What Counts as Writing

I just finished up with a day that began around 8 AM with a decision that I had to start working on this chapter that I really want to draft before the summer is through.  (I didn’t work solidly for 13 hours – that’s nuts – but I’d say that I did work for about 6-7 hours.)  What’s interesting, though, is that I didn’t actually compose anything in that 6-7 hours of work.  Rather, I did the thing that I do when I need to get started that isn’t “writing,” except for I think it actually might be.

I have ended this day with approx. 7,600 typed words, about 24 double-spaced pages, but I wrote not a lick.  What I did, which is a thing that I do, is I put what I imagine is my outline into a word document, and I return to the primary text.  I carefully return to the primary text, and I find those passages that stood out as I read, and I fit them into my outline.  And all the while, I realize the ways in which the outline doesn’t quite work, and I realize that I really have probably about 3-4 times the material that I need for what I’m trying to do, and I organize and I envision the whole while at the same time focusing on specific moments.  I think about how it all fits together into an interpretation.  I think about how things that I thought were central are really marginal, and I think about things I’d forgotten that turn out to be quite important.  I realize that what I thought was going to be the conclusion is really the introduction, and I realize that what I thought was the introduction is really the pathway to the “big finish.”  I think about how much I still need to do, but basically, I spend a day typing and thinking while I type.

In some ways, I think that this is my process because I find typing weirdly relaxing.  I credit this in part to my former life as a transcription typist.  In doing that job, I found that you can actually think while typing about things other than what you’re typing.  And still type accurately.  The human brain is sort of amazing.  Who knew that you could type out that much stuff and yet be thinking all the while?  And it doesn’t hurt that I’m a fast typist, so even though I’ll probably use only about a third of what I’ve typed, the typing is part of the thinking, if that makes sense.  It takes away the anxiety of “writing” and makes it just about “typing,” and that is sort of like meditation.  It’s like writing without actually writing.  And it lets me see the vision of the whole even as I’m not struggling over what I actually am going to write, if that makes sense.

I thought I’d write about this because I think I used to think of this activity as Not Writing, the label that I put on all those things that we do that are about avoiding getting down to it because it’s scary and hard and scary.  But the more that I thought about it today, the more I thought, no, this is not Not Writing.  This is, actually, a crucial part of me getting writing done.  I write best when I have this return to the text first, and where I organize the whole thing in my head with attention first to the literary work.  I drown out the white noise of theory and criticism and “the conversation” so that I actually figure out what I want to say first.  Now, of course I’ll need to return to “the conversation” fairly shortly, but I’ll be writing in the service of the novel I’m discussing as opposed to writing with all the peripheral chatter guiding me.  That may not be “writing,” in the sense of producing my own original prose, but it certainly is, at least for me, a crucial pathway to “interpretation,” which is the whole point of the scholarly writing that I do anyway.

So , of course, the dark underbelly of all of this is that I have to wade through all the typing during the next week, decide what to eliminate, revise the structure, and actually get down to the business of writing around all of this.  And at some point in there I’ll return to the typing – only this time with theory and criticism – because I will reach a wall in which the writing around stalls.  But I made really good progress today.  This chapter is going to be drafted before school starts – or at the very least by September 1.  I am on track.  But, wow, do I wish typing was all I had to do.  Because the other part is much less fun.