The writing struggle

Ernest Hemmingway once said, “Writing is easy. All you do is sit at the typewriter and Bleed.” Writing has always been that type of experience for me. I stress and struggle to find just the right words before I even begin to put a single thing on paper. It’s as if there is a roadblock in my writing process. Unless I have the perfect, or nearly perfect first sentence, I can’t write a single word. On top of that, once I do find what I think is the perfect beginning, I will stubbornly refuse to change it if it stops being so perfect as the paper progresses.

This is what struck me as I began reading Elbow… it was as if he knew all my deep, dark writing foibles and exposed them to light. There is a section on page 26 where he describes how hard beginnings are. This paragraph was so autobiographical to me that I wrote “Yes! Yes! Yes!” In the margin and highlighted the entire paragraph in yellow! Everything he described here is exactly what I go through with every paper. I spent the entire summer working on the writing portfolio that many of us need to do as English Majors. There are three papers in the portfolio and with each one of them I struggled for the perfect beginning and the perfect first sentence. Like most everyone else, I was taught the formula for writing. Make an outline, write a first draft. Edit. And go on from there. I’ll admit now that unless a teacher specifically wanted to see my outline, I never used one. I never even wrote one. They just always seemed to get in the way of my writing. Until I began reading this book, I was sure that my writing process was all wrong. Having Elbow describe in vivid detail the painful writing process that I myself endure made me want to read more. I thought that if he can know what it feels like, what I feel like, when I sit down to write, then maybe he’s come up with some answers to help get past it.

So free writing. I had never really heard of it until now. I may have heard the term in passing, but if I did, I didn’t know what it was. As an older student, this happens a lot. I’ve been out of high school longer than many of my classmates have been alive, so there are some learning tools that came along long after I was out of school. After reading the description of what free writing is, I thought, “well, I should give this a try.” But I didn’t do it right away. Luckily we got the opportunity to do it in class. My immediate reaction to it was “eureka!” I was simply amazed at how well it worked. After decades of struggling to find the perfect words, to realize that with this simple exercise the words can come with half the anxiety and stress is astounding. I know I will use this as a teaching tool in my classroom when I begin teaching!

Editing, I think, is one of the hardest parts of writing for me. I tend to fall in love with my words and phrases. So much so that there have been times when I have changed an entire paragraph just so a phrase with fit. After I finished writing my essays for the writing portfolio, a friend and I exchanged our essays with one another and had an editing session. With each red mark she put on my words it was as if she was stabbing me in the heart. I spent hours trying to re-work my essays so that I didn’t have to throw out any of my word-children, but in the end I had to come to the realization that I had to let go of the words for the betterment of my papers. Hopefully, the more I free write and the more I toss out my words after picking out the gems, I’ll become more comfortable with the idea of tossing away some of my words and in doing so, grow as a writer.