Category Archives: writing/editing

Yesterday I completed my own chapter draft for The Hobbit and History. Yes, rather like the cobbler’s children who go without shoes, the editor’s chapter is sometimes one of the last to be completed.

Today I printed out the draft after class. I celebrated with a wee second breakfast the serendipity of wrapping things up in time for Hobbit Day and Tolkien Week. And then I looked at what awaited me. Ugh! Some of my sentences were so wrapped up in themselves, they fell apart as soon as I tried to read them. I’ll be spending some time this week unsnarling my prose.

Part of this is an artifact of my write early, write often philosophy. I’ve been working on this chapter for well over a year now, although it stalled for many months just around 1600 words. But most of it is the reality that I write shitty first drafts (Thank you, Anne Lamott). It’s not the argument or evidence that’s at fault, it’s my prose style.

My first draft sentences will often start in the middle of an idea, roll out a clause or two, throw in a caveat or qualification and finish up with a key concept. You’d see a lot of similarly disorganized sentences in this draft, let me tell you! I also see too many weaselly or empty words such as “although” and “therefore” and “so too”, sometimes more than once in the same paragraph. I stare in horror at the vaguely grounded statements that claim certain behaviours “were expected” without indicating by whom or how that actually happened. Passive verbs litter the paper landscape. In a word? This draft sucks.

I want to cry. I don’t. Instead, I revise my work, step by laborious step, smoothing out the snarled phrases, eradicating the evasions and purging the overwhelming passive constructions. Editing your own work is just as important as writing. If you don’t allow time for revision, what you send off to the editors, reviewers or friendly members of your critique group can be so rough as to be unhelpful. I’d rather see their time spent getting me from 80% to 100% than from 60% to 80% which is what it will be if I ask them to read my shitty first draft. I can get that to respectability and then their feedback can help me turn it into something I’ll be proud of for years to come.

If you’re going to be a writer, you have to get over the instinctive flinching you experience when you review what you’ve written. (I can’t be the only one who felt that way, going back to when I was an undergrad.) Revising is just as important as writing. Yes, it takes some time, which is why I tell my students to try and have a complete draft several days before the assignment is due so they can review and edit! It also takes courage to face the truth that what you wrote isn’t nearly as clever as you imagined it was when you were writing it. But it pays off and can make the difference between a composition that’s published and one that’s not.

I’ll wrap up with a plug for a great writing opportunity. Jo VanEvery, who’s a font of wisdom on many matters academic, is running a Monday morning Meeting With Your Writing that, if it didn’t overlap with my Monday mid-day class, I’d be all over. If you’re working on getting your own writing or editing working within your schedule, check this out as a great value for not a lot of expense!

With just a few weeks left in the term I’m throwing myself wholeheartedly at another writing project that has to be wrapped up shortly, my own chapter for The Hobbit and History. To that end, I’ve pulled out my pile of books to which I’m referring, rifled through the articles I need to draw upon, reread The Hobbit and skimmed through the subsequent trilogy including the appendices as well as parts of the Silmarillion plus The Unfinished Tales. In other words, I’ve poured myself back into the world of Middle-earth.

Project immersion is the best way for me to get from skeleton outline to finished composition in a short time. I have to live and breathe the world I’m trying to recreate, whether its the story of 17th and early 18th century Londoners playing out at the Old Bailey or the adventures of people long ago in a galaxy far, far away. Along with that, I try to come to terms with the key scholarly themes – how can I ensure I’m relying on up-to-date and accurate assessments of what other practitioners are saying. This is just as important in my pop culture pieces where I will range wide and far in time and space, relying heavily on other historians to help me understand and assess many different cultures and scholarly treatments, as it is for my conventional academic writing where I need to engage with the most important and current interpretations.

As the immersion progresses, I start muttering to myself, hopefully sotto voce, testing out key themes or possible sub-headings. I drift off to sleep with important examples running through my brain. I wake up ruminating over key arguments. I peel potatoes and I ponder primary sources as yet untapped. I jot down a note about how to bridge two different sections in between errands.

And then? I write. The whole draft’s finished in just a few days but don’t be fooled. I couldn’t get my project done if it weren’t for the initial immersion.

What about you? How do you get revved up to write?

This week I worked on another writing task – a new type of composition that left me perplexed and struggling at times. I banged my head against the keyboard time and again as the piece refused to jell until, in the middle of the night, I realized that reorganization would solve my problem. I needed to return to my original conception, sketched out a year ago. Once I did, the words flowed.

Well, maybe not flowed, but they came out. It was still more work and done with less certainty than I’d experience drafting a conventional chapter or article. That shouldn’t surprise me, now, should it? When you move out of your comfort zone to try something different, it won’t be as easy as doing the tasks at which you’re practiced. In the end, the composition was complete and, most importantly, it was good enough for a first draft that would go off to be edited by a collaborator. And that’s the key: getting to good enough.

What I wrote isn’t perfect but it will never be. It can be better but the marginal return of my fiddling with it for hours and days more without feedback? That’s extremely limited. What my writing needs right now is another set of eyes, preferably ones that are connected to a virtual red pen that will mark up and tweak the piece. Heck, I’d be grateful if the response was simply to eviscerate it and say “you missed this, this and this.”

Too often we jinx ourselves by imagining that our first drafts will be perfect and that they’ll inspire a swooning reaction in their first reading. “What a genius! Let’s print this right now!”

That’s ridiculous and damaging thinking because, of course, nobody’s perfect (or ‘pobody’s nerfect’ as we used to say in the seventies). But every one of us can get to good enough with our writing and then enlist someone else’s help to make it better.

Mind you, I’m incredibly grateful that I have friends and colleagues who generously offer to review and critique my work and I’m happy to do the same for them in return. After all, thoughtful criticism helps me improve as a writer, teacher and editor. And isn’t that good enough?