you know, it’s ok to take your time
“Spontaneity is not made by fastness”
I often get asked how long it takes me to write my weekly Sunday Life column. I know why people ask – because they want to know if what they’re doing is taking too long. I wish I had a watertight answer. But to be honest, some days it flows in an hour or two. Others, well it can take all day. And night. And I still won’t have written the first sentence.
My friends are used to this. I have them on an ad-hoc roster. I ring one when I’m having a stuck day and talk it out, agonise, ask for advice and then get impatient with them, hang up and go sit on my head (I don’t say this flippantly).
What makes these days even more turn-inside-outty: if I let it enter my head that Other People Do Things Much Faster.
What makes me eventually calm down: is some advice a writing mentor from my early days as a feature writer at Sunday Magazine (the competitor mag) gave me: “The day you stop taking too long to write your first two paragraphs is the day you stop being a good writer”. She then told me about how a VERY senior journo (now editor of a major metro daily) would agonise and have to share his first paras with the office and get lots of egoic stroking before continuing.
What struck a chord this week: this little snippet about how long it took Bruce Springsteen to record Born to Run:
It took him six months during the spring and summer of 1974 to record the title track….Anytime you spend six months on a song, there’s something not exactly going right. (But) Born To Run marked a change in Springsteen’s writing style. Whereas previously it seemed as if he had a rhyming dictionary open beside him, now his lyrics became simultaneously more compact and explosive. What mattered to him was to sound spontaneous, not to be spontaneous. “Spontaneity,” he said, in 1981, “is not made by fastness. Elvis, I believe, did like 30 takes of ‘Hound Dog,’ and you put that thing on, and it just explodes”.
“Spontaneity is not made by fastness” this quote prompted me to go looking through Leigh Sales book on doubt for the sage advice given to her by her Dad “preperation and planning prevent piss-poor performance”
Blockages stop us from writing effectively. Deeply seated ‘I-cant’ ideas are what causes anxiety and indecision to set it.
20 minutes and a quiet room ALWAYS cures my writers block. Always. If you don’t have access to a quiet room, find a quiet space. If you can’t find a quiet space you’re in the wrong line of work
Thanks for sharing your take Sarah.
Thank you for making me feel ok. I always imagines ‘real’ writers could just churn it out. I take forever, always have. I find I have to walk with my writing and talk out loud (yes madwoman) to help the ideas flow. Mariette
Thank you for making me feel ok. I always imagined ‘real’ writers could just churn it out. I take forever, always have. I find I have to walk with my writing and talk out loud (yes madwoman) to help the ideas flow. Mariette
jo-living savvy – your Dad has got it right – the builders I use on jobs have the same attitude and we never have to go back and forth to get it right!!!
The art of Writing is to make the piece ‘read’ effortlessly – not written effortlessly – great piece, Sarah!
This has made me feel much better. I always wonder whether I’m writing quickly enough compared to other people and agonise over it. I have found that I write better very early in the morning ie from 5am and write better late at night. It is in the middle of the day where there tends to be a problem
It doesn’t seem to get easier! Sometimes I start at my screen as vague rumbling of half-words and churning thoughts skip through my head. At these times, I’ve found it best to get something – anything – out. Once I’ve written a pile of words, I can shape, slash, re-write and re-order.
Other times, the first para flows out like it can’t wait to be born, and then everything flows pretty easily from there. Yet that can be a trap too, as sometimes the sentences I’m most in love with are the ones that don’t fit and can’t be made to fit. Then I’ve got to take my ego in hand and slash them for the sake of the piece.