I have the great fortune of teaching creative writing. It’s a mostly wonderful endeavor because it provides people with an outlet and a guaranteed readership for their ideas and feelings. My work comes in trying to give consistency of shape to those wildly unique forms, to allow distinctiveness to shine while imposing some order in terms of genre and audience expectations.
And I’m no expert; ask my students, ask my instructors, ask my peers. But I have come by a few insights, drawn both from teaching as well as my personal experience in writing, editing, and publishing.
I also get lots of questions: How can I X? How did you Y? When should I Z? And that uncertainty, especially for new writers, is something I do understand. So I thought I’d try and answer some of the questions that pop up most frequently here in a series of posts as time allows.
Today, for the inaugural post, I thought we’d tackle a tough one: How do you just sit down and write something?
It’s daunting to try and take something from your head and convert it to text. It’s even more daunting to try to do so with the idea that other people are not only going to read that something, but need to see it the way you intended it in order to understand, to empathize, and to enjoy. The short solution is don’t try.
Don’t think about the audience yet, because in an initial draft, you are still trying to get something very personal converted to text, and that’s hard enough as it is without thinking Is this going to make for great writing? So, my suggestion is to reposition whatever you are trying to eventually write (a novel, a poetry, a play) into something smaller and more manageable. I use the concept of transcription.
If all you are doing is sitting down to write a brief transcript, of a moment, of an idea, of a feeling, and leave it at that, then the task becomes smaller and more personal. I think that writing anything personal serves as a mileage marker, or a tombstone, for a very particular moment or point in life. So, my theory is that I need to get it down before it floats away, where “it” is very abstract (a random encounter, a bird in flight, a long kiss on a dark street) but also very temporal and therefore all the more fragile and fleeting. So trying to do anything more than capture that moment in the best or simplest way that you can is going to be too hard or time consuming and thus self-defeating given the nature of the thing you’re trying to capture. As a crude metaphor, you don’t try to capture a bear by luring it straight into an exhibit at the zoo.
In my time doing transcription, I’ve found two clear benefits.
The first is that it helps memory. I teach journalism too, and I love this activity where I have someone come in and whisper nothing in my ear in the middle of a lecture. I don’t remark upon it, and the person departs without acknowledgment while the lecture continues. Then in 15 minutes, I ask the class to describe the person (height, clothing, hair color, movements, etc.). Unilaterally, no one remembers much beyond an impression. Maybe shoe color stuck or the way the person covered their mouth with their hand, but never has anyone recalled all the details that would, say, allow the police to make a sketch worth a damn. And so it goes with any memory, impression, feeling, or idea: The longer you wait to get it down, the more likely it is to disappear.
The second clear benefit is flexibility. I can’t imagine higher flexibility than waking up from a dream and reaching for your phone on the bedside table to jot, in the very convenient Notes application, “The dog with the wristband.” I wrote this last night at 2:37 a.m. What does it mean? Not sure. When am I going to use it? Not sure. But this morning, when I looked over the note, I was washed in color and impression, and I liked this concept of a dog that was so old that his owner got him a wristband so he could sit at the bar. Maybe I’ll write a whole short story about that dog. Maybe he’ll be a side character’s affectation. Maybe he’ll never come up again, but because of the flexible nature of the transcript, I didn’t have to worry about that at 2:37 a.m., and I can’t imagine lower stakes for a writing situation.
I’m a true believer in getting it down and then revising until I either don’t hate it or it reveals itself as garbage. I’ll talk more about revision down the line as well as how and where to organize your thoughts, but either way, the transcription process forces you to exercise the impetus, and you can move on in the certainty that you tried. That last bit sounds rah-rah, and I’m ashamed of it, but since it’s true, I’m leaving it.
Thanks for reading.