In my last post a couple of weeks ago I had to confess that, when it comes to writing, I don't know what I'm doing. It gets worse. I'm also not a writer.
There's a school of thought that a real writer should draft without pausing for cross-outs, corrections or other bits of what the school's adherents call self-censorship. A writer should simply keep going and not stop.
I'm sorry, but I couldn't write like that to save my life.
I draft in longhand on yellow pads. The pages quickly become a nightmare swirl of squiggles, blots, blotches and meandering lines looping across the page, leading to added sentences, notes to myself, overwrites and overwrites of overwrites, most of it done on the fly. Whole paragraphs are scribbled out, restored and scribbled out again. It's a mess, made worse by handwriting that my younger son tells me looks like an NSA cryptograph. He's not far off; by the time I've gone over it several times, as I virtually always do, there are whole sections even I can't read.
Only then, when the whole thing borders on the hopelessly illegible, do I turn to my computer and start to type. Then I print it up, grab a pen and start all over. I seriously wonder if I've ever written a sentence I didn't end up rewriting, often as soon as I've drafted it—or even before I've finished writing it out the first time.
I take my solace from the old saying that there is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting. According to that stop-for-nothing school, I'm not a proper writer at all. But, as a rigorous rewriter, there may be hope for me yet.