Chapter IIHOW TO WRITE
The successive steps in writing are:
1. Have a subject that appeals to you, and write for an actual reader.
2. Gather all the material your subject demands.
3. Arrange your material in the most effective order.
4. Write as fast as you can.
5. Revise, recast, rewrite what you have written.
1. Write on a subject which interests you and one that you know something about. Good writing will not result merely from trying to satisfy an instructor. You can write well only if you have a compelling reason for writing; if you desire to convince, inform, or entertain a definite reader.
Know the state of mind you want your reader to be in when he finishes reading your composition. Write for a definite reader such as a college freshman, a high school student, an automobile owner, a ten-year-old boy, a proprietor of a retail store in a town of from 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. It will often be helpful if, after you choose the general class to whom your writing is addressed, you select one individual you know and keep him constantly in mind while you write. Thus instead of writing for a ten-year-old boy write for your brother Robert.
Choose a subject that can be covered in the number of words at your disposal. If you are writing a four-hundred-word theme, “The American High School” is a poor subject. It would take a series of volumes to exhaust the possibilities in that title. Even eliminating a large portion of it by taking the topic “High School Newspapers,” “High School Debating,” “High School Dramatics,” or “High School Athletics,” helps but little. Narrowing any one of these subjects so that it applies only to your own high school still leaves you with more material than can well be put into a short theme. Good subjects for such themes are “The First Time I Faced an Audience,” “The Best Play I Ever Made,” “How I Felt When My Story Appeared in the School Paper,” and “The Most Exciting Play I Ever Saw in a Baseball Game.”
To take another example, “Cooking” is a subject broad enough for a Mrs. Ralston, a Mrs. Lincoln, or a Miss Farmer. “Making Desserts” is too comprehensive for any but an exhaustive treatise. “Making Ice Cream” requires at least a booklet. Good short theme subjects would be “How I Make My Favorite Sherbet,” “How to Make Chocolate Ice Cream without Cream,” or “How to Make Ice Cream Roll with a Frozen Whipped Cream Center.”
2. Reflect, read, ask questions, observe in order to gather material which will enable you to carry out your design. Gather, as applied to material for writing, implies a go-and-get-it attitude. Gathering material requires a physical as well as a mental search. Do not expect material to come to you; go after it. Talk with persons who know. Read what they have written. Good writing is most likely to result when the writerfuses his own experience and observation with the experience and observation of others. Gather all the material possible without trying to decide, while you are getting it, what is important and what is not. Keep your mind, your eyes, and your ears wide open. Get details and get plenty of them. Steep, saturate yourself in your subject.
3. After you have gathered the material, discard everything that will not help you to produce the effect you are trying for. Then if there are any gaps in your composition, gather more material to fill them up. Some writers get the best results by putting a plan on paper before starting to write; others let a plan take more or less definite shape in their minds, but do not try to set down any hard and fast outline. The reason for not making a hard and fast outline is that a curious thing often happens to any writer who has written much. He finds—on occasion—that his composition seems to write itself. The characters he thought he had created have minds of their own and refuse to let him treat them like puppets. His thoughts seem to be alive and to exist apart from him. They insist on expressing themselves in their own way. An experienced writer does some of his best work when he seems to be merely the medium through which ideas are seeking to translate themselves from whatever world it is they inhabit to this one. If, on the other hand, a writer is continually consulting a plan, his ideas and characters never take things into their own hands.
Write for someone to read. Put yourself in that reader’s place and see if your writing is producing the desired effect. Begin your composition with the details that will most effectively attract his attention andarouse his interest. Continue writing so that you will retain his attention and interest. Stop when you have said all you have to say.
4. Write rapidly and at white heat. If pertinent ideas keep coming to you forget about your plan. Get your inspiration on paper before it cools. If you finally find a system—or even a lack of one—that enables you to write fast and at the same time to feel that you are creating something, do not let anyone talk you into trying some other plan. Stick to your own.
5. Revise at leisure, but ruthlessly, in cold blood, and continue to revise, rearrange, and rewrite indefinitely until the finished product satisfies you.
Make the final draft absolutely correct. Avoid especially the common faults that denote the semi-illiterate man or woman. If you make errors that would not be made by a twelve-year-old child, your composition will get scant consideration from an intelligent reader. While revising, question everything, spelling, grammar, choice of words, punctuation; question the usefulness of each idea, and the arrangement of the parts of the completed composition.
Start writing soon enough to give yourself ample time for revision. Let the first draft get cold before you look at it again. If you wait several days after the first draft is finished you can approach your own writing as objectively as if it had been done by someone else. It will then be much easier to question every letter, every word, every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph, every idea, besides the whole composition and each of its parts.
Make everything in your composition justify itself. Whenever you are satisfied to do mediocre work therest of the world is satisfied with the valuation you have set on yourself. Be your own severest critic. Show your own writing no mercy. Some of the world’s most successful writers of advertisements as well as of novels have rewritten their best work time and again before giving it to the public. What reads smoothly takes hours of toil to produce.
Many good instructors insist on receiving two copies of every composition from each student; one a rough, lead pencil draft, and the other the finished manuscript.