For some reason, I have this long held belief that writing frequently will cause me to think more clearly. And as thinking clearly is a something of a rarity for me, I try to write just about every day. For the most part, it ends up being the angsty scrawl common to directionless 26 year olds: whole entries given over to brow furrowing articulations of how the universe appears with me as its axis. Y'know, journaling. And this sort of works. Or I think it has until I read what I've just written, which is invariably crap. So, frustrated by my various attempts at writing frequently and WELL, I have, over the past year or so, tried to take writing, on my blog at least, a little more seriously. And it has been a disaster. In my head this desire to write well roughly translates to slowing down the process, so I can more thoughtfully consider what it is that I'm trying to get across (I blame a starry-eyed infatuation with David Foster Wallace for this, whose essays are sort of a holy grail for writers who wish to sound thoughtful and intelligent and not completely full of shit.) Of course, what 'slowing down the process' means in this case is unclear. It's easy to imagine 'real' authors engaging in a sort of monastic contemplation of their subject before they begin writing, but after having tried that particular method, my guess that hollywood has furnished my imagination with yet another glamorous lie about the lives of others. However, the slowdown method follows with the little that I have learned over the past five years while teaching myself graphic design. The golden rule, simply put is that the first version of anything you make sucks, no matter how much time you've spent on it, and that forcing yourself to treat a 'finished project' as a starting point the next morning pays off in dividends. (Artistically speaking that is. Financially speaking, the opposite might actually be true.) So, wanting to be good at something and having only my limited success as a designer to lead the way, the assumption - and this is classic designerthink - is that if I can just spit out the raw material, the 'writing' part is where you slow down and rearrange those chunks in to coherent paragraphs. If enough time is spent carefully fitting all of the component pieces together, a certain poetic clarity will almost certainly emerge after a while. The same rules should apply I reason. Not quite. Apparently, the brute force technique doesn't work with writing. Looking back on the things I've written here over the past 3 years, it is the reckless little bits, unedited, typo-ridden, and drunkenly posted at 3am which resonate the most. In the same way that no amount of careful labor can reproduce the loose lines of a successful drawing, good writing - or the stuff I like anyways, which is how I'm defining it here - seems uninhibited by the belabored revision process inherent in good design. The moral of all this is unclear. Perhaps I'm using the wrong model. Perhaps I should find a different way of clearing my head and focus on things I'm good at. But just as with innovative design or beautifully descriptive sketches, great writing causes an uncontrollable to desire to try it out myself. Just to see. So if it's here to stay, where to next for some direction?

Comments

ylf
First drafts ARE crap. And in re-writing (or tweaking, as the case may be) remember to-- Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. --Boswell: Life of Dr. Johnson What's left over is usually pretty good. Sleep on it to be sure, tweak it again the next morning and publish immediately.

Nate
1. Got it, typewriter. (What each of us got out of this first one is weirdly telling.) 2. Or ice cream scoops; depending on complexity, density, etc. 3. He's setting the bar a little high, dontchyathink? I'd hate to stumble in to some horrible circuit of self loathing because my writing fell a little short of of creating "a new thing truer than anything true". Still, all excellent advice. Karma points awarded.

m.
tricky, you. the better the comment the better the karma? so here's my 2c. Hemingway once said that he wasn't going to get in the ring with Tolstoy, but he DID have lots to say on the act of writing, and while it may be poor form to quote someone else in a comment, he just breaks it down so well... 1. "there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." Got it. Bleed. 2. "It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply." Oh-kay. Well, I know it's complicated, 'cause I'm bleeding all over the place. I'll use simple-word-band-aids to clean things up. Right? 3. "From things that happened and from things as they exist and from all the things you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of..." Shit.