Originally published in The Writer’s Guild on Medium.
Why “Just Write” isn’t Just Wrong
The mantra is this: Just write. Just start. Just do it. Write anything. Just write!
But if you’re a worrier like me or a stickler for perfection, if your cursor goes back to edit more often than it goes forward to create, then to just write with seemingly no regard of consequence can feel just wrong!
But there’s method in this madness!
When we write we let our creative juices flow. We write, and more ideas jump out at us. We pen those down and swoosh! Another idea is born! And we give that idea life by writing it down. The thought mustn’t be forgotten! Swoosh! Another idea! Write it down! The words give life to our idea - and sustain them.
Expression is life! We read and we think. But it needs a writer to kick it all off.
Write this: “There was a baby elephaant.”
There, you’ve just created an elephant! How cool is that?! You’ve missed out 22 months of pregnancy and brought an elephant into being!
Now who spotted the double “a” in “elephaant”? A spelling error yes, but we still thought of an elephant, right?
This isn’t to say that spelling and grammar aren’t important; it’s more that they have a time - and the time is afterwards.
Why? Because going back to edit stops the creative flow. Removing the extra “a” doesn’t change the elephant, but it changes your thought process and strangles the creativity.
Common consensus is that we use one side of our brain for our creativity, and the other side for logic. Read: one side for writing, and one side for editing.
It’s a biological fact - when we go back to edit we’re not creating any more. And to restart from where we left off means another flip of the brain hemispheres before we’re back in tune with ourselves and hope to carry on in the same vein. We need to get our brains back in gear!
Not going back to edit is difficult. It takes me an enormous amount of will power to ignore those red wavy spell-checker lines under the misspelled words as I type. I’m forcing myself not to google “how long is an elephant pregnant?” until after I’ve got all my ideas down.
Now I don’t want to mislead you and quote an inaccurate number of years (edit: months! 😉 ) of elephant pregnancy, but I don’t want to stop my ideas flowing. Similarly, by going back and correcting the spelling I won’t find out what that elephant is going to do. Spelling essentially makes no difference to its newfound life.
At Writer’s Guild we’re invited to “Hone Our Craft” and I wonder if this also includes typing!
There is a certain pleasure in molding a sentence to convey the exact meaning I want it to give, but to correct typos is tedious. If I can limit the amount of time spent doing that by improving my typing skills then all the better.
I’ve found that the writing - editing relationship hits the 80–20 rule; 80% of the work is done in 20% of the time. At least volume wise, 80% of this article was done in 20% of the total amount of time from blank page to clicking submit. The corollary is that it took 80% of my time to edit the thing.
For me this balance seems wrong when I wish to call myself a writer! The separation of writing and editing therefore seems to make even more sense, confining the task of editing to one block of time at the end instead of diluting my pleasure of writing with spell checks, grammar checks and flicking through the thesaurus.
So my advice is this:
Just write - yes! But only write, then edit.
Ignore the typos and the spelling mistakes. For now! Put off the search for the perfect word. Vocabulary and grammar are fixed and won’t change and can be honed at any time. But our ideas are transient - and yet they are the most valuable! Don’t let then go! Write then down! Now!
Here’s a final thought.
Many word processors can check and correct much of the spelling and grammar for us. We have dictionaries and thesauruses at hand, or use third party programs and editing tools. But when it comes to the writing itself, the actual creative thought and expression, that bit’s up to us!
Nothing has the creativity you do as a writer! How awesome is that?!
Come on. Let’s just write!
Paul
