Developing Your Text and
Managing the Writing Process
Never ignore, never refuse to see, what maybe thought against your thought.
Friedrich Nietzsche1F
or creative nonfiction the heart of the authoring process is a person sitting at a desk, surrounded by information, notes,
scribbles and sources,
or otherwise jammed with ideas, and struggling to organize their thoughts on a blank screen or sheet of paper. This particular image is so dominant in our thinking about authoring because it is so awe-full, so hard to manage your way through at the time, so difficult to capture what you were doing afterwards, and so psychologically stressful or unnerving to contemplate at almost anytime.
In another field, writing novels, its practitioners collective obsession with the angst of an author imagining something out of nothing has gone even further, as
John Fowles noted ironically:
Serious modern fiction has only one subject, the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction … . The natural consequence of this is that writing about fiction has become afar more important matter than writing fiction itself. It’s one of the best ways you can tell a true novelist nowadays.
He’s not going to waste his time over the messy garage- mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters on paper … Yes, all right. Obviously he has at
some point to write something, just to show how irrelevant and unnecessary the actual writing part of it is. But that’s all.
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Of course, Fowles is pointing out that this degree of navel-gazing is deeply unhealthy, even disabling for his field. Thankfully,
creative nonfiction is a more prosaic
area than novel writing,
an area where well-primed authors generally find it easier (more routine) to do writing. But most of us encounter some similar problems in handling the self-exposure involved in authoring,
facing up to our own limited ideas and contribution, and coping with the inevitable separation between our planned piece of work and the one that actually materializes onscreen or paper.
Three key strategies can help ease the myths and difficulties surrounding the writing process. One step is to rethink the writing process not as a single creative act but instead as a multistage process, where each stage is as important for your progress as any other. Authoring does not just involve producing a first draft. It is just as much about how you
reflect on what you have done, tryout the arguments on other people,
replan your text in the light of comments, and implement revisions. Second, where apiece of writing is not working in its current form, it is useful to have in reserve a specific and reliable method for radically remodelling problematic text. A third strategy is to plan your writing sessions carefully and to review some detailed suggestions which may help you maintain progress and avoid running into potential road blocks.
Drafting,
upgrading and going publicEverything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
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