I’ve spent years collecting quotes about writing, first in notebooks, then scattered across devices and margins of books. Recently, while procrastinating on revisions (a writer’s most creative form of avoidance), I found myself hunting through this digital and analog archive for a half-remembered line. The search took longer than it should have. But sometimes procrastination delivers unexpected gifts.
In May 1937, Albert Camus wrote in his notebook: “To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art. Rewrite—the effort always brings some profit, whatever this may be. Those who do not succeed fail because they are lazy.”
That word rewrite sits at the heart of the passage like a command. Not edit. Not polish. Rewrite.
We live in a culture obsessed with first-draft genius, with the myth of writers who conjure perfect sentences on the first try. Social media amplifies this illusion: we see the published essay, the finished book, the viral tweet, never the fifteen versions that came before.
But here’s the truth: first drafts are supposed to be messy. They’re thinking on paper, arguments still finding their shape, ideas not yet fully formed. The real work of writing happens in revision, when you return to those rough paragraphs with fresh eyes and ask: *What am I actually trying to say?*
Rewriting isn’t just about fixing typos or smoothing awkward phrases. It’s about rethinking. It’s where you discover the argument you didn’t know you were making, cut the beautiful paragraph that doesn’t belong, and find the clearer, sharper, truer way to say what matters.
When Camus writes about “disinterest” and “renunciation,” he’s pointing to something profound: rewriting requires letting go. You must abandon your attachment to what you thought you were writing and embrace what the work actually needs to become.
This means killing your darlings, as the saying goes. That horrible command: you see that digression you love, that entire chapter you sweated over? Delete it all. Not because they’re bad, but because they don’t serve the larger whole. It’s painful. But it’s also liberating. When you’re willing to renounce your first vision, you make space for something better to emerge.
Camus promises that “the effort always brings some profit, whatever this may be.” He doesn’t say the rewrite will be perfect, or that you’ll always succeed in saying exactly what you meant. Just that the effort itself yields something valuable.
Sometimes that profit is obvious: a clearer argument, better pacing, more vivid examples. But often it’s subtler. Through rewriting, you discover what you actually think. You clarify not just your prose but your ideas. The act of struggling with your own words sharpens your understanding.
And here’s what I’ve learned across years of writing and rewriting: you can’t think your way to clarity. You have to write your way there, draft by draft, revision by revision. The thinking happens through the rewriting.
Camus’s final line is horribly harsh: “Those who do not succeed fail because they are lazy.” Damn dude!
But he’s not talking about natural talent or inspiration. He’s talking about showing up, again and again, to do the unglamorous work. The willingness to face your own inadequate first draft. The discipline to read your words with brutal honesty and start again.
Laziness, in this sense, isn’t about working too little, it’s about being unwilling to look at your work clearly, to admit it’s not yet what it needs to be. It’s easier to declare a draft “good enough” than to do the hard work of making it actually good.
So here I am, first draft complete, standing at the threshold of what comes next. Maybe writing this text to procrastinate
The surveillance book exists now as a manuscript, full of ideas I’m excited about and sentences I’m already cringing at. The real work begins today: the rewriting, the rethinking, the renunciation of what I thought I was writing in favor of what it could become. It won’t be easy. It will take time I don’t feel like I have. But Camus promises there will be profit in the effort, whatever it may be.
I am not sure there is joy in rewriting; its just another job that needs to be done. Or maybe, I will spend the rest of the day searching for another quotation…