Being satisfied with what you've written is relatively easy. Having others fully understand your meaning and nuance is nigh impossible.
Pat Conroy, Jane Austin and William Faulkner ... they let you inside their brain. Writers like you and me can't get inside our own. We find it difficult to focus a thought long enough to express it poorly -- let alone eloquently ... forget expression worthy of mention in posterity alongside The Prince of Tides, Pride and Prejudice and The Sound and the Fury.
Inside our brains, we're all hard on ourselves. "Stupid!" .... "I can't believe how creepy my hair looks" ... "Is that a zit or do I have a hunk of pepperoni dripping down my cheek!?" We don't let other people talk to us like that; but we all surely hear a familiar ring in these tacky utterings. It's human nature.
But it's not human nature to be as tough on the words we commit to the printed page.
Great writers talk to their prose in exactly that way; critical of every subtlety, noteful of subtext (whether richly embroidered or shallowly cast). Write. Rewrite. Read. Cogitate. Criticize. Get nasty. Respond to your internal criticism and rewrite that passage again -- this time, the way it should have been written from the get-go. Read it again. Cross through liberal portions with vivid red ink. Edit. Add. Cross out. Flash another three sentences on the page. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Ad nauseum.
Satisfied? Good. Give it to someone else -- preferably someone utterly unconcerned with hurting your feelings. See whether someone else even remotely begins to fully understand your meaning and nuance. No? Good. Take the page, with red ink liberally splashed across it anew, and read it. Rewrite it. Read it again. Edit. Cross out. Sleep on it. Wake up at 3 a.m. and rework the last paragraph while you sit on the toilet in the semi-dark. Show it to your spouse, bleary-eyed, across a bowl of Lucky Charms and yogurt.
If you've come up with a half page of prose that will survive the day, NOW you're a writer. For now, that is. Now ... until cometh a compelling need to communicate something new. Now becomes "what have you done for me today." You start fresh, stripped of any past accomplishment, staring at the eternally blank page.
Work inside your brain again, and find out what you REALLY think. What you REALLY learned about yourself in the dank light of pre-dawn. You'll probably discover that a half page of memorable prose has pretty much exhausted the eloquent expression of ideas just rattling about in your brain that the world will find worthy of exposition.
That half page of purple prose was your 15 minutes of fame.
So what do you do to turn out that novel that every person supposedly has stored up within? Chances are you're pretty much stuck turning out the weekly Operations Report you've got to write down at the office. Whaddya gonna do now?
I lied. Writing, editing, rewriting ... all those things are a piece of cake, relatively speaking. Whether you're composing a one-page book report, a Letter to Shareholders, or the Tale of Two Cities, one simple truth rears its ugly head. Before you get to the "easy" tasks, you've got to have something to write about.
NEXT: Research and Reporting
[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]
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