The Unwritten Glossary: On the Private Language Between Writer and Draft
Every writer, I suspect, keeps a secret dictionary. It is not a formal thing, bound in leather and kept on a shelf. It is a living, shifting lexicon born in the margins of a draft, scribbled on the back of a receipt, or muttered under one’s breath while walking the dog. It is the private language we develop with the work itself, a collection of shorthand and code words that mean everything to us and nothing to anyone else.
This glossary is not for the reader. It is the scaffolding, not the building. It is the map of a territory only you are exploring, marked with your own peculiar symbols. A character’s tic might be reduced to a three-letter acronym. A recurring thematic image might be denoted by a simple, private glyph. A particularly troublesome paragraph might be given a nickname, something like ‘the bramble patch’ or ‘the swamp,’ so that you can approach it with the right tools and mindset later.
These terms are born of necessity, a way to move quickly through the dense undergrowth of a first draft without stopping to explain oneself. They are a form of intellectual speed, allowing the mind to leap over complex ideas it has already named in its own way. To see these notes later is to be granted access to the writer’s mind at its most unguarded and pragmatic. It is the raw ore of thought before it is smelted into public prose.
The Fading Ink of a Private Tongue
There is a certain melancholy, then, in the final edit. The process of revision is, in part, the process of translating this private language back into a public one. You sand down the personal notations, expand the acronyms, and dissolve the glyphs into full sentences. You untangle the ‘bramble patch’ until it reads as smooth, navigable prose. The scaffolding is dismantled, and all that remains is the clean wall, giving no hint of the structure that made it possible.
This act feels like a quiet erasure. You are dismantling the very signposts that guided you through the creation. The draft loses its personal geography and becomes a country anyone can visit. This is, of course, the entire point. We write to communicate, not to obfuscate. Yet, in that translation, something intimate is surrendered. The struggle, the false starts, the personal jokes you shared with the text—they are smoothed over, becoming invisible seams in the final garment.
Perhaps this is why we sometimes feel a strange distance from a published piece. It has been translated out of our mother tongue—the messy, efficient, and deeply personal language of the making—and into the common tongue. It is complete, but it has left behind the secret vocabulary that was its first breath. It is a necessary farewell, the quiet closing of a lexicon that existed for only one reader, and only one read.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: