90WPM

First Drafts

I’ve consciously avoided posting anything about writing on this blog so far.

This is mostly because, while I’ve been writing¹ for a long time, I’ve only really had this blog for a few months now, and most of what I’ve written isn’t out there. You can find other things I’ve written scattered across the Internet, but I’m pretty sure you’d find more words on this site than all of those pieces combined. Which is to say, not a ton. I’m in no position to put myself on a pedestal and say “listen to me, I have something of merit to share with you”. It’s also because I don’t like getting too meta. Writing about writing feels oddly like masturbating in the mirror.

But I saw a post on The Brooks Review that mentioned a new software program, Grandview, and it got me thinking enough to make an exception and talk a little bit about how I write and how it differs from the way I was taught to write.

Grandview is a fullscreen text editor that lives in the menubar on your Mac. It has two different views of your text. The first, more familiar one, looks similar to WriteRoom, JustWrite and the rest of the massively over-saturated market for distraction-free text editors. The second, and the one which makes it both incredibly strange and strangely compelling, shows you a single word at a time, writ large across your screen, which remains visible until you press the spacebar or a period, at which point the app clears the screen or, in the latter case, shows you the entire sentence to review before moving on. You can also turn on a preference to disable deleting back to previous words.

This is not a review of Grandview, and all I’ll say is that using it in single-word-mode was one of the most jarring user experiences I’ve ever had. This isn’t a qualitative judgement, mind you. I used it for a few minutes, if that. But it’s clear that Grandview was built to allow the user to force themselves to follow a very specific, proscribed approach to writing: that of the Shitty First Draft.

The basic idea, verbalized by Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, is that in order to create we need to let ourselves go, and part of that is giving ourselves the liberty to let horrible things leak out of our brains through our fingers and onto the page as quickly as possible so that we can then survey the damage, salvage the wreckage and use it to build something worth keeping. Once we’ve sated the muse, we take a cooling-off period only to return to our work with an objective eye and start crossing things out with a fat red marker.

Writing never worked like that for me. Maybe it’s because I had a bad case of obsessive-compulsive disorder around the age I started creative writing in school, but I could never manage to just ignore my mistakes. And when I had a pencil and paper, that really sucked, because flipping a pencil around to use the eraser is time-consuming and breaks the act of writing, and the words, once written, were in a fixed order. If the sentence I had written mid-paragraph would have worked better as a opener, I was shit out of luck.

Fast-forward to 2011. I use a computer for writing². I have a laptop, which has a nice, responsive keyboard, and I type fast as all hell. Editing is no longer something that interrupts the flow of my writing. It has become part of the flow of my writing. Rather than letting my id run free for hours and then coming back to edit, I end up switching back and forth between the two modes constantly.

I don’t always know where I’ll end up when I start writing, but I usually have a decent idea of what I want to talk about, and when I see that I’m spending a lot of words on something off-topic, or being excessively wordy in a particular sentence, or typing out a run-on that will really work better as a couple of sentences, I hop back, correct it, and move on. I’ve spent enough time working with text at this point (typing and manipulating text is a good 50% or more of my time) that I can move a cursor through lines, paragraphs and words without thinking about it. I write haltingly, but I choose my words carefully, and when I go back to edit, it’s usually to move whole sentences around rather than cut out extraneous paragraphs where I went off on a rant that had little to do with what I’m actually writing about.

I’m not saying my way is better. Or faster. But it is, unfortunately, the only way I know how to write at the moment. I can force myself to do plenty of things, but staring at a misspelled word or an awkward sentence in my own writing is not one of them.

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