What got me into studying writing
was that I got in trouble with writing.
I couldn’t write.
I had been a diligent good student in college,
tried to do everything that my teachers wanted, and I learned to do that.
But when I started graduate school,
I just had more and more trouble.
I struggled harder and harder.
Some papers I got written,
and they were just no good.
I put so much agony into them.
I’d written sentences and sentences, and crossed them out.
And I wrote paragraphs and paragraphs, and crossed them out.
And I wrote pages, and crumpled up the paper and threw it away,
and finally produced papers which I turned in,
and they were just barely satisfactory.
In fact, they weren’t satisfactory.
Finally, I did have to quit graduate school after only a semester and a half,
before they kicked me out.
During that whole time
I was worried about my writing, and I kept a kind of a journal.
I kept taking notes. I kept writing myself letters
about what was going on in my writing,
especially when things got tricky, when I got stuck,
when I’d wandered into a swamp in my writing,
and I couldn’t figure out how to get going again.
I would take out a separate piece of paper
and write myself a note.
Not a pat talk,
but an attempt to be perfectly empirical.
What happened?
When did I first start getting stuck?
What led to that?
Can I figure out what train of thought got me down a blind alley?
What was going on with my language? What was going on with my thinking?
What was going on with my feelings?
And when I got going again, I would try to remember to stop and write myself another note.
How did I get out of here?
What was the turning point?
Was there something I did that helped me get out of the stuck point?
Well, I wrote myself those notes for three years,
and kept slipping them in a folder,
until that folder got to be very fat and full of notes.
Some of them were written on the back of envelopes,
but I was getting very interested in what was in there.
I didn’t have much time to explore it,
but that folder of notes to myself is what turned into my first book about writing,
and turned into my first study of the writing process.
But the main thing I learned, or at least the first thing I learned,
is that I had to abandon what seemed like the main premise in writing,
which is that… the theory that you have to get things clear in your mind ahead of time,
that you have to know what you’re writing about before you get going.
And, of course, people always said,
“Make and outline.
An outline is a perfect way to figure out what you’re…
what you want to say.
For getting your thought clear in mind ahead of time, make an outline.”
But I had enormous difficulties making an outline.
Either I didn’t have very much in mind,
and so I couldn’t put much into the outline,
or as I got more thoughts, I couldn’t figure out how to get them well outlined.
Or sometimes I actually succeeded in making an outline after a great deal of effort,
but then trying to write from an outline was a tangle.
I had this lovely outline,
but when I went through the writing,
I would… kept departing from the outline.
It just kept tying itself in knots.
The outline didn’t work.
Somehow the words of the writing and the words of the outline
were in different universes, and they didn’t fit together.
So what I learned was that I needed to
skip this principle of getting things clear in mind ahead of time.
I need to
plunge in on my writing
before I know what I’m really trying to say.
I needed to make a mess.
Making a mess is the quickest way to say it, and it’s the…
“Make a mess” is a concept that I cling to most fervently;
that if I let myself make a mess, it’ll go somewhere.
If I let myself keep writing,
even when I don’t know where I’m going,
I end up going somewhere.
That… So I had to gradually give myself permission,
because this is what I discovered when I was doing all this empirical observation of my writing:
that all my efforts to try and get things clear ahead of time
tied me into knots,
and all… whenever I stumbled into the process of giving myself permission
to just go rambling on, just go forging ahead to the I-don’t-know-what,
those almost always led me somewhere;
led to a lot of extra words,
but I saved time, even though I wrote down a lot of extra words and made a big mess.
I saved time in writing a paper.
That forging on into the unknown and doing a lot of free writing
eventually led to clarity.
So what’s the essential psychological fact about writing for me?
It grows out of this experience of watching myself write,
and trying to figure out when I get tied in knots and when I don’t get tied in knots.
And I think it has to do with the fact that there’s two essential muscles,
two essential processes that get involved in writing.
One is the process of opening the doors.
That’s where making a mess comes in,
allowing a mess to occur.
Opening the doors, asking for input,
inviting in the maximum amount,
a maximum amount of thinking words, just letting words come out.
So that… I’ve tended to call that the creative move,
the generative move,
the generative muscle,
the creative muscle.
That… you can’t write anything unless you generate a lot, a lot, a lot.
And you just need to take everything that comes, and not worry whether it’s any good.
But the trouble is, you can’t write anything that works very well
unless you emphasize the other muscle,
which is the clinching, critical,
logical,
nay-saying muscle,
that says, “Wait a minute. Is this any good?
It doesn’t work.
That’s wrong.
It’s just wordy.
It’s not good.”
Unfortunately, you need to be critical.
At certain magical moments, you can do those two things at the same time,
when everything goes magically well,
but most of the time I find,
and I see this in my students too,
it helps enormously to do those two processes one at a time,
one at a time.
To accept the garbage, to be generative,
to make a mess,
and after you have a lot of rich material,
too much,
then turn around and be critical and nasty.
And then engage in organizing too, and try to figure out what goes where.
When I have something to write,
what I’ve learned is that I need to
sit down for five-, and ten-, and fifteen-minute bits early.
I need to just get one quick thought down.
In fact, what I… what really helps me is, if I’m walking around,
or if I’m taking a shower,
or if I’m eating a meal,
I just have one little thought about that assignment,
and I just need to take out a piece of paper and jot that down,
and sometimes it’s two sentences, and sometimes it’s ten sentences, but that’s enough.
If I can do that four or five times for some major piece of writing;
or if it’s a small piece of writing, if I can do that a couple of times,
then when I sit down for the genuine draft,
I’ve got so much more, I’m so much further ahead.
So perhaps the most practically helpful thing I’ve learned
is to get very very short pieces of writing done early in.
Just make a little pile of those for when I sit down to write a draft.