Teaching an old dog new tricks. April 8, 2008 ~ 2:11 pm
Posted by Julie in : Uncategorized , comments closedI have always thought of myself as a writer, and generally if you think of yourself as a writer, you think of yourself as a pretty decent one. We only define ourselves as something if we’re good at it, after all. Now just because I think I’m a decent writer doesn’t mean I’m a decent writer all the time (blog posts written while I’m multi-tasking are proof of this). It also doesn’t mean that I have a great process to produce decent writing.
Frankly, I’m discovering that my writing process - which I relied on throughout at least eighteen of my twenty years of schooling - pretty much sucks. For starters, I can produce writing under pressure, so for many years I deluded myself into thinking that I needed that pressure to write something. Um, no. I was an idiot with procrastination problems. Also, my writing goes something like this: write something. Is it perfect? Did it say what I wanted it to say in just the right way? No. Delete it, start again. After I get that sentence done, move on. Today I finally realized that system is not very efficient. At all. It’s much better to get something down on paper, leave myself a note that says “This isn’t quite right, find another way to say it,” and move on to the next sentence. Get all of it out of my head and on to paper, then make revisions.
Did I mention that I’m thirty and that I can recall numerous occasions where teachers and professors told me this exact thing and I never implemented it? So I’m an inefficient procrastinator who is also a stubborn idiot. Wonderful.
Today on my lunch break, I was working on a grant. I told the artistic director of the theater that I’m writing said grant for that I will have a rough draft for her on Monday, and for once in my life I wanted to give myself plenty of time to write it and get some feedback from Jordana. (Look, in the past I would have started it Sunday night. This is progress.) And since I realized the “Get each sentence perfect” method sucked, I was getting stuff out of my head and leaving notes for myself throughout the Word document. And I remembered something else. Writing? It’s hard work. And I think the creative muscles I use for it have atrophied since I last tried to write anything that wasn’t a blog entry.
Today, writing is very similar to pulling teeth. I hope it will get easier again.
