There’s a special part
of my writing process that I don’t know how to define, I just know it’s there.
I call it “the challenge phase,” and it can come up at any time. It usually
takes the form of an innocent little question that can stop my typing in
mid-sentence.
“Why am I writing this?”
At that point, the answer doesn’t really
matter. If it takes me more than a few seconds to feel what the answer is, I
stop typing and shelve that work for a while. Sometimes forever.
It may sound like an
arbitrary decision, but there is one valuable reason why I do that – I care
about what I write. This doesn’t mean I must be obsessed about this particular
piece, or that it reflects some deep part of my soul. It means that whatever I
am writing still moves me, and I want to see where it goes. If I lose track of
that sensation; if I no longer know why I am fleshing out these thoughts, I
have to ask myself if I’ve lost track of that, or if I actually care about it.
In the wake of the
2008 financial meltdown, I sat on a panel at the DePaul College of Finance,
trying to explain the crisis to graduate students. A number of us professionals
spent two hours hashing out the details of this economic disaster in all its
brutal complexity. Very exciting and very educational, but if you weren’t a
financial professional, it was likely incredibly boring.
At the reception afterward,
a few students cornered me for a personal post-meeting grilling. I was still
shaking off the last of my public-speaking anxiety, and despite the gin and
tonic, I still carried a little edginess (See previous post, “Staring it Down,”
to understand speaking anxiety). One of the students called me on it.
“Have you spoken to a
lot of classes about the recession?” she asked.
“Sure,” I answered
after a deep breath. “But only five or six this year (it was September).”
The number clearly
impressed her. “If you’ve done it so much, why do you seem nervous about it?”
Fair question, but I
knew the real reason I was nervous wasn’t entirely about public speaking. I was
discussing something I really cared about; explaining the minutiae of a subject
that had dominated my career for the past few years. I knew the subject from
stem to stern, but I still thought about it, processing the events and poring
over the details, new theories coming to mind for consideration. The worst of
the crisis had passed, and yet I was nervous about presenting something I knew.
“I’m nervous about
these talks because I still take them seriously,” I answered with an assuring nod. “If I no longer
cared about this, I’d give you all the details and you’d sense that it didn’t matter
to me anymore. And you probably wouldn’t care about it either.”
And that truth really
stands out when we write. Our emotions come out in the words we write, and as
we grow as writers those come across even stronger. If we are connected to that
story, those words rise from the page. If not, they fade away and the reader loses interest as
well.
So when I ask that
question, “Why am I writing this?” it is a way of finding out if I still care
about the story. And that answer can make my writing pop, or it can tell me that maybe it's not happening.
If you had the idea once, there probably was a good reason why you started.
ReplyDeleteBut if you've lost that reason, those are the times you should maybe set the piece aside for a few months, or cut it up to use in another piece, change the direction.
I have a flash drive full of such startups. My biggest issue is becoming naming the files so I know where to find them, when it's time to resurrect them.
Setting them aside can be priceless. Even if just to have evidence of how your past writing skills have improved
Delete