How I write certain of my blog posts

I’m always interested in seeing the materials of writing, so I thought it’d be interesting to show the materials that went into a post about Anne Curzan’s Says Who? A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares about Words. Why not?

If I’m writing a blog post of any length, particularly a review of a book or a recording, I always start by making notes on paper, more notes than I’ll ever use, but I know that’s the only way to figure out what I will want to use. A pencil or gel pen works best for me; I don’t want the frequent distraction of uncapping and capping a fountain pen (unless I really do). Here I ended up with four pages of notes in a large Moleskine squared notebook, accumulated over four or five days of reading.

[Click either image for a much larger view.]

I go through these notes to find things that I want to use and to figure out how they should go together. That’s where a blue pencil comes in. I then write a very rough draft, always with a fountain pen, always on a legal pad. I never make an outline — I think outlines sometimes produce only the illusion of coherence, but this rough draft functions as a good outline would. It goes idea by idea, with page numbers for things to pull in from the book. My rough drafts tend to trail off as they near their end. You can see that happening on page two. An ending usually doesn’t announce itself until I’m writing.

[Click either image for a much larger view.]

When it’s time to write a real draft, I use a text editor. For this post, which had only minimal details of HTML to attend to, I wrote in BBEdit, dropped the not-finished writing into Blogger, and began to tinker. I asked Elaine to read the draft in Preview, and she had several smart suggestions. I took them all, tinkered some more, tinkered some more, tinkered some more, and posted the review.

Later in the day, at a friend’s suggestion, I removed a comma that I had added when second-guessing myself about a sentence’s readability. No, the sentence was fine without one, just as I had thought. Over the weekend I deleted and restored one word. Better without? No, with. And without realizing it, I had moved (once again) through the roles that Betty Sue Flowers describes in the work of writing: madman, architect, carpenter, judge.

When I taught an undergraduate prose-writing course, I always brought in images of writers’ drafts, many of them far messier than mine. Students always found it instructive to see how much work goes into the work of writing. It rarely, if ever, flows.

[Post title with apologies to Raymond Roussel. The careful reader will notice that the last two words of the rough draft were considerably softened in the finished post.]