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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 donât bother with such processes, merely bashing something out instead, are called âpantsers,â a name I donât mind accepting as descriptive of my process. But itâs untrue, even so. The plain fact is I donât write anything until itâs been thoroughly edited in my head. Which means I donât 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 (âkey pressingâ 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 weâre 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 theyâre there. But itâs not why I read on completion. The terrible truth is that, generally, I like what Iâve written. There are some things that I read again and again until I hate the sight of them. Well, not âhate,â but âgrow tired of,â 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. Theyâve 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 donât stop reading my stuff. The most recent work gets frequent rereading but even old stuff gets hauled out for a read on occasion. And thatâs when I discover things I donât remember writing. In some of my longer excursions into the past, I occasionally find myself reading something and thinking, âThis is really good. Who wrote it? Oh wait, it must have been me. Funny, I donât remember it at all.â That can be quite weird. Reading something that you know was written by yourself but you have no recollection of. I suppose itâs 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 thingâs any good at all. And the fortunate thing, for me at least, is that, so far, I havenât found one of these âlostâ works that I didnât think was well written. That may sound conceited but I donât care. At the very least I can say that I am reasonably content with my former self that wrote all that stuff. Itâs better than going around, eternally weighed down with guilt and regret. I like myself. Howâs that for a clanger? Word count: 590 |