Things I'm still learning about writing

I’m still racing towards a book deadline, which accounts for the exceedingly intermittent schedule of The Imperfectionist in recent weeks. In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to share some of the things I’m figuring out about the process, this time around:

What you need won’t appear until you need it. It happens to me frequently that I’ll realise, with a lurch of the stomach, that while the section of the book I’m working on right now is going fine, I’m about to run into trouble, because I don’t have everything I need (the right arguments, good enough material, whatever) for the bit that’s coming next. This bothers me less than it used to, though, because again and again, the missing insight, anecdote, or angle arrives just in time. I’ll open a book at random, or hear something on a podcast, or a friend will make a comment, or I’ll notice something on a walk, and it’ll be exactly what I need for everything to fall into place. It never seems to arrive until the moment it’s required, though, so that’s more way it’s being constantly hammered home to me that trusting yourself/reality/the process is the whole game here. I think I could muster a down-to-earth, non-magical explanation for this phenomenon, to do with the way one’s attention is primed to notice what matters most at any given moment. But it feels pretty magical whenever it happens.

Sometimes, you just have to decide. At other times, you don’t even need to do that. (Adapted from a Substack Note of mine): When I’m structuring or outlining a piece of writing, I find it helpful to remember that I’m “just deciding” – that is, not struggling to uncover the perfect structure that already exists out there in the world (that would be much more stressful), but just making a choice about what to put where. Probably, many different structures would work perfectly well. Yet when I’m actually writing sentences, it seems much more helpful to remember that I can “just listen” – ie., I can just hear from inside what it is I want to write, as the words come up. In that context, apparently, it’s much less stressful to just “see what’s there” than it is to make a decision. These two thoughts seem to pull in opposite directions, and I’m not sure why it should work this way, but it’s been immensely useful to realise that it does.

Print it out, type it back in. This isn’t new for me in itself – I’ve been doing it for years – but this time I’ve been even more reliant on the method I discussed with Bec Evans for her new podcast This Might Work, which involves printing out the most recent section of writing, deleting it from the manuscript, then typing it from the print version back onto the screen. (Some people, in response to that podcast, seem to be experimenting with typing it back in from memory; more power to them, but I’d never dream of putting myself through that!) The result is that I make all sorts of editorial improvements as I retype, in a very painless way; it’s like a conversation with someone who almost gets what I’m trying to say, so that my only job is to suggest a slight rephrasing. Or what feels like a slight rephrasing in the moment, anyway. Looking back, that’s often the stage at which a piece of writing went from being hopelessly confusing to as clear as I’m ever going to make it.

I’ll do almost anything to avoid The Moment. There’s a critical moment in writing – in an extended project, it happens again and again – when you have to get up your nerve and cross a psychological Rubicon, effectively declaring: I have something to say here, and now I’m going to tell you what it is. For me, this comes when I switch from making rough notes on a section to writing what I’ve deemed to be an actual first draft of it – which can and will be modified later, of course, but which nonetheless feels like the point of no return. And if I don’t keep my wits about me, I’ll do almost anything not to go there. All sorts of practices that can be helpful at other times – outlining, freewriting, additional research, going on walks to think things out, or anything else – can get co-opted as ways of avoiding the moment. But you can’t avoid the moment – and if I’m really honest with myself, I do always know when going for a walk, say, is creatively useful, and when it’s just avoidance. The moment is always uncomfortable. But the realisation that there’s no dodging it makes it much easier to stop attempting to do so.