To start off with, I should make it clearly known that when I write, it is more like a conversation than anything else I could compare it to. It is like my mind is talking to the paper – or computer screen – and I have no conscious awareness of what I am about to write until it is already written. When given a topic to write about, my mind isn’t always jumping for joy to start talking, so in general, this is the process I have to go through to get my mind in the correct mood to begin the conversation:
I sit at my computer, and wait expectantly, staring at the screen as if I’m somehow anticipating the words to magically appear in front of me or for some divine inspiration to come my way. Once a good amount of time has wasted away and I realize that the words won’t magically appear and divine inspiration has chosen to speak to some other struggling writer, I sit in front of my computer and begin to write nonsense. Sometimes, I write something that is partially related to the topic I am supposed to be writing on, and sometimes I write things that have absolutely no relation- but either way I begin to write something, anything. (This “wasting of time” is the only way I’ve found to get my mind in the mood to talk and be comfortable with what it has to say.) Typically, after having wasted a good hour on writing nonsense and replaying the e-mail scenes from “You’ve Got Mail” over and over in my head, my mind is ready to focus and write about the assigned topic- though I admit, I have experienced instances where my mind is never ready and willing to write about one specific thing.
During the assigned-writing-stage, I come across few difficulties. The words usually pour out of me onto the screen and I just let my fingers do the walking as my mind does the talking. When the writers block hits in the middle of my flow – which is extremely common – I skip ahead until I find a point that my mind is ready to talk about.
Then comes the dreaded reading-over stage- the stage where I generally compare my writing to J.R.R. Tolkien and compare my dialogue to movies like: “Before Sunrise,” “Dead Poet’s Society,” and “Big Fish.” The stage where I pick away at every word and rephrase almost everything I wrote the stage that’s most commonly known as the ‘correction stage’.
Eventually, I reach a point of frustration and print out whatever I have written. I give up on rephrasing, re-writing, and filling in the gaps and just try to be content in the work I produced. I’m not always satisfied with the end result but I am always content with the effort I put in and the thoughts behind the point I was trying to get across.