Permission to suck!

Published by neil on September 15th, 2007

One of the biggest blocks to creative writing is the word processor. “Hang on! Surely you aren’t suggesting we go back to the days of quill and parchment?” I hear you cry. No, not quite, but you’re along the right lines.

Writing is re-writing. 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. And I suspect there are more along similar lines we have heard so many times. But they are true. Writing is in the re-writing. Draft after draft, a piece of writing is honed from its original concept into the finished piece - or at least as finished as the deadline allows.

The problem with word processors and other digital writing tools, I find, is they get in the way of the very first stage of simply getting the story/plot/characters/stuff, out of one’s head and into the real world.

Each page of my Moleskine notebook holds around 230 words of my scrawling handwriting. On a journey from home to the London office, I can easily write two or three pages. The same amount of time in front of a computer and word processor, and I’ll be lucky for a couple of hundred words.

It’s all about editing.
The computer enables that to an almost infinite degree. And that’s the problem. Type a paragraph and it is far to tempting and easy to start re-writing, editing, that paragraph immediately. An hour later and all you have is a paragraph or two. In the initial draft of a piece of creative writing in particular, this can be fatal. First drafts are about getting the story out, good or bad. You must give yourself permission to suck in your first draft. Correct it later.

Today I have spent a few hours taking a short story I wrote several nights ago in my notebook, and inputting it into Scrivener. The initial writing is the first draft, and the inputting becomes the second. Whole passages are entirely different - it’s the first re-write, but at least I have a story, start to finish, to re-write. From now on, it’s just editing. The guts are there.

The novel (Table Rappers - I have six of these stories outlined already plus two other novel ideas in the background) needs this process even moreso than a short story. My hand written notebook forces me to constantly move forward in the storytelling. The most I can do there is completely cross out a section of text and re-write, no flow destroying editing, tweaking, and polishing. The hand written first draft is currently around 90 pages (that’s about 20,000 words - wow, that’s a significant number!), and the only editing I have in there are a few cross-outs, and some margin remarks such as “this bit is crap”, “I forgot to mention the spoon”, or “something happens to make him fall over”.

So here’s my tip: write your first draft by hand and use the process of moving it into the computer as the second draft. From then on, it’s just pure editing. It is undoubtedly working for me.

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