I surprised myself in senior year when I signed up to take Writer’s Craft. I’d never liked the writing process; my so-called poetry was a disaster of fictitious emotion, my stories seemed to launch grandiose plots that went nowhere, I regarded essay composition as the sort of suspicious art mastered by those whom I felt sure would vault themselves directly from business school to corporate management.

But I did take Writer’s Craft, and I enjoyed it; when inspired, and not under duress, I *could* enjoy writing. I’ve always been good at explaining things to people: teaching and tutoring are incredibly rewarding activities.

So in some ways it’s perfectly understandable that I’d have spent the two intervening years writing on a website and writing a book. And in others, it’s very strange.

### Processing

I still remember high school writing assignments with their mandatory draft submissions. I remember the feeble excuses offered up by myself and my classmates; *I tried to re-write it, but it came out pretty much the same the second time*, *On the first draft, I edited as I was going*, and *It’s so wasteful to print off drafts from the computer*.

Inevitably, I would score well on content, on spelling and grammar, and maybe on sources, but bomb on *process*. Others seemed to pursue tactics such as “retroactive drafting”, complete with its multiple writing implements and phony corrections, but a deliberate deception has never been my style. In time, it became a sort of martyrdom; I’d simply acknowledge the lost marks, put on a face of long-suffering, and ignore it.

So I never wrote drafts. But now there’s nearly twenty of them in my blog software. Some of these are several pages and need *cutting*, others are just a paragraph or two and a bunch of links. A few are only a sentence and a title.

### The Audience

It seems shallow to say it, but I feel confident that it’s simply the exposure which forces me revise and rethink. School assignments have an audience of one—the teacher. In Writer’s Craft, the audience grew to three or four, as you required to read to your sharing circle. On this website, the are several dozen recurring visitors, plus hundreds of random hits per week.

And in writing for Apress, there’s an audience of thousands. A paying audience with expectations.

Indeed, the problem is the reverse of the one from high-school: suddenly I’m unwilling to declare a project *done*. Book sections that should have gone back and forth maybe twice would have more like three or four official revisions, plus dozens of “in-betweens” on my local machine.

### The Experts

In Steven King’s [Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully](http://mikeshea.net/Everything_You_Need_to_Kn.html), he writes,

> If you haven’t marked up your manuscript a lot, you did a lazy job. Only God gets things right the first time. Don’t be a slob.

Paul Graham, in a [piece about effective presentations](http://paulgraham.com/investors.html), drops this one:

> What you need to do is talk in this artificial way, and yet make it seem conversational… Good writing is an elaborate effort to seem spontaneous.

King’s advice is with respect to writing fiction, of course, but it’s funny how the two points exist in contrast with each other. Revising can help acheive clarity, but in the end it can strangle a first draft’s natural flow.

Of course, in three weeks I have to turn in a UW Engineering work report. And that’s back to an audience of one.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 1:10 am to Reflection, Writing.