2.11: The More Writing Process, the Better

Author: Jimmy Butts @jimmy_butts, theyellowrobot.com.

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”—Bruce Lee

Everyone has a writing process. And writing, like anything, takes time. But for quite a while—much too long—writers have increasingly embraced a specific and drawn out model for the writing process, which generally refers to five sure-fire steps: prewriting, drafting, editing, revising, and eventually—if one can muster the endurance to get through each of those earlier stages—publishing. As we have increasingly valued this writing process, we have moved further away from valuing writing itself as a wonderful, finished thing that humans can produce, that is, actually get done.

In other words, we have so fetishized the creative process that we’ve forgotten what we can actually create: words strung out into beautiful constellations. The obsession with the writing process rather than seeing writing as a completed product is an increasingly problematic psychological perspective as we increase the speed of production in the 21st century. Beleaguered revision has become the norm. When any view becomes that dominant, it is important to consider revising it. I am worried that we are taking too much time to write. And time is our most important non-renewable resource.

Meanwhile, well-meaning teachers all over still have colorful little posters up in their rooms with those classic five steps borrowed from some fairly dated views on what writing involves. We often do the various steps of the writing process while we write, of course—just not necessarily in the prescriptive order outlined by this slightly archaic structure. Writing is more complex than a five-step program. These steps come from a time when people typed on charming things called typewriters. Hannah Sullivan blames the introduction of the typewriter along with Modernism’s aim to present an ideal text for our current obsession with punctilious editing in her book The Work of Revision. There, Sullivan warns that “revision can go too far.” The technological shift in what writing involves plays a big part in how we view writing—as process or product. For many, the writing process involves checking social media accounts for something like three days. In an age of mass distraction, it is perhaps increasingly important to see our writing finished, or it will increasingly become our collective pipedream—a thing that we desire to do but never realize. (Indeed, in much online writing, posts end up being fluid iterations, but readable published iterations nonetheless.)

Perhaps we should drop writing as a verb and see it more and more as a noun—the thing that writing is. Writing is no longer merely a thing we do hunched over for hours, but a thing we make, and increasingly quickly. This view, then, attempts to pull the rug out from under process stances from the mid-20th century to the present—embracing instead what might be called a hyperproduct perspective on writing for the fastest century yet.

The process theory of composition arose with a handful of well-meaning thinkers in the 1960s and 70s. There is a bit of history here about how we got ourselves into an idolatry of a slow process theory of writing. Before the middle of the 20th century, the general theories about writing in schools encouraged finishing products—things like writing themes for English classes. This view is now generally known as current-traditional rhetoric. It was the kind of schooling that we might think of when we think of rulers rapping student’s knuckles to finish their work. An alternate model that valued expressivism of creative and unruly thought and the process of writing—and not the product—grew fairly common as a backlash.

Donald Murray and Peter Elbow in particular—those good, friendly, inspiring kinds of writing teachers—advocated seeing “writing as a process, not a product.” Many embraced a kind of slower process in the teaching of writing that resisted the kind of production-line expectation of written work that can sometimes arise along with a lot of anxiety. All of this was good. It was a valuing of the human as a writer, but it began—I suspect—to devalue the written work. As such, an era embracing endless drafting, tinkering, and reworking ad infinitum began.

The Council of Writing Program Administrators, an organization that thinks about how writing works especially on college campuses, claims that one of the primary outcomes in learning to become a writer is to understand writing as a process. The council states this goal in this way: “Writers use multiple strategies, or composing processes, to conceptualize, develop, and finalize projects.” To their credit, the objective is stated in a loose way to accept multiple approaches to writing and flexibility and recursivity in the processes that we develop as writers.

We love tinkering. We love delaying that finished, polished draft. But we must complete work. Otherwise, I think we relegate that work—the work of writing—to something less valuable. We blush at the fact that we scramble to complete drafts up to the moment before they’re due. Here, now, we might embrace that kind of breakneck pace—the work finished in the wee hours of the morning. Meanwhile, process has been critiqued since at least the early 1990s through a set of frameworks called post-process theory. Still, process haunts us. Most post-process critiques of the process formula suggest that a process view is invalid by merely embracing more complex, unknowable processes.

Of course, the idea of following a formula to write a perfect draft is a false construction. We write for specific situations, each unique. A certain set of cognitive steps are involved in writing anything—from academic papers to tweets; however, the set of steps used to compose one thing isn’t necessarily a learnable and reproducible set of steps. We cannot follow a writing process, because writing is messier than that. Instead, then, revision and process become excuses on the part of writers who have taken a bit too long to finish writing projects, never ending or completing compositional tasks. Holding to dying process-based views, endlessly reworking drafts never to completion, does a disservice to writers who are seeking to make good, new things fast.

We don’t often meticulously revise text messages. The written code of iOS 11 revises iOS 10. Each iteration becomes a potential improvement, but always as a valuable—and evaluable—product. In economic perspectives, revision is worthless unless it creates iterations of value. How we view process essentially depends on how much time we spend creating a thing. Is there a process to composing a tweet? Sure. But is there much editing, revision, recursive work? Not anymore.

It is finally time to explore an alternative to our obsession over the writing process in favor of a return to a healthy appreciation of finished drafts—of writing itself. Our culture really does value finished work. The exploratory work done in prewriting is harder to appreciate. And while a concern with overvaluing product is understandable, we should reclaim our writing—those satisfying finished pieces that do what we intend. If we don’t value writing, then we can, of course, relegate it to something we endlessly defer by thinking about it. Making writing achievable and real is the goal.

The outcome of a written product is quite important. While how writing gets done (process) may not be able to be demystified, we might be better able to see writing as a thing we make (product). The process of writing is insignificant, unimportant, and immaterial when the product of writing is really good. The thing is what matters. And more than that, regularly finishing written work makes one a writer. Writers must find their own ways of completing all kinds of writing in their normal, everyday lives. But completed writing is really what we’re after—not worthless drafts. Those drafts can be bad, and shaky, and loathsome. (They sometimes are!) But they must be finished.

This perspective asks us to write and write a lot, but also to finish and publish wherever we can happily find a space for our work. I think that this view also invites us to stop dilly-dallying, and saying that we are writers when we are sometimes not acting like it and to accept our successes along with our failures. For if we are to write things for the world, then some of it may not be perfect, but it will be completed and made public.

Of course, a hyperproduct view of writing is similar to a view sometimes espoused by hundreds of pithy productivity websites— the kind one might read when being unproductive. However, a strong product-based view of writing values the writing as well as what the writer can do. Famous portrait painter Chuck Close has this wonderful line: “Inspiration is for amateurs, I get to work.” Mark Twain and Maya Angelou, among others, notoriously hated the editing process. There are probably more quotations valuing revision from famous writers than not, coming from a natural tendency, which is why this line of thought is so heretical and necessary. Like any creative practice, it is easy to make writing a ponderous sort of artistic practice. And it should involve a bit of pondering and playful exploration, but it cannot stay there. The tension between process and product involves a shift in how we think about time. There is a well-known anecdote about Oscar Wilde confessing that he spent all morning taking out a comma, and all afternoon putting it back. This decadent view of the writing

process simply isn’t where we are as a culture. It’s like spending all day manicuring your nails. Arrant pedantry!

And it is vanity. Time is a luxury. Revising too much can be unethical—a waste. There are diapers to be changed. More than that: People are dying. You are dying. And you need to write as though your next piece could be your last.

For better and worse, we value getting things done. Doing stuff. Making stuff. With words, in our particular case. When we make written work, we fall in line with other productive professions: farmers, smiths, tailors, cobblers, artisans. Writing was analogous to building for the Romans. In this view, writing is construction, but thinking about writing is never arriving at what we might create. Our trade is sentences—complete ones generally. Perhaps we fear finishing drafts because we’re afraid they will fail. We writers might nail Nike’s maxim to our walls: Just do it.

This approach is not the soft handholding of Donald Murray. We should clean the sludgy snailtrail of slow, process-oriented writing that is reminiscent of the Mac Beach Ball of Doom, endlessly spinning. We owe it to the work of writing. We owe it to ourselves. In this view, we say write something next week. And the next! Write all the time. Don’t waste another second. Love deadlines. Eliminate distractions. Get it done. Now, go. Do.

Further Reading

If you’re interested in thinking more about process and getting writing done, you might begin by reading one of the articles that started it all, “Teaching Writing as Process Not as Product” by Donald Murray. Later reconsiderations of process are collected in the edited collection Beyond Postprocess, put together by Sidney Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola. A few more popular and accessible articles on process include “Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators” by Megan McArdle and “The Trick to Being a Prolific Scholar” by Tanya Golash-Boza. Another popular article, “The Dilemmas of Maker Culture” by John Tierney, questions our obsession with getting things done, while Getting Things Done by David Allen has been a bestseller for a long time and influenced our productivity movement. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow also explores our work habits along these thematic lines. And finally, perhaps the most in-depth study of our historical trajectory toward process and productivity is Hannah Sullivan’s book, The Work of Revision.

Keywords

getting things done, post-process, process, recursivity, revision

Author Bio

Jimmy Butts teaches writing and the teaching of writing to impressive, young humans. He likes to get them doing wonderfully weird things with words. He immensely enjoys finishing a draft. You can find him on Twitter @jimmy_butts or at theyellowrobot.com.