Life is all about continuous editing

Nothing is ever finished. It might be published, but never finished…

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Part 1: Editing in music

I am a huge music fan and to my pleasant surprise, one of my favorite artists has recently reissued his first two solo albums, all remixed anew and with rare demo and live versions of the many great songs on these seminal albums. Remixes typically provide new and better versions of the songs, whereas the demos will help me appreciate the origin of the songs.

For those of you who are not into music: Demos are very early versions of songs that are tried out with other musicians and/or record company executives, in order to see if there is anything there that might be worthwhile investing time and money in. Typically the recording of the demos are only of interest to the die-hard fan because they are unpolished early versions of songs. Consequently, they are not always very good. Sometimes the demos are a sort of diamond in the rough and you can already hear where it is going to go, but sometimes they are completely different from what the song ended up becoming and give a hint of an alternative future that might have been. Demos are to the music lover what studies in pencil are to people who love paintings.

I am also a fan of acoustic editions of the music I love. Quite often, the additional restrictions of having to make a song work without electronic or electric musical instruments, gives an entirely new feeling to that song. For instance on their acoustic album “Less is More”, the band Marillion has a version of “Hard as Love” that is very different from the one on the Brave album whence it came. I never got into the original much, or into the entire “Brave” album, but I loved the acoustic version so much that I started listening to the original again and, lo and behold, after almost twenty years, I finally “cracked” the album and it is now one of my favorites. As Marillion’s lead singer put it during a splendid live performance of the acoustic version: “The original was an angry little song, but we changed the melody and we changed the chords. The words stayed the same, but they mean a completely different thing now.”

That is what continuous tinkering and editing does, it makes the work transcend the bounds and boundaries of the original, and gives it new meaning. For this reason, everything in your life needs constant editing too.

Part 2: Editing in writing

I write a lot, and if I may be immodest for a bit, I regularly get compliments for my writing.

As my dear old mother used to say: “False modesty is worse than vanity” :-)

If there is any quality to my writing, it is because I am a relentless editor. 

Writing and editing are such different activities that I recently changed my writing process to separate the two more clearly, courtesy of the FreeWrite device that I use for a lot of my writing. The FreeWrite made it clear to me that when you are in the zone cranking out words, you need to stay in that zone. Editing, where you go back and forth through the text, changing sentences, fixing punctuation, adding examples, and moving paragraphs, is such a different workflow that switching between the two is a huge and expensive context switch. So, these days I just keep on writing and once I am done, I start editing. This goes so far that if, during writing, I suddenly think: “Oh, I should have mentioned X in the previous paragraph”, I just write down exactly that sentence into the text! Editor-me will pick it up and process it later. For those of you who write often, I can totally recommend this strategy. You don’t even have to buy a FreeWrite :-)

When writing, editing is important because any complex set of thoughts is so hard to write down clearly that multiple passes are necessary to make it a single coherent piece. Whether it is an email, an article, or a presentation, even the best writers need time and reflection to get the right words out concisely and in the right order. It is not for nothing that Mark Twain (you know, from Star Trek)  famously wrote (to a friend): “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

The right idea can make a piece great. A good structure can make it easy to digest. But only good editing (including proofreading) can make a piece of text sweet so that the reader wants to read it. For this reason, everything in your life needs constant editing, to make it sweeter and easier to digest for the people around you.

Part 3: Editing in code

I code a lot, and though I do not get as many compliments for that, I do vividly remember one of my bosses once telling some colleagues: “Have you seen his code, it is tight”, which I was very proud of because when it comes to coding, that boss was no slouch either. 

Like writing text, writing a larger piece of code is something that is probably impossible to do right in one go. There needs to be editing, although when it comes to coding we call that “refactoring.” The problem with code though is that there are two classes of readers: The compiler or interpreter on the one hand, and humans on the other hand. One of these readers is way less discriminatory than the other one when it comes to the importance of clarity.

Many programmers seem to write only for the first audience: The moment the unit tests pass, they stop coding. I would venture that in many cases it is important to continue editing until both audiences are happy: Of course your code needs to run, but it also needs to be reviewed and maintained by humans. I therefore spend an extraordinary amount of time making my code beautiful and pleasant to read. I fret over names, indentation, composition, modularity, interfaces, types, and whatnot. If I do something extraordinarily clever, I write a comment that explains how clever it is and why it works.

The process of editing should continue even after the code has been released. At that time there is less pressure, but it pays off to regularly re-read your code and change it to make it cleaner, tighter, easier to understand, and/or easier to test. In many cases this after-the-fact editing is a form of preventive debugging, as with the benefit of experience running your code you know even better what it is supposed to do and how it should work.

Everything you have ever done deserves continuous editing. I do this with my written articles as well: I read the articles I publish online at least once every two years or so and make minor changes to fix small bugs in the text or fix some punctuation. The rate of editing might decrease over time, but I recently re-read something I wrote in 2004 to see if it needed some changes.

Part 4: Editing in life 

Continuous editing is the process of striving to make everything you ever did better. Nothing is ever finished. It might be released or published, but that doesn’t mean that it cannot be improved. The continuous-editing mindset is an important aspect of making sure that you continue to grow and improve. It also makes sure that you are regularly confronted with the crap you did yesteryear, which is an important humbling experience to subject yourself to.

P.S: With respect to that last sentence: After I graduated from college I went back there to teach “Operating Systems” in the evening program. One of my duties was to sit in as an examiner on the thesis defense of students in their final year. Even after I stopped teaching, I continued that duty, but now as the State’s representative (in Dutch: “gecommitteerde”). Every year, before I sat down to read the theses that I had to judge, I would start by reading my own thesis again, just to make sure that I remembered the crap that I had graduated with. It was an important level-setting operation that the students benefited greatly from. I am talking to you, fd0 ;-)