Coachamatic

There are a bunch of us who write best when the pressure is on. And there are a bunch of us who sit around waiting for the Muse to strike. Oh, wait - she doesn’t strike; she graces us with her presence. Yeah, that’s better. So let’s say you’ve been inviting the elusive Muse, who never showed up (the bitch), and now the deadline looms. What do you do? I usually run around in a panic and then sit down at the last minute and hammer something out. Now there’s a writing process that sucks!

However, there’s hope. In his wonderful book, Writing with Power, Peter Elbow explains what he calls the “direct writing process,” an approach that can get us through another procrastination-induced writing panic, and it’s an approach that can lead us to a better understanding of what got us in this mess in the first place.
Elbow tells us that anyone can use this method to get a writing project done by deadline, even if you have just half-an-hour left. So let’s use that half-hour as an example:

1. Divide the time in half. For the math-challenged, that’s 15 minutes for each stage of this two-stage process.
2. For 15 minutes, keeping your audience in mind, do a braindump. Just write without stopping, putting down everything you know about the subject. Don’t worry about structure or organization - just get the words down.
3. Stop after 15 minutes.
4. For the next 15 minutes, revise: Move text around for a clear beginning, middle, end; fix punctuation; run spell check.

This approach works best when you know what you want to say, but you’ve procrastinated until you’ve almost run out of time.

Now here’s what’s at the heart of this approach: No matter what you’re writing and how much time you have, there are two distinct stages to the writing process:

• Create
• Revise

When you’re generating your content - whether it’s a novel or journal article or a blog post - you don’t want your inner critic telling you what to do. If she keeps interrupting you, give her a cookie and tell her to come back later. The creation stage is all about getting your words out, playing, getting excited or dropping down or blissing out, whatever happens to you when you let go and write.

The revision stage is when your inner critic gets to help you out, but if she shows up in the creation stage, she can take all the energy out of your writing - all the zest, all the fun, all the passion. I think that one of the hardest things about writing is keeping these two stages separate. If you’re wondering why your writing seems to just be words spread out on a page - well organized, grammatically correct words, but just words - take a look at your process. It might be that your inner critic has had her way with you.

Posted on Sep 16th 06 by Verna Wilder.

Verna's joy is helping people find and refine their writing voice, and she does that by coaching, editing, and leading writing workshops. She's a writer and a reader and a lover of good books, good music, good movies, good food. For the past 25 years, Verna has given her best energy to working in a cube; now she's taking that experience and giving her best energy to her clients. Life finally makes a little more sense. http://vernawilder.typepad.com/out_of_the_cube/

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