Tuesday, 24. March 2009
On writing and why it can be so hard12:05:06 AM
I've been working on writing a philosophy
paper for the better part of forever. Contemplating the deep meaning
of my writers block has not yet led me to a completed paper, but it has
led me to something of a revelation on exactly why I happen to get writers
block.
In my ongoing efforts towards writing of
all sorts, it's not that I have any problem forming ideas. Like a
lot of writers I'd say I have too many ideas bouncing around rather than
not enough. And my problem isn't even in distilling down a single
or few ideas to focus on, but rather on just what angle I should be taking
to convey those ideas to a potential reader. When I do my fastest
writing is when I do stream of conscious, in which case I'm basically just
telling myself about the idea and then getting it written down as I go.
It works well to write fast, but it's not my favorite form of writing
because the stream inevitably has a wide variety of junk in it that doesn't
need to be there, and occasionally will veer off course into uncharted
waters.
No, the perfectionist in me always wants to re-evaluate everything and make sure I got it just right. And there, of course is where the waters get particularly muddy. Since any given sentence can be written in numerous ways, how can the "right" one be picked? To make matters worse, I want to imagine the audience I'm writing for and reread and re-evaluate what I've written to make sure what they'd be reading would be interpreted in such a way as to clearly gather the meaning of the idea I'm conveying. That's not to tough to do when doing technical writing, but now jump over to philosophy and fiction writing and the whole thing can get out of hand rather quickly and hence the writer's block.
Knowing is half the battle, right? The other half must be the actual writing...
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