One of the cool things I get to do as an editor is see books change before my eyes as the writer sends me draft after draft. Every writer is different and I need to discover the way they let their story unfold.

Some labor over each detail in a draft and send me little bits with full detail. Others dash out longer bits less fully realized and send me sketches that they will later fill in.

The Life editors recently discussed that one of the challenges for an editor is looking at a work with fresh eyes. I was thinking about this when I followed a link from Daring Fireball to this movie of a New Yorker cover being created.

Take a minute to watch the movie. The artist captured himself drawing the cover on his iPhone. It’s mesmerizing to see the picture come to life. Over and over he draws a shape, adds color, and then starts to add detail. “Oh,” you realize, “that’s an umbrella.”

He starts with a fuzzy background that doesn’t look like much. By the end you realize it’s not supposed to. That it’s intentionally out of focus. It sets the context for the scene we are supposed to focus on. The people close to the camera are sharply drawn but are only shadows which don’t appear until nearly the end. In between is a hot dog cart with its umbrella. At the very last minute the New Yorker logo and the date are added to the top of the image and it’s a completed cover.

You can see a longer video showing some of the same evolution of a song in NPR’s Project Song. Here is a video of Nellie McKay composing a piece of music under a set of constraints. In this video you also get to see what she is going through as the song evolves.

Isn’t your reaction to the finished song and the completed cover different because you lived through their creation? I think you would have viewed the cover differently had you just seen an image of the completed cover. I am sure I heard the song differently before I saw this video. I have a different connection to these works.

With the books we edit, our goal is to try to think of you reading the books for the first time. But we know that our relationship to the work is different because we’ve come to know the author and we’ve watched and participated in the creation and polishing of the work.

This post originally appeared in the Pragmatic Life blog.