On Editing

There comes a time in the life of every endeavor where it seems complete. I used to enjoy that aspect of life—the finishedness of a good essay—a thought laid on paper with some clarity that felt good.

I don’t feel that way now; I’d rather be right than finished. Furthermore, I’ve never ‘finished’ an endeavor—say, a short essay, a poem, or painting a wall—and not come back at some later point to notice that there’s a section off.

What does that mean here? Nothing you see on this site will ever be finished. It will, to the best of my often meager abilities, be right. Perhaps not in the platonic sense, but in the ‘this is as good as it can be at this moment’ sense. If I reread something that I wrote with great conviction and find it lacking, I’ll probably rewrite it or rebut it.

This approach lacks a certain regard for historicity… to which I say, what tiny fraction of our productive capacity as humans is worth remembering? How many Renaissance paintings were found to be overpaintings of a previous work?

I would rather amble towards the things unseen than preserve my ill-thought-out history.

N.B - This section doesn’t quite fit, as you can imagine I’ll need to coalesce my thoughts on all this.

If we want to regain historicity, either for ourselves or out of some sense of posterity, the ‘writing with source control’ approach gives back anything we’ve lost. Gitkraken has an excellent (albeit biased to their product) explanatory page on the practice of writing text using a source control system such as git. Matthew McCullough has a nice GitHub Gist of resources if you want to tread along this path.