The NY Times has a double-pronged review of two books about being wrong — “Being Wrong,” by Kathryn Schulz, and “Wrong,” by David H. Freedman. Dwight Garners writes of Schulze, whom he says wrote the more interesting book:
She argues in “Being Wrong” that, of all the things we’re wrong about, our ideas about error are probably our “meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong.” She continues, “Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition."
I liked the concept of a meta-mistake. It's a problem with the definition itself, and it certainly applies to writing. When writers don't understand process, they treat an early draft that didn't work as a failure, rather than as a stepping-stone.
And it always frustrates me to read about "writer's block," as though we are machines that should be able to churn out immaculate prose at a flick of a switch. The capacity to err — to write the wrong thing, or not to be able to write — certainly helps us to write better in the future.
I'm an expert in wrongness. Yep, got that part down. And I suspect that many of the famous authors who spend a decade writing a novel — from the infamous (Salinger, Catcher in the Rye) to the more recent (Englander, Diaz) are also experts in wrongness. It's more than possible to celebrate a bad draft; it's necessary.
2 comments
So true. The first draft isn’t exactly what Hemingway said about it, but I admit I don’t award myself much freedom to think of it as purposeful wrongness. A crooked thing can be made straight, yes? A thing that doesn’t exist at all – well, who really cares about that?
Nice post.
Yes, at least if it’s down on paper you can think about it. Nice crooked/straight analogy.