Let's Journal: The writing process
What works for you? Tell us!
Welcome guest writer Rebecca Holden, who writes an endearing newsletter Dear Reader, I’m lost. Her posts are honest and vulnerable. In this essay, Rebecca talks about the role journals play in her writing process and what works for her. I comment briefly in bold inside this terrific piece. Let us know what works for you and how you get started.
Dear Reader,
I’m a creature of habit. I like plans and routines, straight lines to follow (is that why I get so lost?) and a certain order to things.
For instance, I eat the various elements on a plate of food in a predetermined sequence, starting with a tiny taste of my favourite part. Last night it was salad with homemade quiche, no crust, and that first nibble from my fork gave me a sneak preview, a glorious taste of what I’d be finishing with: the quiche. In between I concentrated on the rest, alternating between the homemade coleslaw and delicious garden salad sharing space on my plate.
The rest of that slab of quiche (a rectangle, always a rectangle) sat politely on my plate until my knife, fork and palate were ready to do it justice. Reader, I’d saved the best for last.
Check out the footnote to snag the recipe!1
And this of course got me thinking about what the best bits of other things are.
Mary: Isn’t that a fab metaphor for the writing process? I write as I roll out of bed, when the unconscious work let’s loose.
When I’m writing I love to sample the various flavours of different ideas, catching them by writing them down, and expanding both my thoughts and my notes at that exciting stage before I begin a proper draft. Starting to draft a piece of work is absolutely not my favourite part: I generally find this to be more frustrating than enjoyable as I fill page after page with gosh-this-is-rubbish gobbledygook.
Mary: Me too! That blank page can be terrifying.
But once these flavours have landed on the page, the magic begins to happen: some of the necessary but perhaps less interesting elements to the meal of writing slowly become less dominant in favour of the main event. Then the quiet care of editing becomes a process of eating my way slowly around the plate from the coleslaw to the salad, taking care of the side orders until the star of the menu – the story, the focus, the quiche of the post – takes pride of place.
Regardless of the edit, and regardless of how much word-salad has been rearranged or consumed, that slab of quiche remains. The main story, the focal point of my creative process, is centered on the plate, but although it might be the best-tasting bit, it still needs those salady sides for support. Favourites aside, all of the elements on the plate are necessary for an enjoyable, satisfying meal.
With all of this in mind I’ve had some fun breaking down my different stages of writing and then scoring them according to preference (5 = most favourite, 1 = least favourite). Here are my results:
STAGE ONE: Making notes on ideas
SCORE: 4 out of 5
😃
This stage happens almost exclusively when I’m out and about on my walks. As my brain unclogs, words fall out. In walking terms, this is an inconvenience, given that I need to stop to write things down, but if this is – and it is – my best way of catching ideas, I consider the hobbling of my progress to be justified.
This stage scores highly – it’s my second favourite – because it’s a sunshiny brainstorm of all the exciting things whizzing around my head that I take great pleasure in committing to paper.
STAGE TWO: Writing the draft
SCORE: 1 out of 5
😐
Starting a draft is my least favourite part of the process. That’s a shame as it’s these initial words that make up the essential substance of every piece of writing. This stage happens at my desk, where I love the physical process of writing with blue ink on smooth paper, but the creative aspect of this stage can leave me stumbling in the dark. As soon as I sit down, the words I think I’ve harnessed go rogue, run around in my head and laugh at my attempts to arrange them in some kind of order.
Yet this awkward beginning is a reminder that I have to be patient and give the words a chance to speak for themselves: They need to go for their own exploratory walk across the page, to find company in new words and phrases I haven’t met yet. I’m not in total charge of them, and it’s always at the point I realize this that at last I find my flow. In this way unexpected words, phrases and even a narrative I often hadn’t initially anticipated can find their way onto my chaotic pages. At ink-and-paper time I don’t rein myself in: Any words in my head land on the page, sometimes accompanied by crossings-out, arrows, omission marks or scribbles in the margins – tiny as-I-go tweaks that are swift enough not to interrupt either my thoughts or my writing, but which are nevertheless noticeable when they become important at the next stage.
STAGE THREE: Typing
SCORE: 2 out of 5
🙂
I open up a Word document and copytype what I’ve written by hand, paying attention to the crossings-out, inserting the words above the omission marks or tracing the shafts of my messy arrows to the sharp end where my point will be. Often I find I add more bits and pieces as I think of them: I type as fast as I think, and as a result my Word document will be longer than my inky pages.
Over time I’ve found that my impressive typing speed isn’t an advantage at the drafting stage: quite the opposite. In fact, I draft my pieces by hand and not with a keyboard in order to curb my speed. When I’m writing by hand the narrative has the opportunity to refine itself, to develop, between my brain and my nib: slowing things down in this way means that less of my typed-at-the-speed-of-light garrulous gibberish ends up on the page in favour of more considered choices of words and phrases. That’s why my typing stage is a stand-alone one, kept separate from any real editing.
STAGE FOUR: The pause/the cup of tea/the good night’s sleep/the weekend off
SCORE: ineligible - entirely dependent on circumstances.
😐 / 🙂 / 😀 / 😃 / 😍
It’s a crucial stage of any creative process to step away: to go to work, or for another walk, to get on with the ironing, to make a quiche... Time and space and doing something different are opportunities to reset my brain, either to reflect on what I’m writing or simply to concentrate on something else. Sometimes at this stage other things I want to add to my piece of writing will occur to me – this is why I have my tiny notebook in my back pocket every minute of the day. Reader, I will not remember these things unless I write them down, despite my repeated attempts to convince myself otherwise.
Write things down! These are some initial notes for this post. Yes, I know my notebook looks the wrong way round - trust me, this is a comfortable and page-space-maximising way to use a passport-sized notebook!
Mary: I’m a big fan of journals. Here’s a photo of one of mine. I love these little notebooks that fit in my pocket:
Yep, this one has seen better days 🥰.
STAGE FIVE: Editing
SCORE: 5 out of 5
😍
After a break, going back to my Word document with any other notes I’ve made during the pause is something I really look forward to. I review, rejig and reshuffle to get my story in the right order, rewriting chunks as I go.
Command C (never X – I’m not crazy!) and Command V are my best friends. Copying and pasting are such a gift.
But I never cut and paste. Instead, for a while that chunk of text is in its position A (where I no longer want it) and in its new position, position B (where I DO want it). Once it’s IN position B, I go back to position A and delete it from there.
I’d rather have that chunk of text on my screen twice for a little while than not at all because I’ve been too hasty with my text-editing shortcut keys.
(Ask me how I know why this is such a good idea. 😉)
Be careful with the scissors.
Mary: BTW, this was Eudora Welty’s way to create a story: pieces of typed words cut out, laid out and moved around on a table or on the floor. Rebecca is in good company!
Every post of mine shrinks at this point, sometimes enormously. I’m always surprised at how much I cut out: words, phrases, entire paragraphs and often even whole chunks of narrative which I’d originally considered to be fundamental to what I’m writing but which in fact now only serve to dilute my point rather than support it.
My editing is harsh and deadly. At this stage, I find myself unflinchingly trimming my round-in-circles text, turning many of the thoughts and ideas I’ve enjoyed collecting into an untidy litter of sad superfluwords beneath my desk. It can pay dividends, though: recently I amalgamated two very long posts into a single, shorter-than-either-predecessor one that was way punchier than either of its lame and saggy starting points, and learned that sometimes less really is more.
Reader, if in the far-distant future you ever see a book by Rebecca Holden on a shelf at Waterstones, please know that its far-too-slim 100-page volume containing not nearly enough words will have begun as a 10,000-page draft containing all of them.
STAGE SIX: Polishing
SCORE: 3 out of 5
😀
I copy my text from Word, and, in the case of what you’re reading right now, paste it into a new post on Substack. (Mary: Me too!) I find that looking at words in a new format is a wonderful way to identify irritating niggles, superfluous words, clunky phrases or dodgy punctuation. Printing it out of course would be equally useful for establishing where I need to polish. After this last tweaking stage, I go ahead and find pictures, sort out any footnotes, add dividers and play around with formatting quotes or headings.
This stage is always fun, and it’s the one that means I’m nearly at my goal of finishing what I’ve been working on. Yay!
Finally, I always schedule my posts with at least a day’s breathing space, to give myself confidence that it’s never too late to change something.
I operate best with a plan. I like to know where a journey will start, and to anticipate how much I’m going to enjoy each stage of it. And as with my set-in-stone eating habits, I like to follow a plan for my writing. Developing an awareness for the stages I need to go through, and making sure that I pay as much attention to the salad as to the quiche, are all part of my creative process.
Love,
Rebecca
And if you’d like to do a guest post, write me at marytabor@substack.com — I love helping others. Best advice I ever got? “Only connect …” E.M. Forster.
Which stage of your writing process do you enjoy the most? We’d both love to know!
Or
FOOTNOTES
My (Rebecca’s) quiche was made up of:
Two large onions, a red pepper, a courgette and six rashers of smoked bacon cooked until soft in too much butter.
Some cooked carrots, broccoli and summer squash that were left over from last night’s supper.
Six large eggs blended with a small tub of Philadelphia cream cheese, salt and pepper.
A large chunk of extra mature cheddar cheese, grated.
It was cooked for an hour in a well-greased cast-iron oblong roasting dish at 135°C (275°F), cooled and then chilled.
This recipe serves six if you’re sensible four.
My garden salad comprised grated homegrown cucumber, shredded coriander leaves and their juicy stalks, a couple of scoops of sauerkraut from the fizzing jar on my kitchen worktop, crispy shredded romaine lettuce, a tonne of black pepper, a good sprinkling of deactivated yeast flakes and a big slug of apple cider vinegar. Golly, yeast flakes? Gotta try that.
Such an interesting and intimate story. Thanks again, Mary, for finding such great guest posts.
Fun piece! Thanks for sharing. I’m with you on the walks. I’ve always been a big walker, in every city I’ve lived in. And on those walks my creative juices flow. Usually after a walk I feel the urge to write. I liked the writing on smooth paper with blue ink. Reminds me of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the biography of David foster Wallace. The author discusses how Wallace (who wrote door-stopper tomes) would write each book all the way through in pen, and then type it all back up later, editing as he went. Not my process but I get it. I used to write on paper for hours in cafes. Now it’s mostly on the computer.