Paint
I hate painting perhaps more than I hate any other household project. I think I would rather snake out a clogged basement drain than paint. I don’t think I have the patience for it and I always end up making a huge mess: paint spatters everywhere when I paint and often I don’t seem to get the drop cloth to stay where it should so paint ends up on the floor.
Yesterday, I primed the master bath at my house to prepare to paint it. The master bath has been two-toned—a light green on the top half of the walls and a dark green on the bottom half of the walls. In order to put the new color on top of that, then, I had to prime it first so that the old colors would not show through the new one, which is an off white with a slight blue tint to it. So, last night, I decided to prime the bathroom so I could paint it today.
It did not go well.
Before I could prime it, I had to remove the wallpaper border that ran around the wall, separating the two shades of green. Removing that was more difficult than I thought. While I could pull most of it after worrying one edge, when it came up, it left some of the backing on the wall and to remove that I had to use an adhesive remover. Clearly, also, the people who last painted the bath didn’t wait until the paint was fully dry before they applied the border because in some places, paint peeled away, leaving small impressions in the wall that I would have to fill. Once I removed the border, I had to take down the mirror mounted to the wall above the sink and also take down a small bathroom cabinet mounted to the wall.
In all, it took me an hour and a half to prepare the room to prime—longer than I expected it would.
Priming the wall was also difficult. For some reason, the clerk at the hardware store told me I should use an enamel stain blocking primer—but enamel does not go on as easily as latex and it covered poorly. No matter how many times I went over an area, the green paint beneath showed through.
The enamel also seemed to spatter more than latex does and I ended up with paint on the floor, on the sinktop, on the door.
This morning, I decided to reprime it. I went and bought some latex primer and applied it, going over some areas more than others where the enamel had done an especially poor job of covering the former color.
Once I was finished, the wall looked better—not perfect, but the walls seemed more white than they had before and I knew that when I applied the top coat, it would look much better—maybe near to what I imagined it would. I also cleaned the bathroom—scraping up the paint spatters from the vinyl floor and from the porcelain sink and toilet. I scraped away paint that had spattered on the door and then, when I had gotten as much paint as I could from the door by scraping, I used a product called Goof-Off which removes paint.
By the time I was finished—five hours after I had begun on Saturday morning, nine hours into the project in all—the bathroom looked much better, ready to paint tomorrow, finally.
It struck me as a perfect metaphor for writing. The first effort looked terrible. In most ways, the bathroom looked much worse than it had before I started painting. That was the first draft—the draft in which I got some paint on the wall, made some progress toward getting the finished product. More importantly, it was the draft that taught me how to paint the bathroom: it taught me that I was using the wrong material. The plan was good, the execution was poor.
Then came the revision, which comprised several aspects. The walls are essential to the project and so I had to work meticulously to get them to look good. The floor—which I am replacing anyway in a week and a half—was not essential and so it was not important what I did to it. It will be excised, replaced with other material I will find. The door, which is essential, since I am not replacing it—I cleaned carefully with the chemical paint remover. Those aspects of the job represent the decisions you make when you revise: some pieces of a project you throw out entirely, so it’s perhaps not essential to get them exactly right when you’re in the first draft of the project. The parts you’ll keep and that are essential, you clean up.
But the thing is, you can’t paint a room without opening the paint can, without putting brush and roller to wall. In the first stages, you make large strokes and then, when you perfect the job, you touch up what needs touching up or just replace it.
As writers then, we have to be willing to make huge messes with our first draft. We can’t care where the paint goes, so to speak—we just have to get it on the wall.
