There’s a myth out there that says the longer you write the better you get at it.
Okay, that’s not a myth. Practice makes progress, after all. But where the myth shows its face is in the belief that as you get better at writing, it also gets easier.
Uh…I’m sorry if I have to burst some hope-filled bubbles here (and I’ll try to give you new hope-filled bubbles by the end of this), but writing does not get easier with practice.
I mean, in some instances it does. I now have sort-of a process for getting a first draft written and revising it endlessly and perfecting it even longer—it’s not all just loose ends flapping in the wind. So I suppose that’s gotten easier. But what hasn’t gotten any easier is getting started. Or dragging myself through the middle—although I have gotten better at them…it’s just that by the time you get to the middle of a project your excitement for the newness of it has worn off and you’re not yet excited for the end because you still have so…far…to go.
What I’m trying to say is the mechanics of writing get a little easier the longer we’ve been writing. But the thing that gets in all our ways—the headspace of writing—doesn’t necessarily get much easier.
Unless…
You know I wouldn’t leave you with something as hopeless as it never gets any easier, didn’t you?
The truth is, our heads get used to the constant persistence after a while. We feel that initial little oh, wow, this is a big commitment, I don’t have the time, and we know we’ve done it before. We’ve found the time. We hear those voices that say, Well, this idea is crap and no one will ever want to read it, but we also know we’ve taken a crap idea to a brilliant idea before, so it stands to reason we can do it again.
We’re faced with a blank page and that little surge of panic that accompanies the thought, I don’t know what to write, and we remember what Frank Choi, a Korean American poet, said: “Just start a sentence and hope brilliance will strike.”
And we get started, like we did last time.
We just start a brainstorm and hope brilliance will strike. We just start a sentence and hope brilliance will strike. We just start a revision and hope brilliance will strike.
And brilliance usually does, eventually, if we’ve put in the work and the time.
Here are some ways we can help brilliance along:
1. Write the first draft by hand.
I know it’s a radical ask. We live in the golden age of technology! Why would we write an entire book by hand?! It takes so much longer!
Sometimes that’s the point. When we fly through scenes, we sometimes don’t get everything out of them that we may have gotten if we’d slowed down a little. Maybe there’s a significant look one character gave another that meant something ominous. Maybe there’s a vital line of dialogue we missed in our hurry to get all the words typed into the document. Maybe we’re missing an entire point in our essay because we haven’t slowed down enough to let it marinate.
And besides that, scientific research indicates that we use a different part of our creative brain when we write by hand. So if you write the first draft by hand and subsequent drafts by computer, you’re using your whole brain. How cool is that?
So grab a notebook and start writing. And if you don’t want to write an entire book by hand, try just the first chapter.
2. Put your composition away for a while.
When you’ve finished a draft of whatever you’re writing, I always recommend putting the story aside for a while before picking it back up. Time and distance allow our brains to approach stories with fresh ideas, and we can more clearly see problem areas and places that need fixing.
How long should you put it away? Well, that depends on your preference. My first drafts often get put away for three or four months before I dust them back off. And hopefully in that time I’ve not only grown as a writer but also as a person, and I can make vast improvements to the story.
Later drafts (drafts 2-6 or so) get put away for between two weeks and a month. Fresh eyes are valuable.
3. Remember you’ve been here before.
The longer you practice writing and the more stories and compositions you complete from start to finish, the more likely you can remind yourself, at any step of the process, that you’ve been here before and you’ve written your way out. The exciting beginning, the not-so-thrilling middle (I know I’ve been dumping on the middles, but truthfully the more middles I write the fonder I get of them), the I’m-not-sure-how-to-end-this…you’ve been in all these places before. Which means you can confidently and expertly (maybe) see yourself through them again.
Writing comes with all kinds of resistance. But the more practice we get putting words on a page and pushing through the resistance that’s bound to come, the better at it we get. And…dare I say it? The easier it all gets.
Not easy. Just easier. Marginally.
But we don’t do it because it’s easy, do we? We do it because we love it.
Have a fantastic month of starting and finishing sentences—hopefully brilliantly.
