There’s a copy of The Lord of The Rings trilogy in our living room. All three books in one. It’s a big book. Over five hundred thousand words…I looked it up.
I like to imagine that because there were so many words and so much writing (and so much less bureaucracy back then) that there are large passages of the book that are completely unedited…he thought of it, wrote it down and that’s exactly how we read it today. He’s alone at his desk scribbling away on a section and never touched it again until putting it into the now legendary final manuscript. I love that thought.
These days organizing and editing are so much easier and cheaper. Wonderful tools.
AND we’re taught that the first draft couldn’t possibly be the final draft. How could we be that good? We don’t believe we could be. And we use editing as a crutch when deep down we already know whether it’s good enough.
The biggest trick in the conversation of editing is to put in the work and raise the bar from the outset. That’s why Tolkien could write pages of a classic without ever going back and editing them…he’d already done the work and raised the bar. He knew his instincts were sharp. He knew how to identify quality and effectiveness at the moment of creation.
