I’ve learned three basic things about writing over the last forty-five years that are worth passing on.
- Real Writers Write, Would-Be Writers Moan About Not Being Able to Write
I learned this lesson from Judith Viorst, when I was just turning thirty. I saw her at a party in TriBeCa and we walked about my writerly ambitions. I don’t remember exactly what she said but this phrase is what I took away.
(Judith Viorst has written numerous terrific books in a welter of genres. I’ve always particularly loved Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Day and Necessary Losses, an irritating discouraging but ultimately hopeful book about why losing everything is good for you.
At first I was furious with her for saying this, but as I thought about it over months, I realized that, first of all, it was good advice: writing (as opposed to moaning about not being able to write) was within my power, and relatively easy to do (more on this later). I also realized that it was literally true: if all you did was moan about not being able to write, you would never be a writer. You would only be a wannabe.
So I started writing essentially every day, a practice I’ve kept up until now.
2) Writing Is Different From Rewriting
When you are doing the first draft of something, you are working against an internal critic I called — in my thirties and forties — The Censor. The Censor wants to edit everything you write, I observed, and can paralyze you when you’re trying to get a first draft down on paper.
Once you have something written, The Censor becomes your friend. And the work changes from getting something, anything, down on paper to getting it right, getting the right thing down on paper, getting the right effect.
These are two different jobs and they require two different philosophies, two different practices, and two different sets of techniques.
Writing — the first draft — requires a philosophy of toleration. You have to subvert The Censor by pretending that everything you are putting on paper is peerless.
The practice appropriate to getting words on paper is write <X> pages of text a day without regard to its quality. Quantity matters; quality does not.
A technique that corresponds to this is what Peter Elbow called “freewriting” in his terrific (and still relevant) classics Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power. When you freewrite, you just keep writing, even if (as sometimes happens) you write the same phrase over and over again like Stephen King’s character in The Shining. To be fair, it doesn’t usually happen that you repeat page after page; you usually start gushing again after a few lines, not unlike restarting a jammed pen.
A variant of this is Calvin Trillin‘s vomitout strategy which is such a good name I’ve taken it over as the generic name for my first-draft efforts.
Rewriting requires putting The Censor back in charge.
(BTW, rewriting is not the same thing as “checking punctuation, spelling, and grammar”. That’s great stuff, but that’s after rewriting. Rewriting is whipping the first draft into shape, getting it to achieve exactly the effects you want it to achieve.)
The practice appropriate to rewriting is write for <X> hours a day without regard to the quantity of rewriting you finish. If you spend 4 hours dithering over a comma, so be it. If, on the other hand, you read over 10 pages without making any changes, you are probably not rewriting hard enough.
Writing can be done in a notebook or on a computer. Rewriting usually requires space. You have to spread out the whole work, look at the whole thing, put the whole thing up on the wall or out on a table. It also requires what Cal Newport would call “deep work”: big blocks of uninterrupted time spent worrying the material.
3) Everyone has The Censor, and His Aim is to Keep You From Doing Your Work
Have you read The War of Art yet? No? Buy it. Read it.