Person on the Page

My daughter Sarah once told me, “You can solve any problem if you make a chart.”

I have tested that claim several times. I’ve been testing it lately as I work on an e-book project on the essentials of good writing. What is good writing?  How do writers achieve it? I am hoping to offer whatever wisdom I may have gained during my twenty-five years of teaching college writing. 

To help me develop the project, I am delving into what has already been written on the subject. I’ve gone to my bookshelves to find the books on writing on which I have relied over the years, and I have asked people to name the books that come to mind on the subject of good writing.  

My goal is to create a chart that identifies what these books have in common.  What do all of their writers agree on about what constitutes good writing?  My chart might end up looking like a multi-circled Venn diagram that shows the overlap among the most popular books on writing and reveals what all or most of them have in common. 

I’ve been re-reading books such as Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Stephen King’s On Writing, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.

I must pause for a moment on Annie Dillard’s book.  While re-reading The Writing Life, I was halted by one of her observations about the writing process. It led me to a decision that I didn’t think I would make.

While addressing how writing happens, Dillard articulates a popular debate among writers. Should one write slowly and edit as one writes? Or should one write quickly, aiming for quantity, and edit later?

Dillard writes:

The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it—is that original writing fashions a form.

So, writing slowly and painstakingly—editing, revising, and developing as we go—allows us to build upon the form that we have established from the first line we write. It’s a disciplined way of writing. This has been my practice for most of my writing life. It has reaped whatever successes I have enjoyed.

Then Dillard writes:

The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen.

So, pushing oneself to keep writing without stopping to edit and revise allows the form to emerge as the writing proceeds—the form, or the “true shape,” as Dillard describes it.

It’s a method that was first defined by Coleridge and the Romantics as a natural or organic way of writing. By this method, the writing itself and the subject of the writing contribute to determining the form. The writer writes and keeps writing to discover what emerges on the page. This is a practice I adopted for six weeks last winter as an experiment. While it felt strange and often forced, I was not disappointed by the results. 

Author Jami Attenberg’s weekly “Craft Talk” email arrived in my inbox last week. It reminds me that her yearly initiative #1000WordsofSummer will begin on June 1. Attenberg conceived this event to help writers jumpstart writing projects or to overcome writer’s block.  Quite simply, to participate in 1000 Words of Summer, one commits to writing 1000 words per day every day for the first two weeks of June. 

At the end of that time, if one has been successful in writing the prescribed number of words each day, one has 14,000 words of material—part of a book-length manuscript, perhaps, or rough drafts of a number of stories or essays. 

I’m normally not a joiner. And I am always wary of “free” offers that I suspect will lead to my being asked to spend some money after I’ve become emotionally invested in them. (Not that I begrudge Jami Attenberg wanting to make money.  Writing is her sole source of income, and I applaud and admire her for her ability to support herself with her novels and craft books.)

But I’m going to participate in the 1000 Words of Summer event. I’m registered for the Zoom kickoff that will take place tomorrow morning. I feel silly and dumb, and I’m almost sure that I’ll disappoint myself, but I’m going to do it anyway.  What the heck?  I’ll dive in with the Romantics’ trust in organic writing, and I’ll watch for the messy, fragmented, dissatisfying writing to fashion its own form, as Dillard would say.

And of course, as my daughter Sarah would recommend, I’ll keep a chart of my daily word counts, my subjects and genres, and my feelings about each day’s work.    

It’s for only two weeks.  I can do this.   

Thank you for reading! And if you have favorite books on writing that are not mentioned in my list above, please tell me the titles.