Writer's Coach The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work

The Agony and the Methodology The pain of writing is legend. And its intensity hardly varies between the student facing a term-paper deadline, the office worker thrashing out a report, and the seasoned professional writing for publication. When I run a writing seminar, I usually hand out a questionnaire that, among other things, quizzes the participants about the emotion they bring to their writing. They like to quote Dorothy Parker, the New York literary wit who said she hated writing, but loved having written. "It's agony and ecstasy," one writer said. "When I get the idea, and when I'm finished . . . it's joyful. Everything in between is agony." Why should that be? Physically, writing's relatively easy work. Take it from a guy who's loaded log ships, pumped gas, and tarred roofs in the midsummer sun. Writers work on their butts and out of the weather. So what's with all this whining? And why the avoidance, which one writer labeled "tap dancing"? "I'll dance around the story," he said, "putting it off because I think it's harder than it invariably is." What's the first thing you do when facing a new writing assignment? I ask. "Get a cup of coffee," a journalist replied. "More difficult story, more coffee, more trips to the bathroom, more procrastination." "But is it really procrastination," another writer asked, "when I'm walking around, getting another cup of coffee, and thinking about the story? More likely, it's a paralysis from possibilities: possible stories, possible leads, possible story flow." Exactly! Paralysis from possibilities. The tendency to see the task ahead as overwhelming explains most keyboard anxiety. For a variety of reasons, we view writing from the back end. Day in and day out, we witness the finished work of accomplished writers. In our mind's eye we stroll down street after street of beautiful homes, ignorant of the piece-by-piece construction that created them, one two-by-four at a time. "Look at that gorgeous building," we think. "The craftsmanship. The detail work. The sheer size of the thing! I could never build something like that." Time for another cup of coffee. But there's another way to look at it. For the past year I've watched four row houses rise on the lot next door. The work was noisy, messy, and distracting, but instructive, too. From the logging crew that brought in chain saws and cleared the lot to the roofers who nailed on the shingles, not one bit of work went into those houses that you or I couldn't do ourselves, given enough time and some research into the technical details. The secret is in the process, not the finished buildings. The pain of writing stems from comparing your blank screen with the finished pages you see all around you. But beautiful writing is built one step at a time, just like a house. Take the steps slowly, break them down into pieces small enough to handle easily, and the agony will disappear. Writing, it is often said, is thinking. And the most productive form of thinking, the method that built the modern world, is science. The discipline, the logic, and the procedural rules of science took us from oxcarts to interstellar probes. So it's not surprising that scientists place so much emphasis on process. Science, they will insist, is process. Articles in scientific journals invariably include detailed descriptions of how the authors conducted their research--the methodology. That mandatory section of the report sometimes takes more space than the section describing results. Methodology is just as important for writers. "Genius," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, "is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind." In writing, that can involve a considHart, Jack is the author of 'Writer's Coach The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400078691 and ISBN 1400078695.