How to Tame the "Self-Editing" Beast?
How to Tame the Self-Editing Beast?
I know what you're thinking--this is out-of-character for the hypercritical Auntie whose Cardinal Rule (after "Show, Don't Tell) demands meticulous editing and revising. That dictum of course applies to "post-production"--when you've already finished the piece and are ready to post it.
What I'm talking about is "pre-production," as well as the "during": the process of writing itself. As I've mentioned before, I have found it difficult to write quickly on the computer. The very tools that make word processing so convenient --the delete key, the ability to start over and/or move text around --paradoxically slows me down. It's almost as if I have to keep writing the same passage--at times the same sentence--over and over until I am somewhat satisfied with it, or in most cases, forcing myself to give up on that one and move on.
Not only that, it has occurred to me that a creative work can be "too" disciplined, too restrained. Writing, as the late Elmore Leonard said, is supposed to be "fun" and if not, "you're not doing it right." It is fun--don't get me wrong--but I always get a peculiar feeling, a vague sense of dissatisfaction, that I've been unconsciously holding something back. A writer has to take risks!
When the writer is unconsciously risk averse, the finished product may be okay, but from another standpoint there's an odd stench of the unfinished about it, a case of half a loaf being worse than none.
I hasten to mention that I don't mean we all should start writing soft-core porno (as a controversial LitNutter once advised.) The suggestive motto of the 60s and 70s shouted "Let it all hang out," with all the lascivious imagery that implies.
What about keeping a bottle of the hard stuff in the desk drawer?I don't mean that either. The conventional wisdom that writers are heavy drinkers is a myth, I believe. I suspect that writers who were legendary tipplers --Hemingway, for instance, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, et al. --didn't drink to prime the literary pump as much as the opposite: to self-medicate; to attempt to treat the kind of depression associated with an introspective personality; perhaps even to "come down" after sensory or emotional overload. Alcohol, as we all know, is a depressant, not a stimulant. (There are other factors that could lead a writer to the bottle--like financial problems, bad reception by the critics, family troubles, maybe his wife doesn't understand him.) Moreover, it is impossible to write a coherent sentence when one is drunk, in acute stages of intoxication alarming difficult even to locate the keyboard. Or one's fingers.
How can a writer get his or her mind to create the free-flowing, provocative, soul-stirring prose that grabs the reader's attention and squeezes hard? What about tapping into what is really "free" about "free verse" -- not self-centered, prosaic schlock but the mystical music of Whitman or Ginsberg?
This is counter-intuitive to what we've been all taught about writing: that revising and rewriting is more important than the actual writing. That's entirely true--the work has to "make sense" or at least present some kind of structural integrity. Otherwise it would be unreadable.
Indeed, it's disheartening to start reading a hopeful LitNutter's thread that is riddled with typos, misspellings, errors in logic, and worse of all, warmed-over banalities and clichés-- all posted "instantly" in order to maintain a fond delusion of "creative freedom."
Still, here's the question I'm asking you, fellow LitNutters: how can a writer to pump more exuberance into one's work, how to make both the process for the writer and the finished work for the reader exhilarating, in short--how to have more fun?
