I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of allowing creativity to flow by removing excessive control in writing.
Meg Wolitzer highlights the idea that a writer often stifles their own creativity through over-management and excessive direction. By trusting the reader's ability to infer meaning, writers can free themselves from the constraints of overly detailed prose, which ultimately leads to more innovative and dynamic writing.
In practice
During a writing workshop, a facilitator might use this quote to encourage participants to embrace their first drafts without fear.
You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.
'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.
Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."
This grant gave me more than memories; it gave me a crucial experience that is formative to all writers: the ability to perceive that we become writers in exile, where what we write is the only link across distance and time…I became a Maryland writer because the community of Juneau took me in.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. _x000D_ Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.
I made a decision to write for my readers, not to try to find more readers for my writing.
There are some people who have been reading me for years, and they keep saying kind things about the writing. That's what you're writing for, to get people to respond to it.
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