Step 2
This is going to be my room in about a year.
Any writer will tell you that the process of writing
something involves very little writing. I mean, yeah, eventually you do write things, but that only comes
after a lengthy period of nonwriting and moderate to severe emotional anguish. Everybody
approaches it differently, but my writing process is something like 2% writing
and 98% lying facedown on my bed hating myself and everything I’ve ever thought
of. Don’t worry; it’s natural.
The facedown self-loathing step in the process isn’t
particularly enjoyable, but it’s the most important. Between Steps One and Three
– “Thinking of something you want to write” and “Writing that thing” – is Step
Two: “Figure out how you’re going to
write what you want to write.” And that’s where the creative sausage really
gets made. Step 2 is why there are more people who talk about wanting to be
writers than there are writers.
It’s not that Step 2 isn’t fun. Step 2 is fun – eventually. Whenever you figure out how all the moving
pieces of some portion of the idea you’re working on are going to fit together
in a seamless and elegant way, you feel like the smartest person in the world.
At the very least, you feel like you’re making progress. But when you’re
struggling to put everything together in your head, you just want to throw in
the towel on the whole writing business and go drive a garbage truck for a
living instead.*
*With all due respect to the sanitation workers of the
world, who I appreciate every time I throw something that has been in my nose
into the garbage.
What makes Step 2 especially grueling for me is that even
though I’m working, I don’t have anything to show for it. I’m basically just
sitting completely still and thinking about stuff – and not just any stuff, but
stuff that only exists in my mind. Even though winnowing through all the wrong
ways to write something is about the only way to find the right way, it’s hard
to feel accomplished doing it because you can’t just look over next to your
desk and see a pile of discarded ideas lying there.
Wow, look at all the
bad ideas I had today! I don’t know how many more bad ideas I’ll have to have
before I get to the good one, but it’s at least nice to know that I’ve had this
many so far and I won’t have to have them again.
I’ve tried working around this by outlining ideas on
notecards, which is too much work and feels environmentally unfriendly. I also
do some outlining in spiral notebooks, but that just makes me feel like I’m
writing a manifesto.
For as long as I can remember my preferred method for
dealing with Step 2 is just not writing anything – because you can’t be
flummoxed by something you’re not thinking about. The fact that I get anything
done at all is only because I spend a couple of minutes a day struggling to come
up with something before immediately giving up. It’s like emptying the
dishwasher by taking one plate out every night. The job will get done, even
though it takes about a month longer than it should.
Unfortunately, this option doesn’t really fly at work. My
office – by which I mean the four person cubicle of which I am currently the
only occupant – has a whiteboard in it, and while jammed up on a video game
trailer a couple of weeks ago I decided to start scribbling out threads of
ideas on the board, if for no other reason than to look busy if my boss glanced
in my direction. And then, miraculously, I raced through Step 2 in record time
and was back at my computer writing again.
And I haven’t looked back since. I now spend most of my day
at the office pacing back and forth holding a dry erase marker, periodically
rushing over to the board and writing fragmented ideas down in squeaky block
letters. Not only has made getting through Step 2 a lot easier, it’s also kind
of exercise in a really broad sense of the word.
Eager to replicate this success on the homefront, I picked
up a whiteboard and easel at Office Depot two weeks ago, and since then I’ve been
uncharacteristically focused and productive. Now instead of coming home from
work, taking my pants off, and mindlessly surfing the Internet until I fall
asleep, I come home, take my pants off, and pace around my room, outlining things
on the board as ideas come together. When the board gets full, I take a picture
of it on my iPhone, erase the board, and keep going, referring back to the
pictures later as I write at my computer.
I realize that writing everything down on a whiteboard,
photographing the board, and then more or less transcribing the photographs
into my computer is arguably the least efficient way to go about this process,
but I can’t argue with the results.
It’s a lot easier to organize my ideas when they’re all
staring me down from the same board instead of floating around in my head. Pacing
stimulates the imagination. And when all else fails there’s the powerful chemical
odor of the dry erase pens to get the creative juices flowing.
But honestly, I think the inefficiency of it is the biggest
benefit. Because even though programs like Microsoft Word and FinalDraft make
the writing parts of writing considerably easier, they make the non-writing
parts a lot harder because they’re on my computer and are thus one click away
from the Internet. My gut instinct response the second I run up against a brick
wall in my writing is, Maybe checking
Facebook and Reddit will help, and even though it never does I still try it
every time.
My white board doesn’t have the Internet. It’s merely a
blank surface where all of my bad ideas can exist just long enough for me to feel
productive for having had them before wiping them away as if I’d never come up
with something that stupid.
Truman Capps briefly gave some thought to painting
his room with the paint that turns walls into dry erase boards, but realized
that would probably make women even less likely to come in here.