I've always wondered how other people write. What goes on inside their brains before words leak out of their fingertips. Because I've often thought that I approach writing weirdly, and I have a strange, masochistic desire to remove all doubt so I can be more justified in beating myself up over being peculiar and eccentric. This preface out of the way, I thought I'd share a few quick insights into my writing process.
Firstly, I sit staring at the screen. I spend a lot of time doing this, actually.
Then my brain starts making weird combinations of words and phrases whilst I shoot them down one by one, for any odd reason, like targets in a silly carnival game. (Sometimes the same sentence might beg to be given a second chance, and occasionally, one might escape without me knowing.) Then I happen upon a sentence that may or may not work, and I start to type it. Once I see it in print, I know straightaway whether or not it's working for me, and I generally end up deleting it and starting over.
Rinse and repeat, until I don't hate the sentence and I can stand to let it continue existing. Occasionally, the realization that what I've written is abysmal will come after I've strung several such sentences together, at which time I go back and delete them all and start over.
Then, once I've written something that fulfills the requirements of being a substantial block of text, I read back over it with a fairly ruthless eye and weed out the words, phrases, and sentences that don't work for me. If I hate everything, which has happened, I start over. (I start over a lot.)
When I have something that constitutes a "finished" piece before me, which means it's run the entire gauntlet of abuse to which my editing habits can subject it, I often go back and edit it again. I've been known to delete "finished" pieces because they weren't working for me. And start over. (You totally saw that last part coming, didn't you?) No piece of mine is safe. Ever.
It bears mentioning that all of the above steps hinge, somewhat, on several factors. The first factor is how exhausted I am. If I get really tired, I begin to cease caring which words and sentences escape my brain. Sometimes I become really, really formal and fancy and lofty and begin utilizing grandiloquent verbiage. Other times I struggle a single sentence put to together a in way meaningful. It's always a surprise, really. A veritable piñata of possibilities.
The second factor is how much time I have to complete whatever it is I'm writing. You give me a minute to write something, you are going to get something that looks like it was written in, well, a minute. Which, in my case, means it will be coherent and error-free, but unimaginative and quite possibly trite. Like this blog post, for example, which was written in one sitting and was not edited at all. Because I'm feeling particularly exhausted and lazy today, and don't care to waste unnecessary time writing blog posts.
The third factor is whether or not I'm being distracted. If there are people in the room distracting me, or people chatting with me, or the Internet grabs me and forces me to distract myself with distractable thingamabobs, then my writing turns out as you might expect. Distracted. Distracted writing, like distracted driving, often results in something of a wreck.
The fourth factor is whether or not whatever I'm writing is something about which I'm reasonably knowledgeable, or something that is meaningful to me. In either case, the end product generally turns out much better if I am invested, to some extent. If I don't know or care anything about what I'm writing, then why the dickens am I writing about it?! (Good question, Loki. Good question.)
And that, noble readers (you must also be long-suffering readers, if you've made it far enough to be reading this shameless attempt at flattery), is the long and short of my writing process. I hope you've found it, if nothing else, amusing enough that you'll not yell abuses at your computer screen and then demand I somehow become a magical being who can reverse time and return the roughly three minutes you wasted reading this.
