Transcript:
If you want to write a great book, you're told your first one will probably stink. Maybe your second one, too. You have to practice, fail, develop your voice, put in the hours. Which makes sense. But then, how do you explain someone like Homer? Some 2,800 years ago, one guy supposedly gives us the Iliad and the Odyssey, two of the most influential works in Western civilization. So where's Homer's crappy first novel? What did he write before the Iliad? Turns out, Homer did have drafts. But not the kind you're thinking. Homer's drafts were other people. Because Homer probably didn't sit down and write the Iliad the way someone writes a novel today. The story came out of an oral tradition that had been developing for generations. Poets traveled around the Greek world performing stories about Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, gods, wars, and heroes. And they weren't necessarily memorizing one poem word for word. They inherited scenes, characters, rhythms, phrases, entire ways of telling the story. Then they performed them. Again and again. One poet tells a scene one way, another changes it. If an audience finds a passage boring, it gets cut. Do that for centuries and the story evolves. Which means the Iliad may have undergone countless revisions before anyone ever wrote down the version we know. Eventually there may have been an extraordinary poet named Homer who took this enormous inherited tradition and shaped it into something close to the Iliad and Odyssey we know today. Or Homer may represent more than one poet. We don't really know. Either way, Homer didn't sit down in front of a blank page and think, I want to invent something brilliant. He was standing on centuries of accumulated storytelling. Which actually means Homer doesn't contradict the advice that you have to make a lot of bad work before you make something great. He may be one of the greatest examples of it. We just can't see the drafts. Because they were spoken into the air 2 ,800 years ago.
