Hi Terry, I was surprised to notice that your writing process, as illustrated by you involves magic mushrooms. Based on your illustration, I was expecting more discussion of their psychotropic enhancing benefits as pertains to your writing. I am teasing, of course but your illustration(s) cracked me up. Interesting piece and I will check out Mary. Thanks
Appreciate this post, Terry. I don't have evidence of this, and maybe it's unhelpful to generalize, but in my experience a lot of men have this ruminative stage in their process. It was a subject of some debate with my Composition colleagues over the years. Many of them embrace Anne Lamott's notion of shitty first drafts. I suspect that you have rarely written a truly shitty first draft on the page or screen, though you have written and abandoned many in your internal writing stage. At least, that is often true for me. There is this notion among many Comp/Rhet teachers that everyone needs to get comfortable with messes, with chaotic brainstorming and "freewriting." And so a lot of students are coerced into exercises that never would have been fruitful for me at that age. I don't know that any freewrite I've ever done with my students, for instance, has produced anything interesting or worth pursuing further. This may be a character flaw, a symptom of control or some other masculine aversion to vulnerability, but it is, for better or worse, baked into my process. I don't like writing bad sentences. This means that sometimes it takes me a while to warm up at the beginning of a writing day. I have to reread what I've written, feel the rhythm of it, start and stop and sometimes start over before I hit my stride. It's not always terribly efficient, but I think we have to learn to accept how we are, to some extent, and turn those innate dispositions to our advantage.
Thanks so much for sharing your process! As someone who jots tons of notes with the hopes of finding them a home, I love the idea that nothing is useless or wasted :-)
I'm so impressed you don't check email in the supermarket!! I have a bad habit of staring at my iPhone while I'm waiting to grab the leeks. I'd really do better to leave it at home. But my local Whole Foods requires me to "scan in" with my Amazon Prime code so it can follow me around with cameras. So much less romantic than how I'm imagining your grocery shopping across the pond!
I've learned absolutely loads - it's always interesting to read about the writing process of others, and this was no exception.
That 'last sentence' technique is something that I like a lot - often I don't know where my writing's going until I've got to the end, so my technique is then to nip back to the top of the page and sow a seed for the ending, after the fact.
Do you make notes while you're thinking, Terry? I've got the supermarket in mind, here - if you're busy filling your trolley with tangerines aren't you worried that you might not be capturing your thoughts as you go along?
I'm saving this post to read again - there are some absolute gems of writing tools in there! Thank you so much!
I mentioned this post to Emily, who writes about writing. She liked it. Conversation here: https://thewordsmith.substack.com/p/writing-as-burrowing-the-string-of/comments
Hi Terry, I was surprised to notice that your writing process, as illustrated by you involves magic mushrooms. Based on your illustration, I was expecting more discussion of their psychotropic enhancing benefits as pertains to your writing. I am teasing, of course but your illustration(s) cracked me up. Interesting piece and I will check out Mary. Thanks
Appreciate this post, Terry. I don't have evidence of this, and maybe it's unhelpful to generalize, but in my experience a lot of men have this ruminative stage in their process. It was a subject of some debate with my Composition colleagues over the years. Many of them embrace Anne Lamott's notion of shitty first drafts. I suspect that you have rarely written a truly shitty first draft on the page or screen, though you have written and abandoned many in your internal writing stage. At least, that is often true for me. There is this notion among many Comp/Rhet teachers that everyone needs to get comfortable with messes, with chaotic brainstorming and "freewriting." And so a lot of students are coerced into exercises that never would have been fruitful for me at that age. I don't know that any freewrite I've ever done with my students, for instance, has produced anything interesting or worth pursuing further. This may be a character flaw, a symptom of control or some other masculine aversion to vulnerability, but it is, for better or worse, baked into my process. I don't like writing bad sentences. This means that sometimes it takes me a while to warm up at the beginning of a writing day. I have to reread what I've written, feel the rhythm of it, start and stop and sometimes start over before I hit my stride. It's not always terribly efficient, but I think we have to learn to accept how we are, to some extent, and turn those innate dispositions to our advantage.
Thanks so much for sharing your process! As someone who jots tons of notes with the hopes of finding them a home, I love the idea that nothing is useless or wasted :-)
I'm so impressed you don't check email in the supermarket!! I have a bad habit of staring at my iPhone while I'm waiting to grab the leeks. I'd really do better to leave it at home. But my local Whole Foods requires me to "scan in" with my Amazon Prime code so it can follow me around with cameras. So much less romantic than how I'm imagining your grocery shopping across the pond!
Such a fascinating post - thanks Terry and Mary!
I've learned absolutely loads - it's always interesting to read about the writing process of others, and this was no exception.
That 'last sentence' technique is something that I like a lot - often I don't know where my writing's going until I've got to the end, so my technique is then to nip back to the top of the page and sow a seed for the ending, after the fact.
Do you make notes while you're thinking, Terry? I've got the supermarket in mind, here - if you're busy filling your trolley with tangerines aren't you worried that you might not be capturing your thoughts as you go along?
I'm saving this post to read again - there are some absolute gems of writing tools in there! Thank you so much!