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August 06, 2005
The Drawer Method
Hello, and welcome to the thirty-seventh installment of NotWriting.com, an open journal on how one writer spends his time when he really should be writing.
I've been doing a lot of writing lately——I finished the first draft of one novel in 87 days and am now 150 pages into a second one——which is why I haven't logged onto Notblogging and put up new entries. So much for my adding new material just because it's easy. Hey, vacuuming is easy, but you don't see me doing it every day.
"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say." — F. Scott Fitzgerald
I like to think that I don't write as often as most other bloggers because I wait until I have a fully-formed idea, something I truly want to say. A lot of bloggers seem to ramble on the screen until they find the idea they want to talk about, but then they neglect to do the thing one is required to do for any serious, paid writing, which is to go back and cut their maundering. Even though I am fairly tech-savvy, a part of me——the former newspaper reporter in me, I guess——simply cannot "slap up" entries. My mind is geared to work in drafts, a dirty word in this age of instant publishing.
To this end, I still use a technique my philosophy professor taught me: The Drawer Method. As an adjunct professor myself now, I am passing on this writing tip, elegant in its simplicity, to my students. The idea is this: when you finish a draft of a piece of writing, particularly the first draft, you should put it in a drawer for a while and forget it. (And when I say "drawer," I mean drawer——not a folder on your computer, not a flash drive, not your iPod.) Maybe it's the darkness inside, maybe it's the fact that you can't see your work for a while; whatever it is, the act of putting writing in drawers, even if only for a few hours while you go to a movie, gives you the writer the critical distance you need to read your work fresh, like an ordinary reader will have to.
At the moment, like a winery that stores vintages from many different years and grapes, I have at least a dozen writing projects fermenting, aging if you will, in my filing cabinet drawers. Some of these works I have high hopes for, but a few will turn out to be vinegar. There's a screenplay based on my first novel. I wrote it more as an experiment than anything. There's the first draft of that new novel I mentioned earlier. That one, I think, has potential; but only time in the drawer will tell. There are six or seven "finished" short stories that are out making the rounds of the literary journals now. If they all come back as rejections, I'll pull them out of the drawer and give them another look. Then there are the ten or so stillborn pieces of work, stories and sketches that, as much as I try to convince myself I'll one day go back and fix them, will never know an existence beyond the drawer. And finally there are the dozens of notebooks, pocket-sized and full-sized, that lay heaped in one of the bottom drawers and which, in the depths of winter depression, I will turn to for inspiration.
So, bloggers of the world, unite! Join me in taking a step that will elevate the quality of all writing on the web. By printing out your entries and putting them in a drawer for a while before posting them, I promise you will become better bloggers. You will see mistakes you didn't notice the first time. You will think of fresher, more vivid, images. And, most importantly, you will give your subconscious a chance to decide what it truly wants to say.
(Note: This entry lay in a drawer for a week. Maybe it should have stayed there. The thing is, the only way you'll know if your chicks can fly is to push them out of the nest, and ultimately writing is about communication. If the stuff ain't out there and peoples ain't readin' it, it don't exist.)
Posted by corcutt at August 6, 2005 06:58 AM
Comments
Hey, thanks for the drawer graphic. How on earth would I have gotten the point without it.
Okay, I'm sorry. Just jealous because you actually ARE writing and I am so not. I work in a cafe and it is sucking the life out of me. I have nothing to say anymore. No, that's not true, it can't be true... can it?
Those baby penguins are so awesome.
Posted by: sage at September 10, 2005 02:52 AM