By Kat Savino
In the Writing Center, we talk a lot about low-stakes writing, especially in the early stages: do low-stakes writing, make a mess, don’t worry about sentence structure. I’m one of the biggest proponents of this process, to the extent that I usually discuss it in nearly every session—I’m always going on about how, as writers, we need to make a mess and not worry about structure until we have something on the page. We need to keep moving forward before we can go back and edit. The trouble is, once I get to my own work, I have trouble practicing these skills. Even now, as I write this, I’m feeling a strong pull to go back and revise what I’ve written before I move on.
However, I’m making more of an effort to actually practice low-pressure writing, especially as I’m nearly done with one big writing project and about to embark on another. I’m thinking of something a friend of mine said in commiseration: that she didn’t want to average writing one book every ten years. Her husband has often been tortured by watching her write—she often writes a sentence and erases it and starts again, rinse and repeat. We both want to be more prolific. We’re working to change our ways.
A couple of semesters ago, I met with a writing consultant at nearly every stage of the writing process while I worked on a brief essay I was writing, and with her encouragement/insistence, I forced myself to write messier drafts. I still remember how uncomfortable I felt—I wasn’t sure if the writing even sounded like me, because I hadn’t done my usual labor-intensive chiseling of each sentence. I started to consider: which sentences really needed to be developed before I moved on, and which could be impressions that I would fill out later? I found most could be impressions, though maybe a few could be more developed, especially if I was trying to get a foothold on a key idea that I needed to understand before I continued to write. But overall, I tried to think of sentences as light sketches. I could still see what I meant, but I could focus on the whole first; I could focus on just getting things done.
I noticed something significant as I drafted that essay and revised: everything was moving so much faster. For me, it was blazing holy-greased-lightning fast. What might have taken me a year or more took a matter of mere months. I think sometimes when writers face high-pressure writing (and, frankly, all writing can feel high-pressure), we go into polish-mode right away because we think it saves time. I could really see how that wasn’t the case. Perhaps most importantly, though, now when I talk to student writers about writing, I can take out one of my hot mess drafts if they don’t believe that experienced writers do that kind of thing.
Published February 17, 2015
