Till it looks okay
July 9, 2009emily 2 Comments »There’s a part in my favorite childhood book, In the Night Kitchen, that I think a lot about when I’m writing. Mickey, the protagonist, is making an airplane out of bread dough. Author Maurice Sendak writes, “He kneaded and punched it and pounded and pulled till it looked okay.” And I think that describes so perfectly how I feel when I’m working on a chapter of my dissertation. It’s grueling work, accompanied by lots of grousing and feeling like a dunce. I write total crap sentences and cringe with each word, but I keep going just to get something on the page. I throw it all up there on the page, agonizing the whole time. And I don’t know why this is so difficult for me. I suspect it’s this hard for everyone, that everyone who writes goes through quite a long phase where they feel like a imbecile– one with a very tenuous grip on their native language, to boot. I doubt many people who do this sit down at their desk, type out a masterpiece in an easy morning, and then spend the rest of the afternoon feeling very smug while being fanned by the butler. I don’t, in any case. I’m like Mickey. I knead and punch and pound and pull till it looks okay.
Posted on July 9th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
You’ve captured perfectly what I go through every time I sit down to write. Perfectly.
Posted on July 9th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I hate first drafts. Hate them. There is something discouraging about a blank page or blinking cursor that makes it hard to get things out the right the first time – especially with technical writing for work. Which is why I generally go for the just-get-something-on-the-page first draft style and use the process you’ve described to finesse it into something worth reading. Hopefully. Of course that doesn’t mean words flow out – my first drafts usually look as if I have an extremely narrow vocabulary and no sense of sentence structure. And sometimes, no understanding of the law