Fungible Convictions

I’m reading Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, and for anyone who spends a lot of time writing and thinking about writing, it’s one of the best books on the subject—better than some of the standbys and better than newer books like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.

But the book has some seriously flaws. Author Joseph M. Williams fails, for example, to follow through on a promised topic, as one Amazon reviewer points out:

The author states on page three that “English writers have responded to three influences on our language. Two are historical and one cultural.” The two historical influences are quickly dealt with, but the cultural influence is never clearly presented.

That’s a serious sin. I would have encouraged Williams to cut way back on the etymological discussion altogether so that he wouldn’t forget to mention explicity the cultural influence on the English language.

Nevertheless, the book is stellar. Williams thrives where other writers on writing have failed: in his examples. You read them and you immediately understand the concept. In his section on concision, he offers this:

Even when you arrange all [sentences' and paragraphs'] parts in all the right ways, they can still succumb to acute prolixity:

The point I want to make here is that we can see the American policy in regard to foreign countries as the State Department in Washington and the White House have put it together and made it public to the world has given material and moral support to too many foreign factions in other countries that have controlled power and have then had to give up the power to other factions that have defeated them.

That is,

Our foreign policy has backed too many losers.

Editing for concision is a skill honed over the course of a lifetime. Authors often don’t realize how few of their words are essential until their article or manuscript is in the hands of an editor with a strict wordcount. (Concision is a life-long skill, but authors don’t know that until they have an editor.) (Authors learn concision once they have an editor.) That life-long learning process accelerates with Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. It focuses less on rehashing the rules we learned in middle school English and more on why what works, works.

For anyone who wants to write a follow-up, know that Williams dismisses precision altogether. (In fact, he misuses precision when he writes that it has to do merely with battles over that/which, I/me, etc.) Precision in language means that two or more people understand the same word to mean the same thing. His neglecting precision—his neglecting almost everything to do with thoughtful language, an linguistic order of magnitude less than “sentence” and “paragraph”—holds the entire book back. Addressing precision could greatly improve a future version.

The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don’t mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning. —Joyce Carol Oates

When you’re writing fiction—whether a short-short, short story, novella, or novel—do you plan out your work? A little, with some notes? A lot, meticulously, with detailed outlines?

Some writers argue the act of writing is the creative engine for plot and character. Others point out that writing without a concrete (or somewhat flexible) idea of where things are headed guarantees, at best, a lot of rewriting and, at worst, a substandard product.

Lee Goldberg of A Writer’s Life draws attention to this very dilemma and comes down squarely on the side of outlining.

I am a firm believer in the importance of having an outline before you sit down to write. It doesn’t have to be detailed outline—it might only be a page or two. You just need to know where you’re going and, to some degree, how you are going to get there…or what happened to author Sandra Scoppettone could happen to you.

What happened to Scoppettone? She accidentally conflated the lives of characters, and she had to go back and rewrite large swaths of her novel. (see Sandra’s comment below for details)

I have to strongly, though obliquely, disagree with Goldberg. He, like many writers, myself included, make use of outlines as guides, or as he calls them “living outlines”. They change as discoveries are made in the writing process.

But he only acknowledges the chance of significant rewriting, whereas I would argue that major rewriting is an essential part of the writing process. As such, total rewriting should be accepted as a necessity and eventuality, and, as such, a first draft should always be written without an outline, without a net.

A first draft in my process is about generating material. You open your writing to all opportunities. And you end up writing ten disposable pages for every top-notch one. (It’s also the point that you conduct your research, if needed.) It’s only after you have all that material on the page that you create an outline, a retrospective one, that makes use of everything you’ve spit out. Then you write your second draft using that outline and the “unlimited” material.

I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few
elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive. —Susan Sontag

Of course I’ve shelved a lot of stories that way. It’s hard not to have goals to measure your writing against, and that’s a big negative in not outlining before writing a first draft … and it presupposes you have enough time to write many pages you know you’ll just throw away.

But as the truism goes: only writing is writing.

What do you guys think? What process do you find works best for you?