Rough drafts prior to editing.
There is a bed, unmade, and some dirty clothes and Magic card boxes scattered about the floor, but not too many of either. For the most part, the room is organized with plenty of books. They are arranged by subject matter, from philosophy to religion to the art of languages, including a row of various Bible translations. Also present are several spiral-bound and composition notebooks and small writing pads.
Notes before drafting even begins.
It's clear we have a writer here, one who apparently cares deeply about the act of writing. Yet many have not heard from him on his usual platform. The same is true of his Magic playing habits, but that is for the second part of this trilogy on drafting.
Today, we examine the importance of drafting when it comes to writing, the crisis that this presents in our current climate where most writing takes place, and lead in to how this relates to those Magic cards lying on the floor when our heroes primary collection was, until recently, only accessible as digital object behind the computer screen instead of readily available in his bedroom.
But first, let me get my pronouns consistent and clean up some run-on sentences! Our hero is me. And my sentences are still far too long. If I do not shorten them via editing by referencing my nearby copy of Strunk & White's Elements of Style, our hero (damn, I did it again!) may never reach the end of this epic, three-part trilogy (damn...redundancy!).
Kindly allow me a moment to go from the first Revised version to the corrected current edition...
Ah, that's better! And it illustrates my point perfectly. When it comes to writing, the most important step is drafting. This is the key to the steps of writing. Let's review how we get from the beginning to the all-important middle long before we reach the end-goal:
First, you obtain a spark where you come to know or want to know something. This is not unlike when a Planeswalker experiences her transformative spark!
Next, you go about taking notes on the subject, obtaining knowledge about it, especially if you think you already know everything about it! Because you never do. You are not a know-it-all. Nobody knows everything. Never has, never will. Keep this point in mind before, during, and after drafting.
Once your notes are taken, it's time to organize the mess you made. Do this aftersleeping on it a day or so as marathon writing sessions are not adviseable. Neither are binge watching or drinking sessions for that matter. You'll get out your notebooks and begin to connect the ideas, flesh them out, and create lists as a plan of action for putting it all together.
This is quite similar to constructing a Pauper deck you intend to be competitive with instead of just casually throwing something together for fun - but I'll tackle that in pack two after a break. And it's best to take some breaks from this step as well.
In fact, when doing any sort of work, one really should be allowed a temporal break so the body and mind can recover. The fact that the capitalist social conditions of wage-slavery don't adequately allow for this is a different topic for a different day...
And now you are finally prepared to create your first rough draft. These I consider to be the most important pieces of writing one can put to paper. Or input into a word processing program, as it were. Only once these are finished can you get some idea as to how well your ideas are fitting together. Then, and only then, can you decide whether the piece is good enough to refine via editing and perfect through a grammar check.
Only after taking these steps of drafting and revising will the final composition be ready for publication. For sleeving up and shuffling for your readers to cut before drawing and opening hand, if you will.
Or, if you've come up with absolute drivel again (this happens constantly if you write like you mean it) then you'll know that the draft is irredeemable. You return to the beginning of the process working backwards from the outlines, lists, notes, and even your initial idea. You'd best take a break here, too, because having your draft fail is pretty rough. Hence the name: rough draft. Don't let that frazzle you.
Here is the where we reach the conflict in my story. It is not the struggle with myself to compose better pieces of writing. No. In this story, I'd like to be the hero and make things all about me. Yet where most writing takes place these days - here on the Internet - the judgment of villain is the one most frequently cast upon me.
I disagree! I maintain that the problem with writing on the Internet is this: the vast majority of people who use it to post their thoughts on social media and other blogs just plain do not know how to write. They fail to follow these steps. Most of the time, one can tell that all they did was draft and immediately publish. To say nothing of any initial thought, research, or organization as the required first steps to proper composition, most people on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and through e-mail and text messages clearly just type away as quickly as possible, click "send" or "post" or "tweet" with nary a second though, and then move on to the the next fleeting distraction.
This is has made it crystal clear that most people, including grown adults who should know better, have very little writings skills, if at all. And having gotten high marks in schools for my English speaking and writing skills, and recieved consistent praise in person for my communication skills, I reject their poorly-written replies to my accusations that their writing is incomprehensibly bad.
It's one of the main reasons I've removed myself from Facebook, as you may recall from a previous post. One of the reasons I've done this is because I just cannot take it any longer, it being the reading through a daily (hourly) glut of ridiculously atrocious writing posted by 99% of people - and how woefully wrong their points are because of how little thought they've put into their rough drafts which, of course, were never drafted in the first place!
To me, this is infuriating , saddening, debilitating, and yet inspirational all at once. So if you'll forgive my regressomg into a rant of sorts...
Honestly, folks! The following is not an example of a damned sentence:
"They shud just all go bak 2 there cuntry!1!!!"
Not only is it far from being well written, the idea being expressed is disgustingly, hopelessly, and wickedly - sinfully! - wrong to begin with. It's ignorance! It's racism! As socially deplorable as it is grammatically incorrect!
I see this kind of thing over and over again when it comes to people who refer to non-whites with racial epithets; to men who think women are a lesser sex and refer to them all as "sluts"; who think those without jobs are simply "lazy", who express that those who struggle to survive mental illness are just "crazy" and should be quarantined to a deserted island.
In my vast exploration of the Internet, I have come to a conclusion that I stand upon like a house founded upon rock: most of the worst examples of horrible grammar express the most horrifying ideas imaginable.
Now I've been doing this America Online tied up my parents phone line. But even though I can continue to write, I remain firm in my decision to halt my practice of regular posting in response to this nonsense and bigotry on social media.
Why?
The answer lies in more than just my approach to writing. The main reason is the content I write about and the context in which I present it. My philosophical and political attitudes are exactly the opposite and vehemently opposed to the average American citizen. These are the crypto-fascist, pro-capitalist, frankly Cro-Magnon to Neaderthalic types of writing that are merely rough drafts of a brutal ideology called neoliberal capitalism. I provided an example of the same regarding immigrant workers as and introduction to my desperate ravings...
I am no liberal capitalist. I am a Leftist with a capital L (liberals are not even leftists with an uncapitalized letter, but try explaining that essential element of political philosophy to these linguistically deficient ingrates). I disdain to conceal the fact that I am a socialist in the Marxists tradition.
My social media and blog posts - as well as those of my comrades on the Left - are good pieces of writing. They are well-presented arguments, thoughtful points regarding the conflict between capitalism and communism. Above all, they are grammatically correct with far more consistency the than elementary liberal bullshit - conservative and progressive - currently clogging up the plumbing of the World Wide Web.
In fact, one of the main reasons I settled upon this side of the political spectrum was the writing. It was the Leftists who were adhereing to the rules of the King's English and the liberals who continuously bastardized the languages' core principles of grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation.
What a relief it was to see a complete sentence! What a joy to see commas separating the clauses therein! How happy to find puns and other ingenious, ironic literary devices hidden among these compositions aimed at the idiot right-winger in a way that only we true Leftists could fully understand to further enhance our enjoyment of political and philosophical debate!
After exploring philosophy and familiarizing myself with Marxist, socialist, communist, and anarchist ideas and seeing clearly how their present-day adherents were the ones who knew how to write in contrast to the incoherent, incorrect ramblings of liberals - both progressive and conservative! - I had no choice but to solidfy which side I was meant to be on. And I started to draft and revise pieces of writing to post online about it. Day in and day out.
But...the problem with this is connected to what I spoke of in the first couple of blogs I published here upon my return to Cabel the Pauper. It is another piece of me that, while I am good at writing lengthly arguments against the wicked Right-Wing reactionaries in favor of the right wing (the Left!), I ended up doing it too much. Way too damned much. And because I insist that my writing be perfected after drafting first, this resulted in far too much time wasted. I finally realized where this daily excursion into argumentation was getting me.
That's right. Nowhere.
So while I remain proud of my writing skills and as confident as ever in the superiority of my Leftist positions, there is another saying that is not a double entendre the way my "To Draft or Not to Draft" title is meant to be:
"Pride comes before the fall."
Indeed, I'd fallen deep into a Facebook hole of excellent Leftists arguments against the deep-seated racism, sexism, classism, etc., inherent these neoliberal, ungrammatical United States.
All my perfect paragraphs were ever met with were misspelled non-sentences taking me completely out of context. And viciously declaring me such things as "faggot" and "asshole," with instructions to "go fuck yourself," or "move to Cuba!" Because apparently the average American liberal's reading comprehension is as good as their ability to compose a complete sentence: tragically terrible.
What's worse: they were insulting and incredibly mean. It reached the point where it affected me emotionally to the point of depression so deep I found myself asking, as Hamlet did, whether I should continue to be or not to be...
So when I ask the question "To draft or not to draft?" on the topic of writing on social media, the answer is a like a Resounding Roar: Yes.
But after hard casting my diatribes one too many times and not being able to get full value out of this play, I concluded it was time to break the cycle and stick to blogging mostly about Magic: The Gathering Rarity-Restricted Casual/Competitive formats and the 5M's of Cabel the Pauper only once in awhile. And to do it here on Blogspot as opposed to social media where doing little more beating a dead horse. Literally and literarily, like that misogynist, bigoted, syphilis-ridden windbag Nietzsche.
As such, from now on, you'll find some political and philosophical posts here once or twice a month to provide a little bit more than just Magic: The Gathering. These posts will remain uncommon or rare because I'll be spending a good deal of time writing them properly: by drafting them first. Because when it comes to writing, the answer to the question "To Draft Or Not To Draft" must be....
DRAFT!
Thanks for reading. Part two of this mini-series will appear in hopefully a weeks' time, depending on how drafting it goes. And this time we'll switch topics to drafting Magic: the Gathering and why the answer to that question is...well first, I've got to draft it!
Until then, thank you for reading what I worked long and hard one once again. And good luck & have fun in all your endeavors, Magical and literal. Peace,
- C
No comments:
Post a Comment