Museum Pages: Lessons on Essay Drafting from Edward Hopper

During the shortest days of last winter, I paced around my chilly apartment, fretting about my unfinished book. I’d written eight of the fifteen essays I had planned for the collection, and I had six months until my deadline. By “written” I mean that eight essays existed in various stages of development, but none felt anywhere near ready to be bound in a book and read by strangers. My first book had taken over a decade to write, and the reality of finishing this second one in a single year was giving me a middle-of-the-night flavor of anxiety even during the day: I was certain that my book was going to be terrible. It didn’t help that the sun was setting every day at barely 4pm, making every evening feel like an insomniac’s 3am as I paced and fretted, anticipating ruin, mockery, derision—or worse, the polite deflections of friends and colleagues who were embarrassed for me.

I knew, of course, that early drafts are supposed to be messy, that you have to write before you can revise, and all the other writerly truisms. I’d reminded my students over and over: Don’t compare your drafts to someone else’s finished work. But logic is useless against self-doubt. I was spiraling.

I’ve always found museums to be an excellent cure for all sorts of writerly gloom—this “my work is terrible and everyone’s gonna hate it” kind, as well as the “I’ll never have another good idea again” kind, and even the “what’s the point anyway” kind. Something about being mentally squeezed by the volume of creative brilliance, like a weighted blanket for the mind. The quiet halls and the intentional lighting still me, remind me that yes, there is a point—and the point is always the work itself. I needed one of these reminders. So off I went one frigid January afternoon, the sun already beginning to set, to see Edward Hopper at the Whitney.

The gallery was more crowded than I’d hoped, so rather than getting stuck in the shuffling line of people moving slowly clockwise as one mass, stopping for longer than I wanted to at some pieces and not long enough at others, I made my own quicker circuit behind them. From this tighter inner loop, I scanned the room and only stopped to wait for a better view of a few pieces. I let my breath still a bit as I stared at warm-lit paintings of stone stoops and water towers and bridges, and solitary people with that distinctly Hopper-esque type of forlorn gaze, but mostly I was antsy. I was hot in my winter coat, forever too impatient for coat check lines, and irritated by the bustling crowd, convinced I couldn’t have the kind of resonant moment I was looking for with this many people around.

The cluster of people four deep at a far wall, stanching the flow of movement, told me before I could see the piece itself that I was approaching Nighthawks—Hopper’s most famous work, the diner counter and a much different kind of middle-of-the-night feeling than the one I’d been living with. Not wanting to jostle for a closer look, I hung back and caught a glimpse of the painting between shoulders. It was smaller than I’d imagined, and I realized that was probably because it always looked, even in reproductions, like a painting you could step right into. Then the crowd shifted and blocked my view, and I kept moving.

Just past the painting was series of three small sketches, lined up in a row, with no crowd gathered around: studies for Nighthawks. I finally stopped pacing. Here was a chance to have a moment alone with this image after all.  

The first sketch shows just the largest shapes—the long rectangle of the diner’s window with dark slices above and below, a black square of street to the left, and a shadow’s curve on a strip of sidewalk in the foreground. That’s it. Crude, but clear. The outline of that scene we all know so well: The fishbowl of a diner window, a bright beacon on a dark night, a small and bittersweet connection in the vastness of an empty night. That wasn’t all quite present yet in this sketch, but I could see where it would be soon, the vision already so clear.

The second drawing shows a little more detail: The single figure with his back to us, a black oval where his fedora would be. Just the most general shapes to indicate the couple seated at the far side of the counter. The curved line of a waiter’s back—only recognizable as a waiter’s back if you know the painting, otherwise just a curved line.

And then, in the last one, it all comes together. Smudgy in charcoal rather than warm yellow and gloaming greens and reds, but still—the light, the figures’ posture and gestures, the shadows on the street. Rough but unmistakable: Nighthawks.

My eyes kept going back to the first drawing, the barest one, just the shape of the thing. It was clear to me as I stood there, firmly planted in front of it, how much more that was than nothing. The shape of the thing. That was so much! The difference between a blank page and this first drawing was so much greater than the difference between this first drawing and the finished painting. These few lines held it all.

I backtracked to peek again at the painting, the crowd in front of it a little thinner just then. I could see each sketch layered into it so clearly, and the final executed vision’s impossibility without them. It felt like seeing a dear friend’s baby pictures for the first time and then looking back at their face before you: There you are! So different but also exactly the same.

I went back to the sketches, and I could see now that of the eight drafted essays I’d so despised just that morning, most were closer to the second stage on this new Hopper Scale of Drafting that was coalescing in my mind: I knew where the figures would sit, the perspective, the central focus, the action. They weren’t finished but they were well on their way, weren’t they? A few were even in the third stage: All the elements were there, gestures and shadows and all. They were ready to be done in paint, ready for the light to really come alive.

But that first sketch. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Even after I tore myself away and walked through the rest of the exhibit, I circled back to see it again, trying to sear it into my mind. I realized, standing there a third time, that for most of the seven essays remaining, the ones I felt like I hadn’t even started yet, I had this much—the shape of the thing. The concept, blocked out, crude but clear. And that was so very much.

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