How Much Effort Is Too Much Effort?

The other day, we read a review of a book about brilliance. The author and title elude us, but the gist of the book was that "talent" is not some innate god-given gift but rather a process. Essentially, this author claims, any of us could compose like Mozart or hit a baseball like Ted Williams as long as we put our minds to it and commit to practice practice practice until reaching the desired level. We must not only accept failure but welcome it, for only through failure will we discover what it takes to achieve success.

OK. We'll accept that to an extent. We doubt everyone has an inner Mozart squawling to get out, but we believe that, with effort, people can achieve some qualified success and improve whatever skill or talent they set their minds to mastering. What struck us about the review and inspired today's post was the author's attempt to encourage his readers by pointing out that he, himself, revises sentences 20 to 30 times before deeming them satisfactory.

20 to 30 times? How many different ways are there to say "I revise my sentences 20 to 30 times until I find them satisfactory"?

It put us in mind of Camus' The Plague. A character, Joseph Grand, aspires to write a great novel, but, because he spends so much time wordsmithing and tweaking, he can never get past the opening line. Is it worth the effort?

Robert Klein used to do a bit about speed-readers: He lamented their implied disdain for the author. They just zoom along a page, whereas the poor writer agonized over every "a" and "the": "The 'a' is grammatically correct, but the 'the' just has a certain je ne sais quoi!" We assure our readers that we almost never put that much thought into the definite vs. indefinite article. Or anything else, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of monkeys.

It's statements like the above--the one about revising sentences 20 to 30 times--that make us think we must be doing something either phenomenally right or appallingly wrong. Sure, we revise: We go through every blog post looking for typos, grammatical slip-ups, and the occasional racial slur (inadvertent, we swear!). We run through some mechanical exercises and rituals (minimizing use of "to be"; replacing bland, vague, or unnecessary pronouns with more interesting verbiage; smoking a single cigarette before a psychotic groupie-nurse comes along and shatters our ankles). But that about does it. Are we being lazy? Could we scale Olympian heights of writerly craftsmanship if we devoted more time to tweaking and revising?

How many times did Gabriel Garcia Marquez revise the opening line of One-Hundred Years of Solitude:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

And how many times did Gregory Rabassa have to revise that translation?

(The last line's none too shabby, either:

"Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.")

Did Robert Penn Warren go through 20 or 30 drafts before coming up with this closing for All the King's Men?

"But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

How many times would we have to rework a sentence to come up with something even close to this, possibly the most beautiful closing line in all of English literature:

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

See, if we knew James Joyce wrestled with that sentence for a week and a half, we'd have a better sense of how much effort is too much effort. Without that information, though, we're just left to wonder whether we've done the best we could or if we've just opted for a relatively easy way out.