Writing blind: Rough drafts, glasses, and a pair of lazy eyes

I have two lazy eyes.

Thirty years ago, after years of unuttered annoyances and resentments, the muscles behind my eyes fought a feud. Aggravation turned to hurtful words. Rage. Insults. A broken lamp. Rude things said about the other’s mother. Shards of glass sprayed everywhere.

It wasn’t pretty.

The two of them have refused to work together ever since. While one eye and my brain focus on an object in front of them, my other eye peers down the street, checks out the neighbor’s gladiolas, goes off to make a sandwich, just generally fucks off.

On its own, neither is an especially bad seed. Were you to put on my glasses, you might be surprised to discover that the prescription of each lens is pathetically weak. Without prescriptive glass, my left eye can see, for example, that that object across the room is a doorknob: a gold cylinder with a concave end that reflects the contents of the room upside-down; fingerprints, smudges, a keyhole, a reflection of light. Unaided, my right eye sees a mistier version of the same image shifted a few inches to the right. Each eye sees the world almost as it is.

But the two little bastards just refuse to play well with each other. Focused together, my eyes do not see the doorknob across the room: they see art. A swatch of gold, a splotch of bronze, a swipe of coppery blue with two points of light like pulsing flowers. There is no capsized world reflection, no use for a key. Covered by prescriptive lenses, these two eyes together see a cleaner murkiness, a less abstract abstract. 20 + 20 does not equal 20/20. When both my eyes are focused, my world is out of focus. The one saving grace is that their mutual disdain for each other makes both my eyes too stubborn to loll out to the side simultaneously.

I am discovering, however, that this defect in coordination may have one strange advantage.

Yesterday I cranked out 6500 words of the rough draft of the book that I’m writing. For some, such a sum is laughable, but for me, it’s a monumental achievement: I am rarely able to plow through for so long without my inner editor throwing herself onto her sword in the name of rewriting, rethinking, doubt, suppression, and self-censorship.

So what changed?

I took off my glasses.

I’m a better editor than I am writer. In order to get to where I’m going, I need to write at least 50% more words than the finished product will ever need. Overwriting helps me process, think, and get to the stage where I can begin to rewrite. I can chip away at the stone, but first I need to build a really big stone.

But it’s difficult to pound through a complete, and recognizably lousy, rough draft when you’re wasting all your energy trying not to kill your stony infant in its bed. My left and right brains work together about as well as my left and right eyes. The writer just wants to get the thoughts out there; the editor wants to make them good.

But yesterday I discovered that when I take my glasses off and force my eyes to work together, my inner editor is crippled: she simply cannot see what damage on the page there is to repair. Without my glasses, I can fix both eyes on the monitor and focus on being unfocused: I see lines of black, of white, of blue, blocks of green, but all detail—each individual letter, word, sentence—is a mystery. The strain required to keep my eyes together, painful though it can be, distracts me from overthinking, and the monitor, unlike the plants or world outside, is cold and unstimulating: soon I begin to see through it. I don’t stop; I don’t sputter; I just type. Words gets released into the world and forgotten. I cannot look back: I have no choice but to press forward.

I could close my eyes to achieve a similar effect, but I find the twitching of my eyelids distracting. I also don’t need to remove my glasses to focus my eyes together: doing so just reminds me not to worry about seeing. Removing my glasses seems to be the trick that works best for me.

No doubt, my character would be better served through fortitude and resolve and the exercise of discipline required to tame and stifle my inner editor rather than relying on cheap physical tricks; but truth be told, I’m quite happy to trick, cheat, hack, ruse, and delude myself in whatever ways necessary to get through this first, massive rough-draft stage.

I know that more than 3000 of those words written yesterday are destined to be hacked off and pitched; I recognized at least 2000 of them as they were being punched into the keyboard. They’re all crap! But crap I can work with. The only way to get to the end is to get through the beginning and middle, no matter how ugly and mishapen they may prove to be. Blind progress is still progress. Over the long haul, that malformed rock of 6500 words is more useful in constructing a boulder than a perfect, polished pebble would be.

Tagged as: blindness, first drafts, glasses, inner editor, lazy eyes