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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
| Keep Your Pants On The wise ones on the hill say that we should write by planning carefully, begin with a draft and then rewrite endlessly until perfection is achieved. Those who don’t bother with such processes, merely bashing something out instead, are called “pantsers,” a name I don’t mind accepting as descriptive of my process. But it’s untrue, even so. The plain fact is I don’t write anything until it’s been thoroughly edited in my head. Which means I don’t have to rewrite. It also goes beyond the implication of the name, pantser. Doing anything by the seat of your pants may be a good description of writing (or driving or flying) as instinct directs, but it misses the target if applied to how I write. I just do it the other way around. There are some advantages to my method, apart from the obvious saving in pen pushing (“key pressing” for the pedants). Doing it my way means every sentence gets intense scrutiny before being written. Editing afterwards invariably leads to fatigue and some misconstructions and errors slipping through as a result. And, if we’re being honest, who genuinely enjoys rewrites anyway? I will admit to one thing that is advised, however. Reading (aloud, if possible) after completion is absolutely necessary, in my opinion. That will really discover any lumps or bumps in the writing, if they’re there. But it’s not why I read on completion. The terrible truth is that, generally, I like what I’ve written. There are some things that I read again and again until I hate the sight of them. Well, not “hate,” but “grow tired of,” shall we say? Equally, there are some things that I dislike from the start. And yet I let them loose on the world, just as I do the favourites. They’ve had as much, and sometimes more, work put into them as the rest, so they can serve as bad examples at least. And later readings do often reveal them as better than I had supposed. I know this because I don’t stop reading my stuff. The most recent work gets frequent rereading but even old stuff gets hauled out for a read on occasion. And that’s when I discover things I don’t remember writing. In some of my longer excursions into the past, I occasionally find myself reading something and thinking, “This is really good. Who wrote it? Oh wait, it must have been me. Funny, I don’t remember it at all.” That can be quite weird. Reading something that you know was written by yourself but you have no recollection of. I suppose it’s bound to happen that some pieces slip from the memory after a while, but to come upon them as a complete stranger is like looking in a mirror and seeing someone entirely unexpected looking back at you. It has its uses, however. Reading without a personal connection to the writing gives one insight into the actual quality of the piece. For the first time, we are able to gain an unbiased view of whether the thing’s any good at all. And the fortunate thing, for me at least, is that, so far, I haven’t found one of these “lost” works that I didn’t think was well written. That may sound conceited but I don’t care. At the very least I can say that I am reasonably content with my former self that wrote all that stuff. It’s better than going around, eternally weighed down with guilt and regret. I like myself. How’s that for a clanger? Word count: 590 |
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