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Before Writing: Remember What Makes Writing Easy
Donald M. Murray
University of New Hampshire
Donald Murray, Professor Emeritus of English, is a novelist, a
poet, and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He is best known
among English teachers as a lecturer and writer of textbooks on
writing and the teaching of writing. His latest books on writing
are Shoptalk, Learning to Write with Writers and
The Craft of Revision.
Before I start a new book project I force myself to write
down the attitudes and disciplines that have made the writing
easy in the past.
Yes, easy. Writers like to whine and moan about the
struggle, the pain, the suffering of writing but they came to
writing because it was easier for them than math, more exciting
than chemistry, more fun than the playground. Writers lead a
marvelous double life, once in actuality, afterwards in the truer
reality of story.
Writers celebrate life by recording their world and then
shaping memory into meaning. This telling of story, first to the
self, later to others, is as natural to writers as breathing; it
is the way writers live their lives. But they tell the world
writing is hard. Harder than digging a ditch, driving a truck,
selling insurance, caring for an eight-month-old boy with a
three-year-old brother, teaching teen-agers to write a
subject-verb-object sentence? No way.
I fall into the trap myself. No pity is so satisfying as
self-pity. and I have been trained to correct error and avoid
failure by teachers, editors, parents, and the clergy--I was born
in sin as a Calvinist Scot--but we learn to write well if we
construct a writing habit based on ease, pleasure,
confidence, and success. What worked well in the past is what
will make the writing go well the next time around.
Of course some of us zoom from despair to fantasy,
remembering a time that never was. My fantasy is that I can write
two books at the same time--on top of my weekly newspaper
column, my twice a month poems for the poetry club, occasional
articles, the proposals for future books and the revisions,
instructor's manuals, page proofs, indexes that trail after a
"completed" book manuscript.
I chart my course for a new book by writing a memo to
myself, reminding myself of what attitudes and habits made the
writing go well the last time around. I am still a student of
writing at seventy, but I attend a one-room schoolhouse and am
responsible for my own curriculum.
1. To write well I need to take advantage of my
difference.
Until Sandra Cisneros spoke to me from the pages of
American Voices--Best Short Fiction by Contemporary
Authors, selected by Sally Arteseros, [Hyperion, 1992] two
years ago, I was ashamed of my "unmanly" sensitivity to life. On
the football field, in the paratroops, in college and the City
Room, I learned to hide my true feelings, embarrassed by how much
I was the watcher, how much the critic of my own living, how
often I saw events in a way that set me apart from family and
colleagues. My strangeness would be revealed in print--the page
does reveal--but I was always uncomfortable with this
self-exposure. Then I read Cisneros: "Imagine yourself at your
kitchen table, in your pajamas. Imagine one person you'd allow
to see you that way, and write in the voice you'd use to that
friend. Write about what makes you different."
I accepted, at the age of 68, the obvious. It was my
difference that brought me publication. and when I accepted and
revealed my individual difference, the more universal I became:
readers told me I articulated their silent thoughts and
feelings.
2. To write well I need to follow my obsessions.
I work best when I have a psychological need to explore the
subject. Bharati Mukherjee says, "When my writing is going well,
I know that I'm writing out of my personal obsessions." I
suspect that most writers have a few obsessions they must
investigate with language. Mine are my childhood, my war, my
fear of death (obviously related to a sickly childhood, an "if I
die before I wake" religion, and infantry warfare), and the
writing act (I started collecting the writers' quotes that appear
in my work when I was in the ninth grade). If the book does not
tap into some deep running underground river in my being, I
should give it up.
3. To write well I need to experience surprise.
My writing is motivated by the discoveries I make on the
page: I write what I do not expect to write. I write best when
I write against intent, not by plan, but by accident. John
Fowles says, "Follow the accident, fear the fixed plan--that is
the rule." I start with a territory to explore and a line, a
fragment of language that contains a tension that may release a
book: "I had an ordinary war," "after my war I fear Spring,"
"teachers are urged to write but not told how to develop their
workshop fragments." That was the starting place of this
book--Write to Teach Writing--I am beginning to write for
Heinemann. Already, the first test drafts of the opening have
contradicted what I believed I would write--a good sign.
4. To write well I need to write fast.
Fluency is the product of velocity. I have to get up to
speed to write as you have to get up to speed to make a bicycle
balance. In school we are often taught to write carefully,
slowly, thoughtfully but most writers have to write fast so that
they will write what they do not expect. Writers have to give up
control of the text, to encourage it to run ahead of them,
following its own instincts.
Writing with velocity also produces an adequate amount of
text to surprise. School encourages paragraphs; writers need
pages--many pages--for the text to build a flood of language
that may flow toward meaning.
5. To write well I need to achieve instructive
failures.
Fast writing also allows the writer to outrun the censor
that exists within us all, and it causes the accidents of meaning
and language that lead writers where we do not expect to
go in the way failed experiments instruct scientists. If I do
not fail in interesting and instructive ways, I will not continue
the book.
Of course, I have little trouble failing; I have a great
deal of trouble accepting and taking advantage of failure.
6. To write well I need to work within the
draft.
A great danger--and one of the reasons my third novel has
not yet been completed--is that I set literary standards for the
novel I cannot possibly meet. I remember what teachers, editors,
other writers have said and even try to achieve the standards of
people I do not like or respect. I set standards that are
impossibly high or appropriate for someone else or some other
writing project. I must remember John Jerome, "Perfect is the
enemy of good," and William Stafford, "I can imagine a person
beginning to feel that he's not able to write up to that standard
he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that's
surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is
the standard I'm meeting right now . . . you should be more
willing to forgive yourself. It really doesn't make any
difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment
of the product is something that happens after you've done
it."
Stafford continued, "I believe that the so-called 'writing
block' is a product of some kind of disproportion between your
standards and your performance . . . one should lower his
standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing.
It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards
that inhibit you from writing."
In short, I want to be loved and so look off the page when I
know I should work within the page, allowing this page to tell me
how to write this draft. Eudora Welty reminds me, "The
writer himself studies intensely how to do it while he is in the
thick of doing it; then when the particular novel or story is
done, he is likely to forget how; he does well to. Each work is
new. Mercifully, the question of how abides less in the
abstract, and less in the past, than in the specific,
in the work at hand . . . ."
7. To write well I need to maintain faith in the
draft.
At least twice in the writing of this book, about one-third
and two-thirds of the way through, and perhaps more often, I will
doubt the book or my ability to write it. I must then
remember that even the fine novelist Alice McDermott admitted:
"The hardest thing I had to do even to become a writer was
believing that I had anything to say that people would want to
read."
To conquer despair I must remember it is natural and force
myself to keep writing, remembering that this forced fluency will
produce pages that will be as good as the ones written before or
after despair. I must believe--against all reason--that my story
has not been told before, that I have a special authority to tell
my story.
8. To write well I need to establish a daily
deadline.
Like most writers, I write only on deadline so I establish
my own deadlines. My column is delivered Monday morning a week
ahead of time so there is opportunity for careful editing and
revision. Books have deadlines a year or months away but I break
each project down into daily, achievable deadlines: 300
words a writing day, 500, 1,000 or even 1,500 on this book I am
starting. I may also establish deadlines by task: lead, middle,
end, revise, edit. Deadlines by time--an hour at my desk,
half-an-hour, two hours--do not work for me. I waste it. I need
a product measure to keep me forging ahead.
9. To write well I need to practice a writing
habit.
Beside my computer is the plastic covered reminder:
Write first each day
Complete one writing task every morning
Know tomorrow's task today
On the other side I have counsel from fellow writers:
Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room
and sit before a piece of paper. Many times I just sit for three
hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing: If an
idea does come between 9 and 12, I am there ready for it.
(Flannery O'Connor)
If I don't sit down practically immediately after breakfast,
I won't sit down all day. (Graham Greene)
To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill
portion of every day, and to write. (John Hersey)
Two simple rules: A) You don't have to write. B) You can't
do anything else. (Raymond Chandler)
The writing generates the writing. (E. L. Doctorow)
There is no one right way. Each of us finds a way that
works for him. But there is a wrong way. The wrong way is to
finish your writing day with no more words on paper than when
you began. Writers write. (Robert B. Parker)
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
(Simone de Beauvoir)
If you keep working, inspiration comes. (Alexander
Calder)
To write you have to set up a routine, to promise yourself
that you will write. Just state in a loud voice that you will
write so many pages a day, or write for so many hours a day.
Keep the number of pages or hours within reason, and don't be
upset if a day slips by. Start again, pick up the routine.
Don't look for results. Just write, easily, quietly. (Janwillem
van de Wetering)
Perfect is the enemy of good. (John Jerome)
If you want to take a year off to write a book, you have to
take that year, or the year will take you by the hair and pull
you toward the grave . . . . You can take your choice. You can
keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with
your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese
balls. (Annie Dillard)
The art of the novel is getting the whole thing written.
(Leonard Gardner)
I believe that the so-called "writing block" is a product of
some kind of disproportion between your standards and your
performance ...one should lower his standards until there is no
felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write.
You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing .
. . . I can imagine a person beginning to feel he's not able to
write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him.
But to me that's surrealistic. The only standard I can
rationally have is the standard I'm meeting right now...You
should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn't make any
difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment
of the product is something that happens after you've d
one it. (William Stafford)
Living's hard. It's writing that's easy. (E. Annie
Proulx)
I have to force myself to write first. I get up at 5:30 in
the morning, but the world still intrudes. There is a letter to
answer, a recommendation to send off, a manuscript to read, a
computer problem to solve, a family responsibility. But the
writing, if you are to write, must come first.
I also need to complete one task a morning so that I build
on accomplishment, day after day, do not feel a daily inadequacy
that spins me into hopelessness and paralysis.
I need to know the next day's writing task since the most
important writing is done away from the desk when I think about
the next day's writing without being aware I'm thinking about it,
mutter to myself, make daybook notes, discuss it with a writing
colleague. That non-writing writing is what ripens the
possibilities so that I can do each morning what Virginia Woolf
proposed for herself when she said, "I am going to hold myself
from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in
my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it
will fall."
10. To write well I need listeners.
I need colleagues who work in their own lonely rooms and who
listen to my satisfactions and my grumps, my problems and my
solutions, as a book evolves. Chip, Don, Elizabeth, Brock
and sometimes others, give me more than therapy. They give me
back my own advice to them when I play their listener. We teach
each other what we already know, and I often find myself solving
the problem I am describing and which I could not solve until I
picked up the phone.
11. To write well I need readers.
Few readers. Very few readers. During the first drafts
only one--Chip Scanlan because he makes me want to write after he
has read an early, not yet ready-for-the-world draft. Then Minnie
Mae, my wifely editor, who reads all my final drafts before they
leave the house. and there are the others for whom I write--
Don, Elizabeth, Brock, Lisa, Tom and others--whom I see in my
mind's eye as I write and with whom I silently talk as I compose.
And I am blessed with fine editors such as Laurie Runion, who has
been an editorial collaborator for many of my books.
But I remind myself to be careful to whom I show my work.
Many readers--and this certainly includes editors and
teachers--have a rigid formula for each subject and each genre.
If the writer does not fit the formula--and the best writers
never do--they are surprised, uncomfortable, disappointed and
critical. They do not have the ability to evaluate work on its
own terms. I have abandoned poems, articles, books because of
the well-intentioned but destructive advice of friends with whom
I have shared an early draft. For this first draft, I will be
my own reader.
Remember Eudora Welty. What has worked in the past may not
work in the present. My way of working is not a model for anyone
else; it may not even be a model for me. As Graham Greene said,
"Isn't disloyalty as much the writer's virtue as loyalty is the
soldier's?" I must not be loyal to tradition, to what has
worked for others, to what I have been taught or learned, to my
own plans or expectations. I must follow the draft and, if I am
fortunate, it will carry me beyond my imaginings.
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