If you look up “writing process” in a writing textbook, you’ll find a tidy, linear explanation of how writers get their ideas on paper and polish them to be read by other people.
What those books tell you…isn’t true. (You can trust me on this. I’ve written two of those textbooks myself: Sentence Power – Holt, Rinehart & Winston – and Introduction to College Writing – Pearson.)
If you’ve read my previous posts about the Shaw and Education chapter I’ve been writing, you know that my own writing process is neither tidy nor linear.
It doesn’t have to be! The only thing that matters is coming up with a finished product you’re proud of. It doesn’t matter how you get there.
My favorite part of the writing process is the last step. Textbooks say that this is the proofreading step – making small editing changes in punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure.
I don’t work that way. For one thing, I edit as I go. Usage mistakes drive me crazy, and I find that rewording a sentence often affects the next sentence, and then I have to rewrite the following paragraph….It’s a lot easier just to get my sentences right during the early stages.
What I do last is work in additional material that I discovered after I completed my early drafts. It is an insane way to work. It is also fun, sort of like putting a puzzle together. While I was finishing up my Shaw and Education chapter, I pulled out some notes I’d made several months ago. Because I had a strict word limit (3,000 words), I’d had to leave out many marvelous ideas, examples, and quotations.
Nevertheless – and cheerfully ignoring the fact that I’d already hit my word limit – I read through several scribbled pages of notes to see if anything jumped out at me. And something did. In his essay “The Religion of the Pianoforte” (strange title!) Shaw had written, “It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thinking that sets a man feeling.”
Central to Shaw. It needed to be there, even if it wasn’t strictly about education. Fiddle, fiddle. Find some unnecessary words to cut.
Success! Quotation in, word limit honored.
I’m finished.
And it was fun, just as I’d thought it would be.
