The Blog Where I'm a Hypocrite

Yes, I am: I am about to talk about writing as a process on what is the compositional equivalent of throwing up in public: a blog. And I'll start with a few admissions. No, I don't actually do it; not on anything other than creative writing, anyway. I do still recognize the relative merits. But, in my years as an English major, I learned a certain formula for paper writing: to write a good, A grade 500 word essay, with no sources other than the text, I needed half an hour. Each 100 words or sources adds an incremental hour. That means that a 700 word essay would take me 3 and a half hours. Then there is creative writing, and my thesis for the writing process:

There is no such thing as good writing; only good rewriting.

Now don't get mad at me, or shoot the messenger, or whatever the appropriate euphemism is. I got it from John Igo and Professor Rossignol.

So what is the writing process? It's code for common sense. Before you write, you should do some prewriting exercises. That is, get an idea of what your writing on, and do some cursory research (no matter what you are writing--bad fiction is fiction with no research). Do some brainstorming, write an outline, et cetera.

Then, when you have your bases covered (read: you read the Wikipedia article and a few of the articles sources) you write a draft. Emphasis on the draft. This is not publication gold. I have taken to calling it the sloppy copy--because that is what it is.

When you are done drafting, don't go correcting grammar and stuff. Here is where common sense comes in. If you're going to redesign a house, you make sure you have the frame right, then you put in the wires. Grammar is the wires; sentence structure is the frame. So, before you start throwing commas where they belong, make sure your sentences are worded the way you want them worded. This is revision.

When you have your sentences saying what you want them saying, then you make sure you've written in syntactically, grammatically correct English. Put the commas where the commas go, the semicolons where the semicolons go, make sure all your sentences are capitalized and punctuated, and that you didn't write 'there' for 'their' (p.s. Microsoft won't catch those errors. A good secret is to read your composition backwards to catch this and misspelled words, because it takes them out of the context that allows your brain to ignore errors).

So, now you've performed literary alchemy: lead to gold, as it were. This is where you publish: put it on a blog, send it to the newspaper, turn it in, hang it on the fridge, or something. Publishing something is making it public. So, go tell the world.

And that's the writing process. I do think that, if ever a student (or anyone, for that matter) is going to write something worth reading, it should be walked through this process, maybe the middle parts several times: Draft, revise, edit, draft, revise.

Publish.