I’ve come to believe that, to get to that finished draft, you’ve got to let the writing process itself be not only iterative, as we know it is, but actually messy. Nobody sits down and writes straight out, from beginning to end, in reams of beautiful prose, a compelling argument they’ve already researched and fully worked out in advance, like unrolling a red carpet to tenure (or a degree, or publication). Or rather, the only people who do that are imaginary—they’re the successful writers and scholars in our heads, the ones we envy, whose processes we imagine must be easy…