You can see the midnight oil; the sentences betray the midnight oil; too much midnight oil in those paragraphs. A lack of distance is the problem. The work has been trimmed and sculpted and beaten beyond any resemblance to what’s desired. Editing itself isn’t the issue; it’s that the editor and the writer are fighting over the page. Electrification ushered in the end of this phrase, though the fault of overripe sentences still remains, with regular examples in any daily newspaper.
Time is the crucial element here, a simple passage of hours between creation and review. But the language used by most writers during review is certainly imprecise—“the lines didn’t seem quite true”—because the original work hasn’t changed a whit, even though that’s the feeling that a writer perceives. Returning to the already written page gives a sense of what’s different, what’s wrong, what doesn’t look quite right, but a more accurate assessment would notice that the words remain the same while the writer has changed. Even if that change has occurred over just a few hours, the writer’s mind—as compared to ink—is what’s malleable. If there’s blame, it’s for the former writer’s strange tastes.
This brings a curious thought about old work: perhaps the most fortunate writers always see a distance between themselves and their old pages. When they skim old notebooks or read through completed chapters, what comes to mind for the fortunate writer is rejection, disapproval, discontent, even dismay. What’s rediscovered doesn’t look good enough; what’s found is almost inexplicable. And my claim is that this distress only occurs to the fortunate writers. Old work, for them, looks like work that they wouldn’t create again. And they’re right, as they couldn’t recreate the same work— even if they tried—because the fortunate writer is always growing.
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