how I write

This summer I've written lots of lecture notes and online materials, and more recently, the purpose statement for the preliminary round of a national stipend program and a book review.

The lecture note stuff is easy; I just write as though I were writing a blog or in my journal, and then I go back and edit to make sure it's super-clear and the tone is neither too stiff nor too casual.

On the other hand, writing the grant app was tortuous and so was the book review. However, I learned a couple of things about how I write that are worth keeping in mind as I begin to draft a new article. Typically I "write to learn" - that is, I learn what I know about a subject and what I want to say about it by writing it down. However, I'm also a stylist, and so each sentence I write has to be as perfect as I can make it, which means I revise incessantly as I write to learn. And because I really work on diction and end focus, my sentences tend to lead in directions that are hard to change around to where I think I should go next. In a way, this is a fancy way of saying that I'm a better editor than writer. (I think most people are.)

What this means is that it takes FOREVER for me to produce finished work (I started the 700-word book review in May and finished it yesterday) and also that a lot of my writing ultimately gets left on the editing room floor. This is inefficient both from a mental exertion standpoint and from a time-to-finish standpoint. I need to learn to write more quickly and efficiently.

So: two helpful hints I discovered while working on the book review:

1. Even though I'm not big on outlines, my new thing is to make an informal outline, at least of the main content, and then work from it as I write. I have ALWAYS hated outlines - so artificial and stiff! - but some sort of plan for the overall work, even if it's just snippets and phrases, helps me to write more efficiently. In the book review I changed the outline somewhere in the middle of writing, but at least there was a Plan to be changed.




2. With the outline at hand, write it all down as fast as possible. Deliberately write bad, awkward sentences if necessary, just to keep the ideas rolling. (It helps me to have been drinking a little - inhibits the inner editor.) Be as colloquial as necessary just to keep the ideas flowing. But: write in complete sentences; fixing fragments is a pain.

Let's see if this can help me write an article for a planning journal in about a week. My (very ambitious) goal is to get through a rough first draft by next Tuesday. That's ambitious b/c I have to be at school on Wednesday (90 minutes of advising will basically kill the whole day) and then B wants to drive to the State of Insanity (gah!) to see the folks. I can't say no to that (even though we just saw them a couple of weeks ago). Then Labor Day weekend and then, hello, first day of school.