Elbow, Peter - A Community of Writers, pages xxvii-xxviii
It is no secret that writing is hard – or at least that writing well is hard. But it will help to explore the nature of that difficulty. Imagine you are having a relaxed, interesting conversation with your best friend. You’re in a comfortable room where you both feel right at home. You are both talking away and having a wonderful time. You find you have lots to say because you like talking to this person who likes you and is interested in what you have to say.
Then someone else comes into the room and starts to listen to the conversation. A friend. But quickly you feel that something is peculiar because this friend doesn’t say anything, doesn’t join in, just listens. It makes you feel a little funny, but you keep up the conversation.
Then more people start coming in. Some of them are strangers and they don’t say anything either. They just listen.
Then your friend stops talking altogether and asks you to do all the talking yourself.
Then someone pulls out a tape recorder and starts recording what you say.
Finally your friend, even though she won’t join in the conversation, starts quizzing you as you’re talking and asks:
And she doesn’t just ask questions, she gives “helpful suggestions”:
This is an allegory of writing. In writing, you must keep on putting out words, but no one answers or responds. You are putting out words for an audience but you don’t know how they are reacting. You may know who the intended reader is (probably someone who will grade it), but you don’t really know who else might read it, who any reader might show it to, or who might find it lying around. You are trying to get your thinking right, your organization right, your language right – all at the same time. And there’s spelling and punctuation to worry about too.
No wonder writing is hard.
But we have another message: Writing is easy. Writing is easier than talking because it’s safer than talking. For you can “say” something on paper and no one has to see it. if you’ve ever blurted out something wrong to the wrong person and wanted to bite your tongue off as soon as the words came out of your mouth, you know that you can never undo what you’ve spoken. But in writing you can blurt out anything and see what it looks like on paper and no one need ever see it. You can even keep yourself from ever seeing it again. In short, writing can be safer than talking.
People expect you to make some sort of sense when you talk; otherwise, they’ll stop listening or think you’re odd. But you don’t have to make any sense when you write; you can’t do that in speech because people will stop listening after a while no matter how much they like you.
Writing lets you “talk” about any topic at all, even if you don’t know anyone who is interested enough to listen. And there are certain things it’s hard to talk about. Writing lets you “talk” to anyone and tell them anything – and you can decide later whether to show it to them.
Admittedly, in describing how easy writing is, we’re talking about writing in itself, not about good writing. It gets harder when “good” enters the picture or when you’re writing for a tough reader, particularly a tough reader who will judge the writing. But even when your goal is to produce good writing for a harsh judge, you can start out this way, just writing for yourself. Afterwards, it turns out to be much easier to make it good than you might have thought. For one thing, when you do all that easy writing, surprising amounts of it are already pretty good. Those parts that are potentially good but badly written are often easy to fix up once you’ve got them down in one form or another. What’s really hard about writing is unnecessary: trying to get it right the first time.
Behind what we've just said is the fact that writing requires two mental abilities that are so different that they usually conflict with each other: the ability to create an abundance of words and ideas; and the ability to criticize and discard words and ideas. To write well we need to be both generative and cutthroat. We all know the awful feeling of trying to use both “muscles” at once: trying to come up with words and ideas and at the same time seeing how none of them is good enough. We get stuck. But we can get unstuck by separating the mental processes; we can think of more words and ideas if we hold off all criticism (as in brainstorming); and we can be more critical and tough-minded if we have already piled up more material than we need.
In short, even though writing gets most of us into the pickle of trying to use two muscles that get into each other’s way, it is writing that creates the ideal ground for using those muscles one at a time.