Honesty in Writing: Fix it Later!

Four weeks of blogging every day!

Hooray! Huzzah!

Don't worry, folks. I'll eventually stop making a big deal out of the fact that I haven't missed of day of blogging since I started. But for the moment, though, it's a big deal. For me to stick with something for this long is definitely cause for remark. My other blog will tell you why that is.

One of the things I've been finding interesting about this project is the process of writing a blog entry. Some days it's quick; other days it takes me a while.

I've been trying to streamline the process so I don't spend an inordinate chunk of my day just putting up a blog post. After all, I'm doing this every single day.

Usually what is do is fire up WriteMonkey so I have a nice clean screen to work with. Then I start typing. How much I type before switching to my web browser to look up something depends entirely on what I'm writing about. If it's a post like this one, where I'm just talking about the blog or reflecting on life in some manner, I can pretty much type out the whole thing in rough form without switching away from the typing screen.

If I'm writing about a movie, or a book, or a piece of software, I'll usually go to my web brower and call up IMDb or Google or the official website of whatever I'm writing about. That way I'll have a handy reference just an ALT-TAB away.I remember doing a lot of switching back and forth when I was writing my Retro-Techno on Display post back on August 11th. I was checking the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia site, doing Google searches for the various artists in the exhibit, and generally just kind of fumbling my way through the post.

I wasn't particularly happy with that entry, primarily because I'm really not much of an art-head. I appreciate art and enjoy looking at it, but I'm not terribly knowledgable when it comes to analysis or meaning or symbolism or anything like that. Also, that post was fairly local in scope, so it would have been of limited interest to readers outside of Nova Scotia.

I think what I'm starting to get at here is that the more I fuss with a post, the weaker it is likely to be. If I'm constantly switching between the writing and the browsing (ahem… "researching"), then I'm losing the flow of the writing. And that flow is really important.

This is a valuable lesson.

I've been writing a bit about honesty in creativity over the last few days, and I think that, for me, writing from the gut is the best way to tap into my honest creative self. Breaking the flow of the words coming out of me is a surefire way to short-circuit the process and gum up the works. The writing will sound disconnected and rough.

So far in this post I'm writing now, I've switched to my browser exactly once, to check the date of my Art Gallery post. The rest of the time I've been sitting right here in WriteMonkey, tapping away at keys, pausing only briefly to collect my thoughts before pushing on.

This is the method of writing recommended for the "morning pages" in Julia Cameron's excellent book for creatives, The Artist's Way. She recommends writing by hand on paper, mind you, but the overall effect is the same: write without stopping, letting what's in your mind get out onto the paper (or screen in this case) without censoring, judging, or stopping.

Now, I'm not doing exactly that here. I'm writing something that I hope people will actually read, so I'm definitely not writing without stopping. I'm trying to construct sentences and paragraphs that make sense and flow together.

My goal is not to set a speed record for constructing a blog post, but I do want to get my thoughts out without a lot of fuss and bother. I want to write what I need to write and "fix it later."

My writing mentor, Amy Friedman—from whom I took a few writing courses when I lived in Kingston, Ontario, and from whom I learned a tremendous amount—drummed this into me until I finally got it.

Well, I mostly got it.

I still have to remind myself that it doesn't have to be perfect right out of the gate. It just has to actually get out of the gate to begin with. I have to spit the clay out onto the ground; only then can I shape it into something worth looking at.

So, with my near-anal writing tendencies and my almost slavish adherence to rules grammatical, punctuative, and orthographic, I still need to work on relaxing a bit and just letting the words flow.

That's the way to be honest in the writing and allow the creativity room to breathe.

Not getting in my own way… hmmm… another of my many challenges.

We'll see how it goes.

Gesundheit.

(Just for the record, I did switch away from the typing screen one more time during construction of this post; I had to look up adjective forms for "punctuation" and "spelling".)