In order to write, you must write. This not a puzzle. It is not a conundrum. It definitely is not an oxymoron. Simply, at some point, you must begin, like a kindergartner, to put beads on a string. Creation of a story by way of written language is accomplished with written words. Those words are combinations of letters to which meanings have been attached. Your unique task as a writer is to string the letters together to make words. You also string the words together to make meaningful sentences. Which reminds me: According to my Granddaughter, there is a very special way to get really, really close to a unique squirrel. I asked, “How’s that?” “PawPaw, you neek on him!” You really should start them early. Back to writing. It is the doing of it, that is important. Do not waste your, or my, time telling me about all the reasons that you can’t find time to write. I wrote this article today. I wrote it on a day after I left the house, drove over one hundred miles on slow roads, made fourteen stops, went shopping, and sat waiting in the car for others. That was when I did my writing. While waiting. I could have read a book by some other author, or listened to music. Maybe I should have taken a longer nap. I chose to write. If you are going to be a writer, even part-time, you must write. It does not matter what the beads are. That is not the point. Don’t expect the Pulitzer for every golden sentence that rolls off your brain. You will likely throw most of it out for the junk it is. That is also not the point. The message need not even “make sense”. Spelling does not count. Which is a very good thing for me. It isn’t that I can’t spell. It is that I can’t type. My keyboarding skills are a lot less than spectacular. My fingers only have a vague notion of where to go when I’m pushing my speed “hunt and peck” envelope. The location of the keys is arbitrary anyway until the spelling checker is activated. Grammar does not count. Tell it your way, first. Clean it up later. Start with anything. Look out the window. Write about what you see. Observe your pets. Write about them. Give them human attributes and names. Have them speak to you. Answer back. Cut loose, and have some fun with it. Do something creative. This initial process, I call the “opening of the valve”. You must open the gate. You have to let the words flow out of your brain. You have to achieve some reasonable volume of word flow. Every author is different. Do it your way when you are rich and famous. I’m neither one yet, so I still do it this way. Once you achieve word flow, it becomes an easier task to direct the “flow” of words in a specific direction. It becomes easier to direct that “flow” to the subject you want to write about. Remember, to become an expert is easy. Go study something seriously. Spend eight hours a day at it for five days. That is a total of forty hours of serious study. Now move fifty miles away from home. You are automatically an expert on the subject of your study. Why would you want to become an expert? Every person has a different sized word valve. When you go to the hardware store, you can find valves that range from a half inch to four inches. They are different. People are different. If you are a two inch word valve, be happy. Let the words flow full bore. Keep the valve open for as long as the words continue to flow from your brain out onto the paper. When you seem to run out of words, run out of word steam, the pressure drops. This is not a bad thing. You are learning the capacity of your word steam boiler. You need this time. It is very valuable to you. It is now, during this down time, when your steam pressure of words is rebuilding, that you concern yourself with little things. Little things are things that are not terribly important right now. You have been creating. That is the hardest kind of work. You need to recover from that hard work. Little things are things that do not need to be done today. They can be put off indefinitely. Things like spelling, grammar, sense, tense, dangling participles (My sixth grade teacher had a “thing” about dangling participles. As I’ve aged, I’ve wondered from time to time if she was really worried about dangling in general? Or, was it that she really wanted to hang some of us?), capitalization, and punctuation. When you need to do that kind of work, you will do it. You will clean up any little problems you find. Most importantly, you will find yourself adding to what you originally wrote. Your correction and revision process allows you to reflect, see additional issues, lines of thought, paths to be followed, and you will expand on your work. I think it was Frank Herbert that said that one of his books had begun as a single sentence in an earlier bit of unpublished work. That is an expansion. Your original creation will inspire you to create even more. At this point, my word count is 927. I have used only two and one third pages of written notes on a five by eight yellow pad, out of a total of seven and one-third pages of notes that I created today. In my case I tend to originally write in long, complex, convoluted, intricate, and interrupted sentences. Look back at “dangling participles for, an example. I left that one alone just so you could see it. Do you see what I mean by convoluted? Note also the interruption with parenthesis. I often do the same thing with brackets. Sentences of forty, fifty, even sixty words are common. When I revise, I aim to break these monsters up into sentences of eight to ten words. I want short choppy sentences in clusters of four, five, or six sentences to a paragraph. Look at the first sentence of the last paragraph. It could easily be made into five sentences. It could become a whole paragraph by itself. Example: “In my case I tend to originally write in long sentences. My sentences are commonly unnecessarily complex. My thinking is convoluted, and so is my writing. My sentences tend to be intricate. I have a strong bent (left over from my college days) for interruptions with parenthesis. More than that, my favorite editor suggests rather forcefully, “George, cut the {expletive}{excrement}. Eschew the literary, collegiate {excrement substitute}. Write for the guy and gal who reads at an eighth grade level.” It seems like good advice. In my revision process, I commonly find that I end up with twice as many words as when I began. If you could see the small yellow pad from which I now sit typing this material, you would see confusion. There are carroted additions between the single spaced lines of written material. Phrases and sentences in notes fill the margins. Arrows are all over the place, pointing an addition to a sentence, or directing me to the back side of the page for still more material. My original hand written notes, “scripts”, are a “mess”. My wife, despite all her experience with children’s sloppy handwriting, cannot read many of the words I write. That is because I write for myself. I am the only person that needs to be able to read my writings for myself. While I use the word “write”, every author has the choice of how they will do their creative work. I’ve read about an author who uses a tape recorder and “works” while flat on his back. He literally tells stories and then employs a staff to transcribe. This example points out what is important about our craft: telling a good story. At this point the word count is 1,403. I have decided that I will use the rest of my notes (four more pages) from today to create an additional article on another day.
(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace completed an MA and taught in the public schools for 28 years. He recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, the layers of money sucking priesthood, and their departures from the fundamental ideas and messages of Religion. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will outrage everyone. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com
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