But even though the strictest rules for expository prose seem unnecessary to me, and even though you can probably write more informally for many audiences than some of your teachers have led you to believe, that is not my main point in this chapter. My main point is that if you want to breathe experience into your expository writing -- to make your readers feel your ideas -- you have an extra layer of difficulty that you don't have with creative writing. To breathe experience into your words, you have to pour all your energy into just experiencing the thought, yet in order to make it disciplined thought -- however informal -- you must also pour enormous energy into getting your thinking straight. These two goals conflict with each other. Whenever you have to attain two conflicting goals, the best approach is to pay wholehearted attention first to one and then to the other in a dialectical alternation. If you try to reach for both goals at once -- in this case experiencing your thinking and getting your thinking straight -- you allow yourself to be tugged in opposite directions at the same time and you will just end up doing a mediocre job at both. When I am writing something difficult for me -- and this chapter is an example -- I often have to switch my focus of attention back and forth more than once. That is, I start by putting all my energy into trying to experience my thinking as I write fast and uncritically: I try for total immersion in my thinking wherever it goes. But then during the next stage as I am critically revising and shaping mywords and trying to make my thinking disciplined, I some times seem to lose touch with my ideas. As I try to remove blunders, to add clarifications, to deal with exceptions or counterarguments, and to construct a logical order for my thoughts, I slowly sag, and the energy seeps out of my words, and the writing gradually gets more complicated or wooden or dead. I become very discouraged where originally I had been excited. And sometimes it's not just the language that begins to feel dead but the ideas, too: "How could I ever have been so excited about these ideas? They are so tiresome or so obvious or so wrong-headed or so merely-intricate," my feelings tell me. It's only after I have brought more discipline to my thinking (though I may hate it more) -- and usually I have to retype everything because it has become such a mess -- that I finally realize I must go back and put all my effort into feeling those thoughts. As I do this I find I can gradually remove dead language and put in live language, words that I can feel, words that have breath in them. This process of reinvestment usually involves trying to speak the sentences I find on the page, feeling how awful they are, and then trying to say the thought in language I believe. Having, in effect, examined this creature for defects, now I can let myself fall in love with it again, become vulnerable to it or feel its power, and thereby invest myself linguistically in it again. Only then can I dare let my real words come out, the words that actually have my breath in them. During that intermediate period of detached critical examination I had, without realizing it, retracted or hidden or fogged over the words that were actually part of me. But since this process of reinvestment gives birth to lots of new words -- and often brand new trains of thought are sparked off -- I usually have to turn my energy back to critical revising once again. And so forth and so on, till I have a set of words that will pass muster with both of my consciousnesses. I make this story sound a bit neater than what often happens with me. The truth is more ragged: piling up a lot of writing with parts that excite me; trying next to shape and revise it and as I do so gradually getting lost, thrashing around in a swamp, sunk, discouraged; and then by a dogged sweaty process I don't clearly see, finally getting out of my dilemma to a draft I believe in. For I am now just beginning to understand this dialectic of attention -- just now beginning to to realize consciously that when I get too sagging and discouraged during the revising process, I need to start put ting all my effort back again into the process of simply experiencing my words. What this means in practice is that I need to go back and read over the good bits of my raw writing to get in touch with them, perhaps read over some revised sections that I feel pleased with, and perhaps do some more raw writing. When I am reinvested, then I can turn back to revising with critical consciousness.Sometimes when I am working on something I have already revised and clarified and struggled with, I glance back at something in my original pile of raw writing and I am surprised: "Hey, none of my revised versions has the power and life -- even crispness -- of this original passage. I didn't know where I was going, I didn't understand the main point, I didn't see it as part of a sustained train of thought, but I stated this particular idea with more juice here than I've managed to give it in any later clarification." The point is, I now realize, that it's hard during revising to enter into that idea with the wholeheartedness that I had the first time. Some of my attention is dissipated on considerations of where it goes, how it fits, and how to say it best. And also, I'm simply not trying as hard -- not pouring myself into it -- since I feel I already know that idea, I've already stated it, I've already got it in hand. Therefore I don't need to put out so much. If you want to play tennis well you have to pour your attention into looking at the ball. You lose that concentration or focus or full participation in the ball when you feel, "Oh yes, I see this ball, I know where it's going, I've got this thing in hand." That's when you are apt to miss the ball or hit it wrong. Advice | | • When you have expository writing to do -- essays, memos, reports, or whatever -- start by putting all your energy into experiencing your thinking. If you don't have much thinking yet -- if you don't yet know much of what you want to say -- experiencing your thinking turns out to be the best way to get more. That is, let your early writing be raw. Use whatever trains of thought you have as they occur to you, including digressions, frustrations, and doubts. In addition use the words themselves that simply come out of your mouth as you open it and force yourself to write even if they seem wrong or stupid or unsuitable. You will have raw writ- | | | ing that contains, much of it, the breath of experience. But of course it may have other characteristics of spontaneous thinking: its connections may be associational and analogical more often than logical; it may have mistakes in logic even where you tried to be logical; it may have many false starts and digressions; it may start somewhere in the middle -- or rather it will start and restart in different places and tend to go in different directions at once; the language may be unclear or unsuitable. And it may lack any clear conclusion. But if you simply pile up all your thinking as it comes to you, you can produce many good ideas and much writing with life in it. That's exactly what you need for a first draft. Next, as you shape and revise this raw writing, you can give it clarity and coherence. Finally you can end up with writing that is coherent and logical but also makes the reader experience your ideas. | | | • On some occasions, however, you will already know almost everything you want to say before you sit down to write. You can start then by getting your thinking straight rather than experiencing your thinking. Start, that is, by making an outline (full sentences), since that is the best way to cross-examine, correct and organize your thinking. With the structure and security this outline gives you, you can engage in the writing itself and as you do so pour all your energy into experiencing your ideas. But if you find that sticking to your outline somehow drains life and experience from your writing, then I would advise skipping the outline and following the words where they go and using the outline later for organizing your raw writing. | | | • You can give yourself pep-talks as you write expository prose: "Feel it! Am I really experiencing it or just settling for describing it from memory? Be someone who cares deeply about this idea!" | | | • Role playing as you write is one of the best ways to breathe experience into words. If you are writing about someone else's ideas or explaining information you don't care about, pretending to be someone else will help you get more involved. For example, if you have to write a report explaining the three policies that your committee must choose from, pretend as you explain each policy that you are the person who invented it. Tell the idea in the first person: "First I realized this, then that . . ." As you revise you can make the few changes needed to put it back into your voice, but the ideas will have life. If you must write about thinking that feels ancient, strange, or tiresome to you -- if you feel you can't get | | within a hundred miles of what you are writing about -- pretend you are the first person who has ever had these thoughts and write an excited letter about your breakthrough. It can also help to be someone who disagrees with what you are trying to explain, "Yes, Mr. Darwin, that's an interesting idea you have there, but I'm very upset by what follows from your irresponsible speculation." We are likely to assume that expository writing ought to emulate the kind of communication used by God and the angels: they communicate with each other directly, purely, all in one gulp. Humans, on the other hand, because our reason is clouded with mortality, must use discursive reason which gets at truth only gradually, step by step, imperfectly -- often by means of a crooked path. Good expository writing -- we feel -- should be pure and direct and distilled. Or it should be like mathematics. There should only be the essence, none of the dross. Role-playing helps knock this assumption out of you. It makes you talk onto paper. Powerful conceptual writing is usually more like talking than like mathematics or telegrams between angels. It usually has lots of clayey, mortal imperfection about it: the writer is standing there in front of you and he has to explain one point at a time, sometimes back up to repeat something important, not be a in a hurry, and sometimes pause and look around. When your expository writing goes particularly well, it is often because you have drifted into actually speaking to someone as you write. Later, during the revising process, you can remove some of the speech habits -- "Oh yes, there's something else I suddenly realized is very important to tell you" -- that may make a written piece feel too chatty or cute. But you don't have to hurry to remove them as long as you get them out eventually. The speaking mode of writing helps to breathe experience into words. Only speech has breath in it. (The role-playing suggestions in the Loop Writing Process, Chapter 8, though they are exercises for generating new thinking, are also ways to get more experience into your words. You cannot have new thoughts without experiencing them.) | |
| • Give yourself as much practice as you can at putting experienced thinking on paper. That means keeping a diary or journal or folder for your thoughts and reactions. Have a place where you talk to yourself on paper and aren't afraid to explore thoughts as well as feelings. | | • But it also means writing down thoughts when they strike you. |
Even if you are doing something else. If an idea seems important to you or if it relates to an important project, it is especially useful to write it down at the time. Allow yourself to find a scrap of paper now -- or within five minutes -- and write it down briefly. When a thought first intrudes on you, you can be sure you are experiencing it. Don't settle for saying, "I'll have to sit down and write about this idea when I get home." You may well be out of touch with it by then. This method is important for me. It means sometimes getting out of bed for five minutes after I have turned out the light, or retreating to the bathroom if I'm in a public situation where it's inappropriate to write myself a note, or writing on the back of a blank check when no other paper is handy, or tuning out in the middle of a meeting while I write down my own idea which the conversation somehow triggered. (It looks as if I am diligently taking notes on the meeting.) I find that many of my best ideas about X come after I have put it out of my mind and I'm thinking about Y. Therefore, if there's something you know you have to write, it pays to start it as early as you can -- that is, to sit down and do four or five pages of free exploration to fertilize your mind. Having done this, you'll find that many extraneous events during the next few days or weeks will trigger new thinking about your topic. It's not much trouble. You'll be surprised by how quickly you can get down a rich train of thought when you are in the middle of something else or waiting to go back to bed -- especially if writing has always been a slow ordeal for you. You aren't trying to write it well or completely, you're just trying to capture the experience of your thought. You'll feel enormously grateful when you do sit down later to write a full draft because you will have a little pile of thoughts to start from. Felt thoughts. Even as few as three are a fruitful pile because they were jotted down in different mental contexts so that when you set them to interacting among themselves -- when you try, that is, to figure out how they relate to each other or which of them is true -- showers of other ideas will come to you. But don't just jot down key words or phrases, write a short note. Pure or distilled information usually won't carry experience. You need your information in the form of speech or syntax. It needn't be lengthy speech or correct syntax but it needs breath in it. Just | | write quickly out of the feeling and drama of your sudden thought instead of translating into "essay language." Here is a note I wrote myself on a little scrap of paper when I was in the middle of something else (think I was listening to a lecture that was difficult to follow): Do you want your reader to have to struggle to figure out what you are saying? Damn right! I had to work to figure it out. Why shouldn't he? Besides, if it's too easy for him, he won't appreciate it. | | | • Do as much reading out loud as you can. Of others' writing and of your own. It exercises the putting-experience-into-words muscle. | | | • Put your body into it as you write. Clench your fist, bang your hand on the desk, stamp your feet, make faces. When you connect wholeheartedly with what you are trying to say you may well find yourself crying or giggling or shaking. Let your body react just as it wants, and keep on writing, even if it feels peculiar. (It's not.) If you try to stop the tears or giggling you just make it harder to stay in contact with your thinking. | | | • Get a feeling, finally, for this dialectic of attention: since you need to invest singlemindedly in experiencing your thinking but also to invest singlemindedly in disciplining your thinking, the only way of doing so is to alternate between the two. Learn to notice cues that tell you when your attention is divided or when you are distracted or worried or pulled out of focus. Learn to make yourself do something about it. Stop, look around, and then pour your attention into experiencing or disciplining. |
And even when your attention is focused one way or the other, learn to notice cues that tell you when you need to switch your attention to the other. Switch to disciplining your thinking when you feel a cycle of investment and raw writing is finished, when you are just covering the same ground over and over, circling unproductively back on your old ideas, or when a deadline is approaching. When, on the other hand, you notice you are getting too discouraged and stale as you revise -- perhaps even making things worse rather than better, throwing away good bits, making needless changes, taking all the energy out of your language -- switch away from disciplining your thinking back to experiencing it. Here are the best ways I know for reinvesting yourself in your thinking: | • Go back to your raw writing and read over the good bits. |
| • Read over revised sections that work well. | | • Do new raw writing. | | • Force yourself to say out loud your thoughts in words you would use in talking to a friend. |
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