Learning from one’s own mistakes

The great Roman orator Horace Flacco used to say:

“a writer had to work 10 hours a day: 2 hours writing and 8 hours re-writing.”

Horace Flacco

I have many other quotations from many other famous writers that suggest the same thing:

“Writing is above all correcting and rewriting”

António Lobo Antunes

“I use the metaphor of sculpture to explain the need to move and remove and destroy parts of the stone to display the form. You really write by subtraction. And my work is not so much writing, but rather erasing. I usually say that anyone can write. It is easy to write. The art is in the erasing and not in the writing. And sometimes I think I erase more than I write.”

Amos Oz

Well, you must be wondering, so what? Allow me to use another quotation to try to explain.

In the book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ by Robert Pirsig, the main character, a writing teacher, debates with his students the difficulty he has in writing.

“Schools teach us to imitate. If we don’t imitate what the teacher wants, we get a low grade. In college the process is more sophisticated; it is necessary to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince him that you are not doing imitation, but rather assimilating the essence of the transmitted knowledge and applying it in the elaboration of individual thoughts. In this way, you get the concept ‘A’. Originality, on the other hand, can guarantee any grade, from A to F. … It is expected that [students] read articles or stories, that they debate how the writer did certain ‘little things’ to get certain ‘little effects’, and then that the students write an article or story similar to it, to see if they can do those same ‘little things’. “

‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ by Robert Pirsig

But it didn’t work.

“Spelling, punctuation, grammar … It is impossible to remember all those trifles and at the same time concentrate on the theme you are trying to write about.”

The teacher then had a moment of epiphany

“The rule [that famous writers use to write] was discovered in the text after the text was ready. It was a post hoc rule. All the writers that the students were encouraged to imitate wrote without the help of ‘rules’, putting on paper what seemed correct to them; afterwards they went back to see if it still seemed good to them, and corrected what did not please them. “

This passage is fundamental not only in the life of a writer, but in the life of anyone! What makes the difference is not only knowing the rule. It is, above all, knowing how to apply the rule.

In the same way, in our lives, we need to know how to apply what we learn, whether it is from a book, a friend, or our own mistakes. We need to be able to recognize when something is not working and be able to correct it. You need to know how to evaluate, ratify and rectify. Fix, improve and evolve. Basically, being creative takes a lot of work!

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that. Sonia Rodrigues defends the same idea when she says that

“nobody writes with the dictionary open on their side. Otherwise, they don’t write”.

Sonia Rodrigues

Take a look at this statement by the American writer David Sedaris, given at the International Literature Fair of Paraty – FLIP, Brazil, in 2008:

“The first draft of a novel is always exciting. But then… it becomes… mathematics. Ah, I just found out that I used the same word, twice in the same sentence… and here it comes… how do I not use that word twice… and not sound like an amateur… and get the rhythm of the sentences… so I have fun in the first one draft, and then I have a miserable life through the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th… and by the 7th… I start having fun again.”

David Sedaris

OK, so the application of the rule, after the fact, is important, because he can apply the rule and apply it and apply it until… until he is satisfied. Until the text meets your quality standard. Which he can only do if he has established a criterion. If he had… create one.

I once asked a group of young authors at FLIP how they knew a text was good: “there’s no criteria, I read and correct, read and correct, read and correct until I think it’s good”. Well, he may not know how to enunciate the criterion, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exists… it does!
And that is mostly what I try to instill in my students: criteria!

Open parentheses: I have already written a text about the importance, even, of waiting a while between writing and rewriting. But it is important that it is written! You can’t mentally evaluate what you want to write, to write it right away. Whoever writes like that… well, doesn’t write. “I can’t assess what’s in your head. I can only evaluate what you put on paper” I tell my students. Not me, not them. Close parentheses.

As students tries more and more to improve a text, they discover the limit that defines the quality and quantity of effort to achieve it. And at that moment, the teacher taught (let their students learn) how to develop criteria!

Okay, but what exactly am I talking about? What will the students write and rewrite? Is it an essay? A paper? The answer of a test? No… it would be practically impossible to force a student (or anyone) to write and re-write several times something that would be useful only for themselves (an answer of anything school related). That is why I believe students should not answer tests but rather PREPARE them!
For the exercise to be cool, you have to choose the words well, you have to study the concepts, etc. If you’re going to ‘answer’ a question, you might as well guess right. But if you have to prepare one… there’s no way to guess. You WILL HAVE to learn!

Posted originally in 2013 in the “Voce que é biólogo…” blog in Portuguese