“All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.” – Stephen King

So you’ve beaten procrastination, strove for excellence rather than perfection and pushed through to do what screenwriter Brian Koppelman says 99% of writers with an idea only ever dream of…

You’ve finished your first draft.



Good job! Mission accomplished.

Time to sit back, relax, and share your masterpiece with the world, right?

Yeah, if only creativity was that straightforward…

Unfortunately, unless you’re blessed with incredible luck and superhuman literary genius, you’re going to have to do a rewrite.

Why? Because as proud as you may be of your work, let’s be real: it’s most likely still a bit “shit” [Hemingway’s preferred adjective for first drafts].

When John Irving said, “Maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting.” He wasn’t kidding.

The journey between the first and final draft is often longer, harder and peppered with more pitfalls than most would-be writers would have you believe.

Critiquing Your Creative Work Without Bias

“Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” – Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

In order to rewrite, we need to take off our subjective artist’s hat and replace it with our objective critic’s hat. We need to learn to see our work with a fresh pair of eyes.

Do you ever see other people’s work and know exactly how you could have made it better?

The key to successful rewriting is the feel this way about your own. Easier said than done. It’s much harder to rewrite your own work than someone else’s.

For artists, this problem of looking objectively at your work has been always been a problem. Leonardo da Vinci was no exception:

“We know very well that errors are better recognised in the works of others than in our own; and that often, while reproving little faults in others, you may ignore great ones in yourself.”

But even if you try to be unbiased, that’s very often not enough.

The old saying, ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ isn’t necessarily true. Studies have shown that people in relationships rate the attractiveness of their partners lower when their photos are horizontally flipped, but rate themselves more attractive when their own photos are flipped.

People like their own mirrored image more because its familiar.

Familiarity creates blind spots.

Da Vinci, it may not surprise you, popularised the use of mirrors in art for getting rid of such bias:

“I say — that when you paint you should have a flat mirror and often look at for work as reflected in it, when you will see it reversed, and it will appear to you like some other painter’s work, so you will be better able to judge of it’s faults than in any other way.”

The technique of flipping an image so you can look at it with fresh eyes doesn’t just work with paintings. Film director James Cameron periodically flops [reverses] his movies during the editing process to stop his eyes from predicting the movement of the action.

This is a great way for artists and filmmakers to gain objectivity over their first draft, but what about writers?

While we may not be able to mirror our writing to see it anew, we can do the next best thing…

We can mirror the neurology of people reading it for the first time by harnessing the power of what neuroscientists call:

Mirror Neurons

“[The discovery of mirror neurons are one of the] single most important unpublicised stories of the decade.” — V. S. Ramachandran, PhD

Emotions are contagious.

When we spend time around stressful, angry people, we get stressed. When we see someone get hurt badly, we ‘feel’ their pain. When someone does something embarrassing, we too cringe with embarrassment.

This neural WiFi that causes us to absorb and reflect the emotions of other people is mediated by a recently discovered mechanism in the brain called mirror neurons.

Bestselling author Daniel Goleman explains the discovery of these neurons in his book Social Intelligence:

“Neuroscientists stumbled on this neural WiFi by accident in 1992. They were mapping the sensorimotor area of monkeys’ brains by using electrodes so laser-thin they could be impacted in single brain cells, and seeing which cell lit up during a specific movement. The neurons in this are proving to be remarkably precise; for instance, some neurons lit up only when the monkey was grasping something in its hand, others only when it was tearing it apart. But the truly unexpected discovery came one hot afternoon when a research assistant came back from a break eating and ice-cream cone. The scientists were astonished to see a sensorimotor cell activate as one monkey watched the assistant lift the cone to his lips. They were dumbfounded to find that a distinct set of neurons seemed to activate when the monkey merely observed another monkey — or one of the experimenters — making a given movement. Since that first sighting of mirror neurons in monkeys, the same systems have been discovered in the human brain. In a remarkable study where a laster-thin electrode monitored a single neuron in an awake person, the neuron fired both when the person anticipated pain — a pinprick — and when merely seeing someone else receive a pinprick — a neural snapshot of primal empathy in action.”

The implications of mirror neurons involvement in creativity are very exciting.

To me, this research is evidence that great art cannot be faked — it must be born from true passion.

Actors who don’t genuinely feel what they’re portraying on screen will never convince us, no matter how many courses they attend. Speakers who don’t feel first the emotions they want to elicit from their audience will never appear charismatic. And if your work doesn’t tantalise your mirror neurons, don’t expect it to trigger anyone else’s.

I’ll write future posts about the various ways mirror neurons can help us with our creative process, but for now, let’s stick to rewriting.

How Tarantino Uses Mirror Neurons In His Writing Process