Blood and Wine

Write, then write again.

I like to write. Whether it's blogging or commenting on blogs or just a journal entry. I like writing.

Now, I don't know if it's any good. People say it's good but then again it's never easy to tell which compliments are born of courtesy and which of honest, sincere admiration. So I won't say it's good. Judge for yourself and tell me how to improve, that's what I want. But I digress.

Whatever good is in my writing comes from the rewrite. You have no idea how many rewrites I can do before I'm satisfied enough to let it see the sunlight of public scrutiny.

Before the rewrite, my work is always horrible. Simply horrible, filthy trash. Nothing but unorganized grab-astic pieces of amphibian crap, as a certain Gunnery Sergeant Hartman would say (hint: the movie Full Metal Jacket). The sentences sound awkward, I repeat myself everywhere, the narrative flows like a constipated elephant...

Horrible.

I always rewrite. I need to rewrite. The rewrite has become such an indispensable step for me that showing any piece of my writing that's still raw, still unrevised and unchanged from the too-hot-to-touch thoughts I'd hurriedly slapped onto paper in the middle of a writing frenzy, makes me feel naked. It's incredibly uncomfortable, me revealing my first drafts. I always destroy them after the first rewrite.

It's true. The moment the rewrite is done, the first draft is gone. Torn into shreds and tossed into the trash. Deleted and saved over with a cleaner version. I hate the thought of someone reading my first drafts because that first draft is all me in there. No masks. No games with the reader. No foundation or blush or eye shadow. Just me.

We're all terrified of people discovering who we really are. We say we want people to know, but that's not really true. Because deep down inside we're all insecure little animals who want to be told how great we are and how much we'll accomplish when we're all plainly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. We worry that we are useless and horrible, that we haven't reached some minimum standard of quality.

Maybe that's also why we hide our diaries and journals so. It's not just our secrets and true thoughts that have been put on paper. It's also our souls, the truths that define who we are and how we behave, the fears we hide under the lock of something we proudly call a "personality."

That's why the rewrite is so damned important. It's when you cover up your flaws with as much of your "personality" as possible and pray, really pray, no one discovers the truth about you, that you are just an untalented, horrible writer and person.

So we work on the presentation above all else. A good writer can write a thousand words about nothing and you won't want to stop reading. Heck, there's even a book by that name if I'm not mistaken. But a bad writer can turn the most gripping material into sleeping pills.

In the same spirit, you'll sometimes find posts in this blog suddenly change, rewritten so completely it resembles nothing like its previous incarnation except perhaps for the theme. Expect that. I don't like things to be static. I like change. I like "personality." Stroll around a bit. You might one day find one of the ugly cocoons you thought so ugly finally repainted into the butterfly it deserves to be.
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