Sometimes I feel like I’m not actually a writer.
I don’t mean this in an “imposter syndrome” way. We all have our hang-ups. In the list of mine, for better or worse, that happens to not be one of them.
What I mean is this. When considering the work I do on a given piece of content, the actual writing is a really small percentage of my overall effort. Like, miniscule. So when I think back on a project and remember everything I put into it, it seems weird to use the verb “writing” to describe what I do.
Maybe it’s an issue of definition. Or perception. Writing, we learn in school, is putting words on a page, in a particular order, to achieve a particular effect. This could be telling a story; or arguing for a position; or (implicitly) convincing your teacher––in five short paragraphs with a thesis statement in the opening one––to give you an A.
I was fortunate enough to have great writing instruction throughout my education and definitely learned a lot. But it was still all within the confines of semesters and units and specific curriculum we had to cover. This meant my classmates and I were often drafting things a week before they were due at best, the morning of at worst, with just a few exceptions, like the occasional writing-focused capstone project. Five a.m. drafting in bed with a laptop can be great. There’s an art to churning out content, after all. But it never felt like an intentional practice. I wasn’t cultivating a process that would help me figure out what I was actually doing with this whole writing thing.
And that’s the problem: when you’re racing from deadline to deadline, when you’re thinking “how can I meet these expectations as efficiently as possible, and then move onto the next assignment,” the writing starts to feel like a performance. Forget Stephen King’s advice to draft with the door closed, revise with the door open. There’s no time to revise at all. Or even to get up and close the door in the first place.
This is how most of us learned to write and learned to think about our writing.
It took years to shake the bad syntactical habits I developed from writing in a voice that wasn’t my own. And many more to figure out that, for me at least, “writing” (that is, writing-as-drafting) is only maybe 5% of the work.
The other 95%? It’s figuring out what I’m actually trying to say. And revision. So much revision. I’m going to lump those two steps together because often, in practice, the figuring-out and the revision are the same thing.
In the past ten years or so, I’ve finally gotten to write in the quote-unquote Real World. Here, unlike in school, personal projects and shifting client timelines often mean I actually have some breathing room in my process. Not always, but sometimes. When I can, I take advantage of this. I draft as quickly as possible, approaching those first words on the page not as something precious, but simply as the raw material I’ll use when I get to the real work.
Award-winning children’s writer Shannon Hale has a well-known quote about this.
Next, it’s time for revision, AKA castle-building. Given that this is, ideally, the bulk of the process, it’s worth paying attention to. There are ways to revise strategically, and misguided approaches that can derail your whole project.
Here are a few things I’ve learned.
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Choose your critics wisely.
Any project, personal or organizational, needs outside feedback to get into its best possible shape. You need people you trust. They should know how to be truthful about what’s not working and how to phrase this feedback in a supportive way. The most helpful comments will come from people who care about what you’re doing but have a different take on the whole thing. This could be a subject matter expert outside your creative team or a critique partner who’s way better at setting and will point out when all your characters are just disembodied ideas floating around in a geographic vacuum. (For example.)
This can turn into a real cooks in the kitchen situation really fast. So be sure that every voice you get involved is bringing something unique to their criticism and has your project’s best interests at heart.
Stay open-minded.
Getting critiqued is hard, whether that’s feedback from third parties or just going over what you wrote the next day and realizing there’s still so much work to be done. Sometimes it feels like an attack, especially when a piece is personal. (Workshop can get very quiet after the classic, “This protagonist isn’t very likable” / “Actually this is sort of a loose memoir” exchange.) But staying open to everything, especially early on, can be very rewarding creatively.
I’ve had prose manuscripts that morphed into poetry, and blogs that transformed into web copy, and entirely new strategies for positioning a product that came together because we were all receptive to ideas that emerged at the revision phase. This happens because a scribbled page is frequently easier to respond to than a blank one. So don’t be scared to consider everything. Listen to your critics, even when their feedback seems left-field.
But know your north.
That being said, not all feedback is good feedback. A (mostly) truism from workshop is that when someone tells you what’s wrong, they’re probably right. When they tell you how to fix it, they’re probably wrong. You’re the creator, whether this is your manuscript or whether an organization has hired you to write something for them. So it’s important to know your north, and use that north to guide how you respond to feedback.
For your own creative projects, editor Cheryl Klein suggests writing a letter to yourself at the outset, describing what you want to accomplish and why you’re making this in the first place. You can periodically return to this letter to ensure you’re on track. If the sweet, fluffy romance you dreamed of crafting with the intent of warming readers’ hearts now features zombie alligators and a tragic ending that gestures at how the failure of those in power will inevitably lead to our society’s dystopian downfall, maybe it’s time to course correct. If this is an organizational project, an occasional perusal of the creative brief, the campaign goals, and the company’s brand guidelines should do the trick.
If something’s not working, just cut that part out.
This is the easiest one! If you’ve been messing with a sentence for more than a couple minutes, just delete it. Works every time. I swear. And it works on a macro level, too. In a novel manuscript, for example, if you keep fiddling with a scene or even a chapter and it’s not coming together no matter what you do, nine times out of ten it’s probably because it doesn’t need to be there. Your subconscious knows when something’s not part of the whole. It took me years to figure this out, and my revision process has become much more efficient since I did.
Cutting stuff can be unnerving, though. Especially when it’s a big chunk or includes a particularly beloved darling. Take bestselling author Angie Thomas’s advice and keep a separate document where you can paste all the bits you’re taking out. She calls it “deleted parts”; other writers call it “purgatory” or “graveyard.”
Recently, I’ve settled on “compost.” It feels very eco-friendly and also less depressing when that document hits 60k words and my actual work-in-progress is only 50k.
I am not writing unnecessary words. I am simply making my creative future all the more fertile!
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So, back to not feeling like a writer.
All this revising is writing, I guess, though it doesn’t feel like it the way putting words on the page feels like it. I don’t know how they would have taught us this in school. Maybe by making us pull out our stories from third grade and rewrite them completely from our fifth-grade perspectives. Maybe by making us just sit there for half the class period, thinking in silence about a prompt we’d answered the day before. And then writing an entirely new response and seeing where that took us.
“Everyone, listlessly stare out the window for twenty minutes! Excellent, you’re just like a real-life author now.”
It could work?
Nowadays, I’m still searching for ways to conceive of my own productivity that extend beyond words on the page, or projects and manuscripts completed in a given year.
All I know is that with time, with revision, writing feels less and less like a performance and more like something that comes from within, rather than without.
And my compost files keep growing.
–Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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