This morning, as we biked down the Riverside Park path at 7 am—Chris on his way to the watch the Arsenal game at Nevada Smith and me on my way to Everyman Espresso for an hour of writing—we dissected the problem of tinkering.

Tinkering is procrastination in the guise of work. It’s when I open a Word document and read an essay-in-progress from the beginning and start making little, inconsequential changes to polish up sentences or move commas around. I love tinkering but it gets in the way of writing new material.

I put this problem to Chris. We were biking side by side because the hordes of serious weekend bikers had not yet crowded the path. It was lovely to be up and out so early, peddling along the sparkly Hudson River although it was a little windier than I like.

He had one thing to say on the topic of tinkering: Don’t do it.

He was quite emphatic. "Revising is one thing. Tinkering is another. Tinkering falls into the category of messing around."

I made a mental note.

"You should only tinker when it’s time to tinker," he went on, "and that’s only after the 'big picture' draft is complete. And then it's not tinkering, it's positive change-making and editing. It's rewriting, not tinkering."

While I tend to start with the flicker of an idea and draw it out to see if anything's there, he prefers to nail down the structure like a dressmaker does with a pattern. For example, he devoted two weeks to planning out his next chapter book during morning walks, making notes on post-its.

"Post-it's?" I was having trouble hearing him in the wind.

He raised his voice to cut through it. “Post-it’s take the pressure off!”

Step two was to get the entire draft down. Only then did he go back and reread to check the integrity of the whole. The final step is tinkering with the finer points of shape and sound.

The problem with tinkering too early--after every paragraph, page or chapter--is the very things you've tinkered into perfection may need to be cut because they no longer fit the pattern. It's wasted time.

This is similar to how, as a teacher, I planned a new school year. I created a year-long plan divided into months. I wanted to hit “plot points” (curriculum) at certain times to make sure I covered all the material. For example, I wanted to be sure to teach rounding off, telling time and measurement so I plotted out when it would happen.

The year-long plan brought me back to center after the chaotic details of each teaching day and so it is with writing. A plan is the yardstick by which we measure progress.

But what about art? Is tinkering a problem for visual artists? It depends, Chris said. Pierre Bonnard famously persuaded his friend Edouard Vuillard to distract a guard in a museum so he could touch up a work that had been completed years earlier. Hard to say if this was tinkering (to busy oneself with a thing without useful results) or accretion (the growing together of separate parts into a single whole).

To get back to this idea of pre-planning, this weekend we saw the Met Breuer exhibit Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, which examines unfinished works from the 15th century to the present by Klimt, Turner, Cezanne, Picasso and many others. It was fascinating to see the very detailed sketching that had gone into many of the paintings. (The one I loved best, however, Vincent Van Gogh's vivid, emotional "Street in Auvers-sur-Oise" (1890), looked like it had been dashed off.)

For me it may be a question of the size of the project. I'm not sure it's in me to make an outline for an essay but when it comes to my book I'm willing to try. A book is big and unwieldy and I get bogged down, which leads me down the tinkering path.

Most important of all is to write forward each day, not cycle back.

This tinkering eats up too much time.