Hi Reader,

Last week, my editor friend Kim and I took an impromptu trip to Italy. (Because when a friend of a friend offers you free round-trip tickets in exchange for escorting kittens from Venice to the US, you say absolutely, yes please.)

We spent a day in Milan (not my favorite) and a couple days each in Florence and Cinque Terre (loved them both and hated to leave). Of course, we visited all the classic sites: the Duomo (in both Milan and Florence); Michelangelo’s David; the Uffizi Gallery, full of art by Botticelli and da Vinci and Michelangelo and more.

On this particular trip, here’s what struck me most:

Everywhere we looked, the creative process was on display.

Of course, we saw many finished works. We spent long minutes contemplating Michelangelo’s David and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

But we were also surrounded by evidence of the process by which all that glorious art was created. Unfinished works by these Italian masters were displayed right next to their most revered masterpieces.

In the Galleria dell’Accademia, David stands under a domed skylight in the Tribune, a room designed especially to display him.

To reach him, visitors walk through the Hall of the Prisoners, which is lined with Michelangelo’s half-finished sculptures. When I looked closely, I could see the rows of chisel marks along a roughly blocked marble knee.

Later, in another hallway of the Galleria, we saw the plaster models of dozens of statues. These were the early drafts that sculptors created before rendering them in marble. Some were covered in tiny holes, markers the sculptors used to help them scale these miniature models into full-size sculptures.

In the Uffizi Gallery, there’s a room full of da Vincis. Front and center is the Adoration of the Magi, a large altarpiece that da Vinci never finished. Some figures are fully painted, while others are merely sketched.

And though all the Botticellis are finished works, the creative process is on display in the Botticelli rooms, too. One of my favorite pieces here was St. Augustine in his Study.

Here’s what the plaque next to it says:

The sheets of paper strewn across the floor at the saint’s feet are intended to convey the difficulty implicit in translating divine inspiration into words.

When I look at this, I see an ode to the creative process of writing: the countless drafts it takes to reach the final words.

I’ve often wondered how artists create masterpieces. Did Michelangelo sit down one day with an idea, a chisel, and a block of marble, and simply start hammering away until David emerged? Did Botticelli pick up a paintbrush and a pot of paint, and just start applying color to canvas, freehanding the Birth of Venus?

Nope. Nuh-uh. No, they did not.

Masterful art rarely, if ever, emerges fully formed in one draft. It goes through a process with many stages; many drafts; many tools and skills; many, many, many opportunities for revision.

Which makes my own process of writing this newsletter rather ironic. I spent an age trying to draft and edit this entire newsletter in my head so I could write the “correct” version, the final draft, on the first try.

Eventually, I realized that my stalled process was really just illustrating the entire point I’m trying to make. So I gave up looking for the perfect words and just wrote any words so I’d have something to edit into the shape I’m looking for.

If this newsletter were placed in a museum in its half-finished form, like a Michelangelo sculpture with a figure emerging from a block of marble, it would look like:

• A bunch of photos of art on my phone,
• A grab bag of half-baked thoughts jotted down in a doc,
• A collection of quotes from museum info plaques,
• A couple dozen tabs open to Google searches about particular paintings,
• A series of sentence fragments I wrote and then cut from the draft.

I am not Michelangelo, and my scraps of ideas scattered in a Google doc will never be displayed in the Uffizi.

And yet.

And yet, for me, and for Michelangelo, and for you, the creative process is just that: a process with many stages.

And yet, the process itself is something fascinating and beautiful, a testament to human ingenuity and perseverance.

And yet, in Michelangelo’s marble and da Vinci’s sketches, I see the words of your drafts, and my own.

I hope that today, you get a little taste of joy, and awe, and beauty in your writing—not only because the finished novel will be excellent, but because the process of creation itself is admirable and museum-worthy all on its own.

Happy editing,

Alice
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