Again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again
Why don't you do it, why don't you do it again?
Again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again
Why don't you do it, why don't you do it again?
(fragment of a song by Status Quo, but… I can’t remember the title)

“You can earn while you learn.” (Lawrence Block)

The teachers of creative writing all tell you to write the draft and then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

If the writing coaches are write right, the job would be called ‘rewriter’ instead of ‘writer’. It reminds me of the story of the mason…

Once upon a time there was a mason, well, there was a man who always wanted to become a mason and on one day he decided that he was one. He felt happy being a mason. He looked in the mirror and said: “What a great mason you are. Too bad you haven’t studied the law, or you could even become a perrymason, but being a mason is already wonderful and I congratulate you on this success. There’s only one question left: What are you going to do now?”

That question was easy to answer: when you’re a mason, you do masonry. Our mason decided that he wanted to build a house. He went to the river, took large amounts of mud, made bricks and baked them in his pizza oven (in an earlier life his dream was to become the cook of a pizzeria, but the stone-baked pizzas that came out of the oven were hard as stone, so he decided that he would be better off as a mason). He mixed cement and started to build.

One year later the house was finished. The mason was excited. The architect, who knew everything of masonry, came to look at it. He said: “What a lousy house. All you have is four walls and a roof. No windows, no rooms, the only entrance is a square hole in the front wall and it is so small that even my four-year-old daughter could not enter. You should rebuild it.”

“Rebuild it? Are you nuts? I worked a whole year on building this house. I will not rebuild it. I will sell it and start again with a better house.”

So the mason sold his house to a man with a dog. The dog was very happy with his new doghouse. He said to the mason: “Thank you for all the work you did. My best friend Snoopy always teases me with his wooden doghouse, lying on his back on the top of the roof, but now I can show him that I have something better: a real doghouse made of handmade bricks.”

The mason was excited. He was now convinced that his decision to become a mason was his best ever. He decided to start with a bigger house, as the architect had told him.

One year later the second house was ready. The mason was amazed. This house was so much better than his first house. It even had a door. He called the architect, who came to look at it. The architect said: “What a lousy house. I see that it is much taller than the first one, I can enter myself, and it has a door and stairs to go all the way to the top…”

“Yes, I needed those stairs to build the high walls… And on top, there is also another room, with windows. I even managed to install a light there, so you can read a book at night when it is dark. This time, I really thought about everything.”, the mason explained.

The architect was not convinced: “But still it is a lousy house. No kitchen, no barbecue, no heating, still only one room... You should rebuild it.”

“Rebuild it? Are you nuts? I worked a whole year on building this house. I will not rebuild it. I will sell it and start again with a better house.”

The mason sold the house to a man who always wanted to live on the coast. The man was very happy with his new lighthouse. He said to the mason: “What a wonderful house. It has the best view ever, because it is so high, and with the light on top it will warn the ships against the danger of the cliffs and the rocks on the coast. Thank you for building this wonderful lighthouse. I’m delighted.”

The mason started again, inspired by all this success. One year later his third house was ready. He asked the architect to give his opinion. The architect said: “What a lousy house. It has four walls and a door, windows and a front garden, it even has two rooms, a living room and a bedroom, but it has no kitchen, no bathroom, no shower, no barbeque, no basement to keep all the stuff you bought but never need, no running water, no heating, not even a place where you can brush your teeth in the morning. You should rebuild it…”

“Rebuild it? Are you nuts? I worked a whole year on building this house. I will not rebuild it. I will sell it and start again with a better house.”

So the mason sold the house to a man who had a mother-in-law. The man was thrilled about the house. He said: “This is amazing. I want to buy this house, so my mother-in-law will have a place to live and sleep when she visits us. Until now she came, kicked me out of my bed and made me sleep on the couch. And she liked my bed so much that she stayed longer and longer. Last time she bought the return ticket for the bus when she left instead of before she came. This house is perfect. No heating, no shower, no place for her to keep all that stuff that she takes and nobody uses, not even a way she can brush her teeth in the morning. That will make sure that she will not stay too long. Thank you for building this amazing house.”

The mason felt great. I do have to add the info that this story happened before the economic crisis of 2008, when selling houses was still an important point on the agenda of president Whatshisname, who made the law that guaranteed a loan for everyone, even for the ones who could not pay the interest. The point is: I never was a fan of rewriting a story. I prefer to write with attention, do it right the first time, think it over before I start and edit, edit, edit, edit, edit, edit until I feel that it’s right.

Until the day before yesterday. It was a Monday. You know about Mondays, right? Shit happens, but it always seems to happen on Mondays. Like this Monday. I started my computer up with this great idea to edit one of the stories I wrote in my manuscript ‘Stories for in the Campfire’. The computer started with telling me: “Today I will install Windows 10 for you.” I answered with a click: “I’m not interested in Windows 10. The Windows I have now, Windows 8, works fine and I like to keep it that way. So go install yourself on somebody else’s computer and let me do my work.”

In Spanish, the word ‘computer’ is ‘la computadora’, female. My computadora did not listen to me. Instead, she told me that she was always right and she started to install Windows 10. When all that was finished… (I had to take the morning off, it took a while…) I could not find my manuscript that I had saved on my desktop, the one with the title ‘Stories for in the Campfire’, the one I had worked on for a whole week, the one that already had 50 pages with my best stories ever… So I gave Windows 10 the order to find it, placed it back on my Desktop, did the same thing with all my music and videos and other stuff, restarted the computer and… my dear female computer started to tell me that she was cleaning my desktop to put everything back as it used to be… When my wife tells me that she will clean my desktop, I start to panic, but when my computer tells me, I can only imagine that Stephen King wrote that program… There is no horror story worse than what can happen to you in real life…

Shall I repeat what I said when I found out that my manuscript, my music, my videos, my ebooks and all the other stuff had disappeared? Shall I leave out the swear words? In that case: I said nothing. There was nothing left to say. La Computadora does not listen to me. The only thing I could do was… start again, rewrite all those great stories I wrote before. I felt bad. I felt hopeless. I felt like Hemingway.

Hemingway once wrote a manuscript and rewrote it and again and again until he was satisfied. He gave it to a woman (his wife or his sister, I’m not sure, but I guess his wife because he married four times) who went to Paris… and she lost the suitcase with the manuscript. That was: the manuscript of a writer who won the Nobel Prize, a prizeless manuscript. So Hemingway started again and made sure that his new version was even better than the one that was lost. Happy ending…

I told you in the foreword: this is an exercise for me. I do this to improve my English. The result of the first exercise had disappeared, but the skills I learned were still there. I remembered the titles of the stories I wrote and I remembered the message, the core, of each story. I even had the chance to improve more, something that never would have happened without that little inconvenience of Windows 10.

I remembered a story by Johan Cruyff, the most famous Dutch person ever, outstanding football player, outstanding coach, influential philosopher and a good man who did wonderful things for others. During his time as a coach he said to his best striker: “When you score goals, you do that for fun. When you do defence, you do that because we pay you for it. If you want to improve, you should work on your weak points, on your defence.” I never tried the tool of rewriting, but when I did, I noticed the result and decided to do it more often.

I started to rewrite. I followed the lessons of all the masters in creative writing. And it was not a bad idea at all. I changed the set-up of some of the stories. I remembered the best part of others and rewrote the text with almost the same words. I invented some new twists, worked a bit on style and construction of sentences and after a while, I’d forgotten about the accident. I even came up with a great idea, a new story about a mason, a real working class hero that readers will love. I was working. I was writing. I was happy.

It’s nice when you do some writing, but the nicest is what writing does to you. Of course, the mason was right. Doing all that work and destroying it is useless. There will always be an architect that disapproves what you made. It is better to focus on the ones who like your work. If you can find someone who likes what you created, you’ll make at least one reader happy. And when I have one happy reader, I’m happy too.

The writing coaches are right, but my advice is: Do what you like. If you like what you’re doing, you usually get better, and when you get better at what you do, you will like it more.

Writing is something you should enjoy.

Life itself is something you should enjoy.

Do what you like.