The Sunday Writer’s Digest #7: Writing as Dialogue
One Thought, One Recommendation, Every Sunday
One Thought
When I spoke with Abraham Newman this week for Etched in Marble, he said something that’s been echoing in my head ever since: “You can’t wait until something’s perfect. The sooner you send it into the world, the sooner it comes back to you clearer, stronger, better.”
For Newman, writing isn’t about control, it’s about conversation. He doesn’t see the page as a place to prove what he already knows, but as the space where thought takes shape. Perfectionism, in that view, isn’t a virtue. It’s a trap.
The longer we hoard our drafts, the more we deny the very feedback that could make them stronger. Newman calls it the Virginia Woolf process: you start with an idea, but once you write, it comes out differently. Sentences pull you somewhere else, and that’s the point. It’s an argument for letting your ideas live in the world where they can be tested, challenged, and refined. Writing, in this sense, isn’t a product. It’s a practice of discovery. (Full disclosure: I almost didn’t publish this note today because it didn’t feel quite “ready.” Then I realised that was exactly the point. So here we are, imperfect, but on time.)
One Recommendation
If Newman reminds us that writing is dialogue, Zadie Smith reminds us why we need others to keep that dialogue alive. In her essay “That Crafty Feeling,” she writes: “The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.”
Writing is discovery, editing is conversation. We have to step outside our own minds to see what the work is really saying. The best writers, like Newman and Smith, write to be read, to be questioned, to be changed by the exchange. When we stop treating writing as performance and start treating it as participation, we make room for ideas to grow beyond us.
Tiny Writing Exercise
This week’s exercise is about releasing before you feel ready. Take a piece of writing that you’ve been polishing, a paragraph, a section, even an idea in your notes, and do the following:
Stop editing.
Share it with someone you trust, a colleague, a student, a friend).
Ask one question: What did you take away from this?
Don’t explain. Don’t defend. Just listen. Writing, as Newman reminds us, isn’t finished when we stop typing, it’s finished when it starts speaking to someone else.