Explosions!

"I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write."
— Madaleine L'Engle

I was chatting with my friend QuHarrison Terry about his creative process for writing last week, and the theme of repetition - as presented in L'Engle's third point - resonated throughout our conversation. While typically difficult for those unaccustomed to it, even writing and rewriting the same idea over and over helps. As a perfectionist, I usually try to get it exactly right the first time. When I'm writing, this means editing in place over and over as I try to achieve an impossible goal. I remember being taught in school to work in drafts, and it always annoyed me. But coming back to writing as free-time activity in my adult life, I can see how getting the ideas out is more important than perfecting the phrasing surrounding them.

Transitioning from one idea to another is also a struggle. I would guess that the overall flow of the ideas throughout the work is more important than the phrasing of transitions, so similar to the way in which spitting things onto the page beats chewing them up in your head, having an outline to guide the flow of the paper is superior to working through all the transitions as they enter your flow.

The next thing I want to touch on is L'Engle's first point. It's about practice and repetition much like the third, but it's also about diversifying your topics, discovering your interests and developing your voice as a writer. (As an aside, the privacy portion is something I personally would like to think is unnecessary, which is why this blog would make no sense to someone finding it organically on the internet.) In the talk with Qu, I related this to his notion of author authenticity. If you're going to publish something for others to consume, it should at least speak to you. It should be something you're interested in and can get behind and support and defend in the case where you have a discussion with someone about what you put out there. I don't think this means that you have to have such a discussion, just that you'd enjoy it if you were to have it, and that you'd genuinely believe in what you were saying during the conversation in the same way you believe in your original work.

L'Engle's remaining point about reading is the one I'm least certain of. While I think reading helps your vocabulary, reading generically, reading for content, doesn't cut it. In order for reading to significantly impact your writing, I think you have to be reading with that in mind. You have to be focusing on critically evaluating the author's style. You have to be thinking about how different types of content lend themselves to different types of prose. A fantasy novel would be ruined by the terse nature of the prose you find in scientific journals. Jason approached the cliff at 4.5 m/s and extended his arm with hand outstretched, adding an additional 17 cm to his reach as he caught the falling red Farlax just half a meter from the cliff's edge. Reading contributes most toward improving your writing when you're looking for the things you like in the author's work. For example, in writing fiction, which I rarely do, I find that my setup is often lacking and my descriptive prose, imperative to setting a scene, is frequently imbalanced against the scene's action. So, I might read a few of my favorite sci-fi authors to see how they do it.