Under the Deadline

Once again, I'm writing just under the wire after a long day of classes, rehearsal, workout, and shower. I mean, better something than nothing when it comes to the discipline, but sheesh.

I used to think I wrote better--that I wrote best--under a deadline. In retrospect, the likelier explanation is that I wrote when facing a deadline, whereas I often merely thought about writing with no deadline in front of me.

But that's not always the case. When I have a large writing project before me, I'll often start writing stuff weeks ahead of the deadline. I'll churn out pages and pages, mostly me chasing wild geese down rabbit holes and mixing my metaphors.

I've called this the crap writing stage in the past. In part the function is excretory. I'm expunging the bit of writerly poison that builds up over time, working the kinks out of my authorial voice, shedding my bad habits, passing authorial kidney stones (ugh.).  It's like a warmup before a performance, singing scales before the aria.

That crap writing phase, though, exists also as a journey that many of my writing projects have to take, especially those that represent relatively new areas of research.

There are arguments that I can whip up into a brief conference presentation with relative ease because they draw on a reservoir of prior research, writing, thought, and discussion. I apply a prior hard-won line of argument to a novel object.

But for those times when I lack a prior, hard-won line argument, I have to spend time doing the hard work of winning it. Lots of what I might casually call crap writing isn't bad per se. It's just raw, me thinking things through in writing. I tell my students (as I was told as a student) that writing changes how you think. Ruminating on a subject to yourself or even having conversations with other people get you only so far. Writing forces you to slow down, use your words, lay out your arguments. Someone (I'm not sure who) described philosophy as "thinking in slow motion." Writing is that.

But the slow-motion thinking isn't the same as the polished end product. This too was an old misconception of mine: that I didn't need revisions. In my high school and (shamefully) early undergrad days, I tended to see revising as a kind of failure step, a remediation needed by those who lacked the brilliance to get it right the first time.

Ah, younger me.

Truth be told, the urge to earn the automatic A still runs strong (You got it completely right the first time! What a genius!). But I've come to distrust any writing of mine that hasn't gone through some thorough, frustrating, time-consuming revision.

I can meet a deadline, a minimum word count, with crap writing. But getting a piece under a maximum word count demands revision and time. I have to build in time for crap, for rawness, and for time to refine those elements into something new and better. It's rare that I can do that nowadays in a last-minute fashion (this post included).

I need to start writing these entries earlier in the day, lol.

More tomorrow, hopefully earlier,

JF