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IDEAS ARE THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT PART OF CREATIVE SUCCESS


Twitter has informed me that the Man Booker Prize long list was released yesterday, which reminds me of an interview I read with last year’s winner Richard Flanagan. In it the Tasmanian author said he’d destroyed five complete drafts of his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North before finally submitting to his publisher. All copies were completely expunged too, using the hard copies to light his barbecue.

I love that story. Any of Flanagan’s drafts would probably be acceptable to his publisher and most likely the public, but not Flanagan himself. Just one more pass... That interview was in stark contrast to the ‘lightning bolt from God’ stories I used to gorge myself on in my twenties: Kerouac’s scroll, Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver script, and the Dostoyevsky’s brilliant short novel The Gambler, knocked off in a flash so the author could go and settle a gambling debt.

Flanagan’s tale is about editing, and Dostoyevsky’s is about inspiration, which seem to me basically the two most important aspects of any creative process. To create something, you have to have ideas; hopefully many and varied, decently formed but also malleable, but you also must be able to recognise the ideas that have worked and those that haven’t, and also be able to understand which failed ideas can be salvaged, and which should be terminated with extreme prejudice.

The luckiest creative will have equal talent and verve for both, frothing and bubbling like an overflowing pot in the morning, and then coolly and analytically throwing away everything that wasn’t David in the afternoon. That’s rarely anyone’s fate though, and I’ve decided if I could choose to be supremely talent at one, I would choose editing.

While ideas are the engine of any creative vehicle, editing is literally everything else. Whatever you want to use your vehicle for you will need ideas, but even if your idea is a 747 jet engine, it’s going to be of limited use strapped to a billy cart. If you only have some ideas, but know how to harness and mold them then you’ll finish projects, stay employed and live a sane life. Be a torrent of ideas with no way of regulating, amending or marketing them then and you’re an agitated web-commenter who works at a video store (and those jobs are hard to find these days).

And the best part about editing is that you can get better at it, which is not necessarily true of pure creation. Your talent for editing will not only improve each time you edit, but also every time you see a film, watch a play, or read a book, and your improvement will double if you have a beer with friends afterwards and discuss the choices the creators have made. Editing is truly a skill that can be applied to Gladwellian concept of 10,000 hours till excellence.

Or maybe I’m just telling myself all of that.

Last month a rather long novel I wrote went to ‘acquisition,’ the final step a publisher will make before an offer is made to the author. After that meeting I didn’t get the happy phone call I was expecting, but instead I got sheaves of notes. The options available to me now are either to take the book to another publisher, or embrace a rather large editing job. I think I’ve chosen the latter. It will be a long, painful process, but if what’s written above is true, I should be a better off at the end of it all.


Vonnegut of the Month

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'."

Timequake

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