I’ve been thinking a lot about the writing process recently, and how much it differs from person to person. Writing is one of the only activities in which the goal is the same–to produce quality textual work–but the process by which you achieve that goal is completely inconsistent. Some of the writers I know churn out their best work just as dawn sidles up, cup of coffee in hand, brains fresh and ready for intensive mining. I tend to have my best ideas right before falling asleep. Every night as I drift off I find myself constructing phrases and sentences in my head that contribute to the ever progressing narrative of my life. When I was younger, I used to keep a notebook next to my bed for just this reason. But having grown up with insomnia, I often fear that getting up to jot down my ideas will trigger a writing frenzy–soon it’s 3am and I’m shaking the kinks out of my aching wrists, having written and edited a draft that began with just a measly string of words and a hypnic jerk. Now, so much of my best ideas are consumed by the heaviness that invades the space between my eyes just before sleep. When I told this to a friend, he responded, “If you want to be the best at what you do, you’re going to have to get up in the middle of the night and write, even if you’re exhausted.” He’s right.
The process for me begins like this: I see something or hear something or think of something that moves me. Just as I am about to cry, I sit down at my laptop and I open up a blank page and I exhale and spill and purge. Writing is an exorcism for me, like a crustacean shedding its shell: afterwards I feel so light I often think I’m floating. I write everything down, even if I hate it or I’m embarrassed by it or it makes me want to scream. Often I start new paragraphs before finishing sentences. Once everything is on the page, I walk away and leave it to ferment. I think it’s important to get distance from your writing before you edit, or else you can get so sucked into its lyricism that you miss important grammatical errors or misplaced words.
The most important editing advice I’ve ever received was from an old co-worker at the Library Journal. He took it from the current Editor-at-large, John Berry, who was the Editor-in-chief of the magazine for 40 years. Sitting next to him at work every Tuesday and Wednesday was riotous; he would regale me with tales of the three martini lunches and conference orgies that punctuated the heydays of the publishing industry. He liked to yell at everyone who walked down our aisle–everyone except for me. I adored him. Mr. Berry’s advice is this: cut out the first and last paragraph of everything you write.
This is relative, obviously–some people have a closing line they’ve saved for the end that is just so heart-stopping that they couldn’t bear to delete it. But generally you have to write yourself into and out of a story, and deleting the first and last paragraph is the most direct way to winnow the chaff.
For me, flow is not the most integral ingredient of writing, but it’s certainly up there. Because of this, I read everything I write out loud to make sure that it sounds just right. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just know how a sentence is supposed to sound, and how the sentences around it should sound in order to generate the maximum impact. It’s not that I count beats, but I can tell by the way the words leave my mouth how many syllables a specific word should have. I think this obsession with lyricism is derived from reading a lot of poetry and Beat literature as a kid.
Whenever I write, I typically end up with at least 1,500 words. By the time I’m ready to publish, I usually have it down to 500 or 600. I am vicious and attentive: I am the meanest editor my writing has ever encountered. But because I can’t always achieve the distance necessary for optimal editing, if it’s a piece really close to my heart, I’ll often have a trusted writer friend look at it and give me feedback. I generally only do this with Really Important Posts, though, because blogging is an imperfect art, and I am an imperfect person, so mistakes are understandable if not expected.
It’s the picking and choosing that’s the most difficult. Sometimes I’ll be in love with a particular graf but realize it has absolutely nothing to do with the narrative as a whole, or perilously interrupts the flow, or makes the whole already-distorted thesis even more confusing. I put these grafs in a special post-it note, right next to the one where I save words that I saw in my Google Reader and fell in love with. Sometimes I copy them into WP drafts and try to build other posts around them, but sometimes they melt away, just like the ideas I have right before falling asleep.
I guess I just love that everyone approaches the same activity so differently. How do you write?
Most of my thoughts about writing come when walking or, oddly enough, in the shower. Neither of those locales are very conducive to capturing anything concrete unfortunately.
Nice post though!
While tipsy
@Derek– Thanks!
@Dee Hahaha, nice.
Right before I fall asleep. I try to write humorous pieces over deep emotional ones, as I find the dark ones put me in a funk. I think I come up with the best lines when I’m sleepy- probably because I’m too tired to judge them.