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Platonic Idealism
“The first draft of anything is shit,”
and
“All writing is rewriting.”
—Ernest Hemingway
Writing is creation, while editing is curation.
But what exactly does that mean, to “curate”?
The word “curate” shares its roots with the Medieval Latin noun curatus: “the one responsible for the care of souls,” and Old French curacion: “the treatment of illness.” Thus, to curate a written work is akin to caring for its soul and treating its perceived illnesses.
A written work’s conflicting soul and illnesses arise from a discrepancy between what we can possibly imagine and what we’re able to construct in reality. Plato describes this phenomenon in his Theory of Ideas (also known as his Theory of Forms, Platonic idealism, and Platonic realism) as the result of two disparate realms: the day-to-day reality we experience that I’ll call the Physical World, and a higher theoretical plane that is of the timeless, absolute, unchangeable essence of all things, known as the Ideal World. The written work’s soul is its flawless essence that exists only in the Ideal World, and the written work’s illnesses are an inherent (though mitigable) result of its existence in our Physical World, which is a sort of sea of dynamic energy, matter, and time that doesn’t conform well to pure Ideas.
For example, you can easily imagine a perfect circle, or a perfect triangle, because our minds understand the conceptual essence of these shapes. However, a truly perfect circle or triangle has never been brought forth in the material world because of our reality’s limitations. All of our circles and triangles are merely approximate replications of the perfect circle and triangle because our versions are of imprecise energy and|or matter subject to time’s entropy. Another example is beauty, which is an essence that cannot be held in our hands but can be recognized as an essence or aspect of other things. Beauty, therefore, is a perfect, imaginary Idea which physical things seem to possess or lack. Lastly, think of a dog. Any dog you know in the real world is, in some manner, distinct from every other dog in the world. And yet, all dogs share some fundamental “dogness,” whether the dog is an Armant, a Bully, a Chihuahua, or a Zerdava. Do you consider coyotes and wolves, in essence, to be dogs too?
There exists in the Ideal World an Idea of what our written work would be if it were perfect, according to our individual wishes (which also change as we do). And then there exists the written work in reality, with its flaws we wish to fix. Editing and curation are important because they are the means by which we take our imperfect work and make it less flawed, to make it just a little more like the perfect, Ideal version that only exists within our conscious mind.
…
Quality vs Quantity
“It is quality rather than quantity that matters.”
—Seneca
“Excellence comes when we balance quality with quantity.”
—Amit Ray
Imagine that your written work is not a collection of words and phrases on pages. Instead, think of it as a personal museum of rocks and minerals you collected by hand. Which of the two following museums would you prefer?
On your first attempt, you decide to hoard every rock and mineral that you ever encounter to build the world’s most comprehensive collection. After many years of collecting, you succeed according to that metric, and your museum thus contains seemingly infinite sorts and pieces of rocks and minerals. It contains adakite, agpaitic rock, andesite, alkali feldspar granite, ankaramite, anorthosite, aplite, argillite, arkose, anthracite, amphibolite, adamellite, appinite, aphanite… Well, I won’t bore you with an entire list, but if you can imagine a rock or mineral, you’ve got it somewhere there in your museum in equal amounts to its natural abundance. Accordingly, if you took all of your rocks and minerals and put them into one large pile, you’d have a monotonous mountain of gray, black, and tan gravel with very rare exceptions hidden throughout it. In other words, a handy resource for a construction site.
Now imagine that all the rocks and minerals are returned to the earth so that you can begin again, and that this time, you decide to carefully curate (or edit) what to keep, what to leave. After many years of re-collecting, you have a much smaller museum inventory, but each piece is unique and more meaningful to you.
Displayed atop a row of authentic Ancient Roman marble pillars holding clean, protective glass cases with velvet cushion bottoms are…
A small but brilliant diamond, clasped by your grandmother’s wedding ring.
A handful of pristine birthstones sitting together, one for each of your family members.
A gold coin that originated from a friend’s Olympic medal.
A neat tray featuring all of the mineral sources of periodic table elements.
A lightning-formed fulgurite, like a thunderbolt’s shadow you can wield with both hands.
A skipping stone saved from the waterfall where you proposed, or were proposed to…
Such pieces go on and on—though you have only a few dozen rather than the messy heap of the indistinguishable thousands that were your first museum attempt.
This second, smaller collection seems a fine mineral menagerie worthy of bodyguards, public appreciation, and maybe even admission fees—even though it objectively contains so many fewer pieces.
When you write and edit a written work, you’re choosing between these two extremes, to some degree, with your collecting of words and phrases instead of minerals and rocks. Your duty as an editor is to simply weigh each word, each sentence, each aspect of the work like you would a rock or mineral in hand, and to ask yourself: “How much do I dislike, like, or love this? Is this worth carrying, or worth its space and attention among the rest? Will this strengthen my collection, or will this just dilute it? Will this become a distraction, a focal point, or a complement to another piece? And will this require polishing before presentation?”
Since writing and editing are subjective, the answers to these key questions will come to you more effortlessly with practice, as you continue to define and refine your tastes and standards, and as you learn to better envision and replicate the perfect, theoretical versions of your written works. Only by doing this duty of editing and curating our initial, lackluster attempts at written works can we treat their illnesses, discover their ideal aspects, and bring forth their glorious souls.
Sincerely, your writer friend,
LeDavid DeLouis