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An Innocent Start
It started innocently enough as a habit formed on sound advice from Stella Leventoyannis Harvey. Early in The Writer’s Studio program I completed a few years ago, she suggested to the workshop group that it can be helpful to retype a story as a final act of revision. Certain things are improved with speed. Writing might be one of them.
I quickly discovered that when my fingers were busy typing,
the nose-in-the-air critic who lives inside me fell silent. Truth is she could not keep pace. Heavy footed, her thoughts were ponderous and clumsy and not necessarily kind. She was nothing like the childish brat who took off barefoot over summer grass, giggling her head off . . . if only I dared to run.
Suddenly Courageous
If you’re sensing that I find the rush of words across the screen exciting, you’re right. It makes me light and brave at the same time, bold and defiant. The unspoken splats onto the page. Whoops-a-daisy, did I really just say that? That was fun. Let’s do it again.
At first, I used this technique specifically for final revisions. Immediately, I saw that the parts of the story that were not helping vanished without a second thought when I typed faster. More to the point, important connective pieces, slips of the tongue, the awakening of the silenced, all of this showed up with ease. I was used to fiction writing being work. I was not used to it being play.
The Magic of a Great Big Mess
When I was revising “Your Body Was Made for This” for publication, I was under a tight timeline. Having never been published before, I did not comprehend that nine months to print was a tight schedule. It embarrasses me now to admit that when Ronsdale Press offered to publish my book, I thought it was mostly ready. Of all the things I am grateful for in the hair-raising journey towards having my first book published, I am most grateful that I recognized soon enough the error in my thinking.
I got to work and I didn’t have much time. Typing fast was my only option. I’ve always relied on the freefall method of writing. That part wasn’t new, but the proliferation of ideas and the mess on my desktop was. Rather than starting clean on the first page of each story, I began to start clean every time I wanted to freshen my mind. I might type two paragraphs or an entire page or several pages even . . . and then start over in a clean file. Each time, something better showed up. Plus, although it was messy, it was fast.
On any given morning, there could be as many as ten unsaved files open on my desktop, each with a bit I had abandoned in order to start again. A few times, I’d reach the ninth or tenth file only to realize there was a good bit in an earlier attempt. I’d have to spend several panicky minutes hunting through the stack of files for the precise lines I wanted before carefully copying them into the current file.
An Ongoing Practice
Currently, I’m working on the first draft of a novel, which couldn’t be further from the initial intention for this technique as a tool for revision. Yet, I persist in using this approach for the simple reason that it is working well for me. I start a new file every time I want to freshen my mind. Better ideas show up when I do. As with revising, writing a first draft in this manner makes for an ungodly mess on my desktop, but halleluiah chorus I tell you no lies—it is fast. By taking this chaotic and iterative approach, I am able to draft better scenes more quickly than ever before.
What’s this all about? I am curious. Why does this work for me? I used to play trumpet. For most of my enforced participation in music, I was less than enthusiastic. An interesting thing happened when I was finally given the choice in Grade Eleven. I could keep taking lessons or I could stop. I decided to practise. Every day I made the time and I improved more in a single year than I had in the eleven years previous.
Some of the time, practising the trumpet did mean going through an entire song without stopping . . . performing as it were. But most of the time, practising was about something far more important. It was about improving. I would repeat a phrase or a single note as many times as I needed to, listening with care and trying to improve. Previous efforts enriched fresh attempts. I felt free to try over. Oh what a joy to see trying over, not as a sign of failure, but as a sign of dedication and courage and dare I say fun.
It’s too soon to know if this way of learning can sustain drafting a novel. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your writing habits.
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Debbie Bateman 