The Never-ending Story
In “That Crafty Feeling,” a talk Zadie Smith delivered in 2008, she noted that no matter how incredible a piece is, an author often wishes that they had made other decisions in crafting it. She went so far as to say she regrets every “Art of Fiction” polemic she’s ever delivered. The first time I read this, I was astounded. Smith is a literary figure who looms large—her first book, White Teeth, was published to immense critical acclaim when she was just twenty-five years old. I always imagined that if I received that level of validation, I would never question my artistic ability again, but she confesses that she can’t look at her work after it’s published without becoming nauseous.
No matter how many accolades one receives or how highly a work is rated, there is always room for improvement, and that knowledge can plague writers into always wondering if there’s something better that could have been done. “I know that this new novel, that I’ve hardly begun, will be shameful and strange to me soon enough,” writes Smith. Maybe self-doubt is part of the process, and having a creative mind that constantly searches for solutions can’t be tamed just because something has been published or even celebrated.
How, then, do artists and writers live with something being permanently out in the world? For the most part, I think, we just nitpick and hypothetically think about how what we’ve written could have been done better. We can look back wistfully at the younger us who made that project possible and focus on what comes next. We can face that our work is out there in the world forever, whether or not we like it.
Or we can say to hell with acceptance and tread down a different path. Enter the remix.
In college, I was obsessed with Bleachers’ “I Wanna Get Better,” the lead single off of their debut album Strange Desire. The beat is chaotic, explosive in a way that made me nostalgic for a time I’d never lived in, lodged in my noggin like a false memory. The sound captivated me, but I was most drawn to the lyrics: I didn’t know I was lonely til I saw your face … I didn’t know I was broken till I wanted to change. I had never experienced a love that made me want to become a better person, and the mere thought of finding a love so deep that it made me see things that I didn’t have access to previously arrested me. I imagined what it would feel like to be so consumed by love that it transformed me, pushing me to heal the neglected parts of myself.
Strange Desire has a big, 1980s synth pop sound that lives the landscape of some John Hughes movie—I’d listen and glance down beneath my window half expecting to see someone lifting up a boom box.
Ten years after the release of Strange Desire, Bleachers released a reimagined, bare-bones version of the album retitled A Stranger Desired. The updated version of “Better” is not only stripped down, but solitary. The original featured faux explosions and synthetic sounds while the updated version allows listeners to pick out the exact instruments being played. It’s more whisper than shout—you’re forced to lean in to hear it. Listening feels less like dancing around a wild party and more like nestling beside a campfire. The contrast between the upbeat beats and shouts with the intimate lyrics offered a dynamic listening experience, but the congruency feels more vulnerable—there’s no hiding behind the oversized production. You can’t dance it all away—you have to sit with the words.
In the original “I Wanna Get Better,” lead singer Jack Antonoff features the voice of his ex-girlfriend Lena Dunham shouting “Go!” and a distorted piece of a voicemail from a friend. It’s a collage of other people altered through his lens. “Better” reimagined feels like listening to one person sitting across from another talking instead of performing. There are no samples of other voices. Antonoff sounds childlike, and the few moments of shouts hold more power because everything else is so subdued.
A Stranger Desired isn’t the first time Bleachers has reimagined Strange Desire. Terrible Thrills, Vol. 2 offered the first reinterpretation by featuring all female performers to cover the album, released one year after the original. Antonoff’s decision to craft alternate versions of the same project is a proclamation that there’s no correct or incorrect door to walk through when making art.
A remix is an undertaking, a reevaluation of ideas with the benefit of more skill or knowledge or a fresh approach.
While listening to A Stranger Desired for the first time, I immediately thought about my relationship to my own creative projects. In the final moments of completing a poem or essay, I often spin out and stall because putting my words into the world feels final. I become uncomfortably aware of the infinite permutations of the project that would be better than the version I’ve written—perfect ghosts drifting in the ether that I have failed to bring to life.
First drafts are exhilarating. They are outbursts that I can no longer contain in my brain. First drafts aren’t so much of a want as a need. They’re ravey, they’re ranty, they’re sappy, they’re cliché. They’re thin and nonsensical. An overwhelming majority stay as first drafts, hidden away from the world forever more. The scant amount that fight through to become proper revisions are anomalies. In college and graduate school, these survivors were born out of necessity—deadlines had to be met. Some of my oldest surviving drafts originated a decade ago as senior capstone essays.
I first wrote an essay about the five houses I lived in as a child as an attempt to exorcise shame after hiding my economic status from my peers—who unironically offered that vacations within the continental United States weren’t actually vacations at all. The piece ended with the biggest accomplishment of my life at the time: high school graduation. My family, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, were there, and the scene provided a nice button promising new adventures in a far away city after the essay’s end.
Years later, I still believe in the story I wanted to tell in that essay, the story that shines a light on a protagonist who against all odds tries to make a little something of herself while displacing her unearned shame. But the wider the distance between myself and the girl living in those homes—and the distance between myself and the girl who proudly submitted that essay as the star of her graduation collection—has grown, the harder it is to reconcile them despite my belief that there’s still good stuff there. For one thing, I read it and ask myself what the point of it actually is. At twenty-two, “an exploration of race and socio-economic status as a framework for coming-of-age” felt like a theme, and now it just feels like a thin premise dressed up in self-serious jargon. Even after all the workshopping and reviewing painstakingly written feedback letters from professors and classmates, I still haven’t found a shape of it that I’d be happy to have out in the world.
Seeing Michelangelo’s David for the first time was more overwhelming than I expected it to be. I had seen miniatures and prints my whole life, but of course none of those reproductions rendered the sheer power of the real thing. Its greatness was only highlighted by Michelangelo’s Hall of the Prisoners. On either side of the hall leading up to the gargantuan masterpiece were rough, unfinished pieces reaching out of the marble. The museum posits that Michelangelo may have intentionally left the statues incomplete to “represent this eternal struggle of human beings to free themselves from their material trappings.”
If, as the artist believed, the figures were already in the marble and only waiting for a god to liberate them, then what do we make of half-liberated work? Are those figures liberated in their own way? Once a work leaves one’s hands, it’s at the mercy of those who choose to engage with it.
Or perhaps leaving them incomplete was unintentional. Originally, Michelangelo was commissioned to create forty of these figures for the tomb of Pope Julius II. The finished project was meant to be far grander than what he ultimately ended up completing, but it was postponed due to lack of funds. In the meantime, he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Though not an exact remix, sometimes intentions are not the final outcome. What could have been, had the funding been acquired? If the artist completed the figures as standalones? Endless are the possibilities, but in all its ragged glory, the Prisoners enabled me to walk away from the Accademia with feelings more complex than just wonder at David.
Finding a final form for a piece still haunts me. A piece about being an only child mutated as my relationship to the story’s characters shifted. The essay began as a rant that emerged after a woman advised me, an only child, to never have an only child because of how needy and bratty only children are. After scribbling a rage-fueled scrawl, I decided I didn’t just want to get out my feelings—I wanted to unequivocally prove her wrong.
To the archives!
I read studies conducted by sociologists throughout the eighties, firsthand accounts of only children who raised only children, articles about chic onlies in New York magazine, social science studies on birth order, personal essays from famous onlies, a graphic memoir about confronting the death of one’s parents alone as an only—and worked to synthesize all of it into something not just readable, but compelling. Workshop one asked for more of the personal—that, they insisted, was where the piece had the most energy. A seminar professor encouraged me to dive even deeper down the research rabbit hole, vary the sources, and show them in conversation with one another. A thesis reader advised me to cut most of the sources and talk back to the research included.
Sometime after workshop one, my father confessed to his children, who are over twenty years my senior, that I existed, and my vision of my onliness changed. The deepening relationship with one sibling transformed the essay into a celebration of becoming siblinged as we dined in fancy restaurants and spent Thanksgivings gathered around their table. When that relationship curtled, so too did the essay, aging into a salacious takedown overwrought with bitterness. That bitter essay feels unpublishable to the world at large, but it has gotten me into nearly every writing residency I’ve applied to, transforming betrayal into long hikes and fireside chats with other artists. As I’ve examined the falling out over the past few years, I’ve worked to orient the piece away from condemnation and toward self-understanding. With every examination, I realize something new about myself that has to find its way into the piece. I shudder to think about how I’d feel having early drafts available for anyone to click on—as if I stand a chance of understanding the fracture totally and completely as long as the words stay hidden from public.
Charli xcx had a major resurgence after releasing her sixth studio album, BRAT, in June 2024. Her star rapidly rose following the debut—memes were everywhere and BRAT SUMMER was in full effect. BRAT is brash, edgy, honest, and complicated. It’s powerful on many levels: hypnotic and fun and playful, but the lyrics are incredibly vulnerable. It’s filled with emotional volta after volta: a gentle, confessional song about questioning whether or not to become a parent ends and a song about being a 365 party girl rushes in to fill in the silence. That authenticity shepherded in not only popularity with the album peaking at number three on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Billboard Electronic/Dance chart, but also critical recognition—being nominated for seven Grammys including Album of the Year.
In the whirlwind of Bratmania, Charli released remixes. “Girl, so confusing” is about a borderline contentious relationship with fellow artist Lorde, and days before the song debuted, she sent Lorde a voice note telling her about the song. Soon after, Charli released a remix that included Lorde’s view of their friction that explains how her own insecurities led her to reject Charli’s attempts to connect. By adding the second perspective, the remix has more dimension than the original.
Charli didn’t stop there, and just four months after BRAT’s debut, she released Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, which featured remixes of all the original songs. In “Rewind,” Charli wonders if she deserves commercial success. In the remix, she and rapper Bladee address feeling more stress as they attain more fame. A song about feeling insecure about someone else’s success, “Sympathy is a knife,” transforms into a reckoning about accepting other people’s reaction to her own success. An homage to deceased friend and artist SOPHIE, “So I,” goes deeper into moments that she didn’t share originally, as if she released the song only to realize there was so much more on her mind. Throughout the album, she calls on outside voices to make the tracks more conversational, demonstrating remix as revision, as addendum, as explanation.
In a 2010 Current TV interview, public radio personality Ira Glass delivered a viral piece of advice about a phenomenon that’s now known as the taste-talent gap. Creative people are driven to make art because of their taste, but it takes a while for their skill to catch up to their discernment, creating a gap between what they know to be quality and what they are able to produce. Only by creating a huge volume of work, Glass argues, are artists able to eventually start making stuff that’s actually good in their mind. Many people get lost in that gap and stop creating because it’s such a discouraging place to exist.
I’m grateful that I heard about the gap when I was in college, though there are still many times where I forget the message. Sometimes, I see essays or poems that I submitted in the past and gratitude washes over me that some brilliant editor had the good sense to reject it. Most of my early essays were a poor man’s imitation of Joan Didion—she could have sued be for identity theft the way I tried—screaming and clawing—to embody her disaffection and cool observation without a shred of her skill level or self-awareness. But at the time, that was the absolute best I could do. My taste was superb, but my work could not measure up.
Michel de Montaigne started writing Essays in February 1571, and the first edition was published in 1580. In the preface to Essays, Montaigne expresses belief that his death is imminent, so the essays are meant to preserve a part of him: his thoughts as they appear, making them more of a record of who he was at the exact moment of writing than a collection of absolute truths or certainties. He was less concerned with being correct or balanced than with creating an accurate version of himself on the page.
As a college student, I was initially intimidated by his work, but once I got past the fear, I sank my teeth into the message, and the message was that I could write about absolutely anything. Montaigne saw himself as the topic of his essays rather than the ideas he was writing about, and as such, his thoughts and feelings were subject to change at any moment. Not only was absolutely everything fair game to write about, but absolutely everything was fair game to reconsider. He published a revised edition of Essays in 1588, and a final version was posthumously published fifteen years after the original in 1595. He frequently made whole pages of addendums to his work, constantly reconsidering how he felt about a subject long after his thoughts were published. He accepted that thoughts are not static, and as time stretched on between his publication date and the time that he spent learning and living, he wanted to reflect his evolved thoughts.
For instance, in “Of Friendship,” Montaigne originally wrote of his close friend Etienne Boetie, “If you press me to tell you why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed.” In a later version, he builds on this thought to say “except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.” Truth was reached by documenting change, an ephemera only landing on the page as a way of preserving a single thought in a single moment as opposed to a static work.
I feel doubt when I write because I write about myself. I imagined that I would wholeheartedly discover who I actually am by age eighteen or twenty-five or thirty, but as those deadlines have come and gone, well, I’m optimistic that all will be revealed by forty. I guess it’s a blessing that I refuse to stagnate—not just in my craft but in my views, in my self. Because that’s what the work is really about—discovery. I resist delivering ideas to the world that I don’t entirely agree with, but there’s so little that I do agree with entirely that I end up hoarding my words like a dragon hoards her gold. My work is the most honest part of myself, and I despise the thought of work with my name on it that I don’t stand by.
But the remix offers another possibility. The remix offers room for growth, for compassion, and for appreciation of a past self.
Like Montaigne, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a lifelong reviser. The more he grew as an artist and human, the more updates he made to his work. One of his best known poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” underwent several additions throughout his lifetime—his final version was published the year he died. The original was published in 1798 when Coleridge was twenty-five. Currently, there are eighteen known versions of the poem. In the 1817 Sibylline Leaves edition, Coleridge provided more context through a gloss to make the text even more accessible to readers, partly in response to critics who called the work too obscure.
Though there are myriad ways Coleridge evolved between the writing each version, author and academic Frances Wilson argues that one guiding circumstance that brought on change was the poet’s reconsideration of faith. After Coleridge shifted from Unitarian to Anglican, the poem shifted from open-ended to prescriptive with the inclusion of the later edition’s gloss. The gloss clarifies that the bird was more than a good omen—he was also “pious.” Rather than leaving room for the reader to interpret the “spirits” who reanimate the fallen sailors as forces of evil, the gloss in the revised edition confirms that they are a “blessed troop of angels.”
Perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of literary remix occurred not in an epic poem or essay, but in Akhil Sharma’s award winning novel An Obedient Father. Sharma published his work when he was twenty-nine, but after years of reflection, self-examination, and a divorce, the revised edition was published twenty-two years after the original debuted to critical acclaim.I had always felt ashamed that the book wasn’t as good as the characters deserved it to be … Because I had published the book without fixing its problems, I felt as though I had betrayed [the characters],” writes Sharma. “Even if the people seem exactly as they used to be, you and your sense of the world have changed. I started to think about how I could make the book good enough for its characters.”
Sharma’s loyalty to his characters prompted him to change the story, and new readers reap the benefits. Originally, character names often began with the same letter as a way to slow readers down and force them to take time with the material, but in the update, names were changed to allow for an easier reading experience. Sharma also updated the structure of the book to allow each chapter to address a particular set of issues instead of ending each chapter with a major plot point.
The most significant change occurred as a result of the writer’s personal reflection and growth. Writing the original novel in his twenties, Sharma blamed himself for enduring abuse as a young teen, and his guilt compelled him to avoid properly portraying a victimized character in the story. His personal development and acceptance allowed him to give the victim in his story more space and make her a more approachable character.
I find these examples encouraging. Working to bring any piece into the world can be laborious but also freeing. Writing has always been as essential to my life as eating—it gives me fuel to handle all the other stuff that’s beyond my control. One of the greatest feelings I know is the lightbulb-over-the-head sensation that comes about when I unlock a new thought about something that I was positive I had figured out, usually while in the shower or on a long walk, but just when I think that something is ready for submission, one of those lightbulb moments can undo the whole piece. I either struggle to shoe-horn in just one more thing or raze the piece entirely to rebuild on the foundation of my life-changing insight.
Reminding oneself about the possibility of remix allows a sense of play to permeate one’s practice. Art is alive—it has energy. It lives on long after we are dead: teenagers in the 21st century are still having conversations with Hamlet hundreds of years after Shakespeare’s death—of course we can still have conversations with our own work as we progress. Art lives on after our own hearts stop, growing and morphing—remix is proof of immortality—there’s no need to cryogenically freeze yourself.
Doubt is a feature of writing—if you have no doubt, you have no tension. I write to find my way through, so of course there are gaps. I don’t often start out because I want to impart knowledge or tell some universal truth—I start because I don’t know. As soon as I hit submit, ideas I hadn’t considered rain down on me or I inevitably read something in a structure that would have been the absolutely perfect fit for the piece that’s out of my hands.
My biggest hope is to reach a point where I see each project not as an all-encompassing beacon of who I am as a person, but as a snapshot of my life at a specific moment: here’s what I thought about The Catcher in the Rye at age fourteen, these are my thoughts on marriage at twenty-three, here are my thoughts on international travel at age forty-seven. Rather than reddening with embarrassment as those beliefs become outdated, I keep in mind that they can always be reconsidered and remixed—stasis is unnecessary.
Zadie Smith ends “That Crafty Feeling” by recounting that after rereading her novel On Beauty, despite experiencing the nausea she often falls to when reading her work, she found “in very isolated pockets—I had the sense that this line, that paragraph, these were exactly what I meant to write, and the fact was, I’d written them, and I felt OK about it, felt good, even. It’s a feeling I recommend to all of you. That feeling feels OK.”
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