As far as possible, you should aim to be alone with the words.
Hello, today I’m talking about word processing, computer writing.
You should aim to be alone with the words. You should hope for much of the time to be inside the sentence, hearing it totally, seeing it thoroughly. Beyond this, you should be possessed by the story or the statement.
It, without interruption, will be saying you rather than you making it.
I’m referring here to going-fantastically first drafts, maybe more than going-really-really-difficultly last drafts.
This state, being alone with the words, is something like a trance of certainty. Second thoughts can come later or be included as asides, as options.
I put different possible versions of a sentence one after another in square brackets when I’m first drafting. In a later draft I’ll choose between them or meld them or write something new, but for now I want all the possibilities there visible.
Perhaps you feel this being alone with the words, uninterrupted, is a bit too exclusive or woo-woo. Perhaps you welcome the pop-up notifications when England take a wicket or a new meeting appears in your calendar.
I don’t.
Why? Because you need to make it possible for you to come out with something you didn’t know was in you. You need to surprise yourself in your writing and delight yourself.
If you stay on a level of conscious control because your means are keeping you there, you might forestall your best inventiveness and prevent your most startling truths.
Word processing software standardises. I’m used to it now, I bet you are, but I don’t know into what thought boxes it’s forced me.
The paper page is, at least in theory, or if you make it so, an open plane. The pen nib can go in any direction. It can start to draw pictures or arrows or loops, squiggles.
Sometimes you need to cross something out with anger and disgust rather than just moderately, demurely delete it, send it into oblivion so it’s not visible anymore.
Your handwritten page is and shows your mood as well as your mode.
When I said something like this earlier about the constrictions of word processing, I had a question, could I give some examples?
I thought of many.
I thought of letters that changed each time you looked at them or that could only be read at certain times of day, limits that you could put on a text. But then I came across something much more expansive.
At Winchester School of Art at the moment, there’s an exhibition of artist books. English and Japanese called Folding Space. It’s marvellous, it’s on till the end of March.
And those texts in that exhibition show the kind of things that you can’t word process. They show the kind of imaginatively expansive texts that Word for Windows couldn’t possibly come up with.
When you disagree with what I’m saying, of course, please be ready to voice that objection in the comments.
Tell me, tell others.
Here are a couple of things about the specifics of word processing.
So first, cut and paste. And this is something I’ve written recently.
Cut and paste can be as bad as putting a slice of buttered toast into a bowl of just mixed dough. Or to take it backwards, a slice of toast or bread or even risen dough into a bowl of just mixed dough. It’s something that’s at a different stage.
You can make a bread and butter pudding with stale bread or breadcrumbs for the top of a lasagna, but you can’t make fresh bread. That moment has gone.
That’s why I think you should keep your writing at the same stage. You shouldn’t be importing old bits of writing into new bits of writing.
And here’s something I wrote a while ago about word count.
Word count is an instrument of the devil, particularly on-screen word count that goes up by nines and tens with each added line. Word count makes writers artificially paranoid. There is no real difference between writing 499 words and 500. There is certainly no moral imperative to reach exactly 500 words. You’re not a worse person if you don’t.
I’d advise you to consult word count as infrequently as possible. If you’re writing a novel and need to accomplish a certain amount every day, then I’d make it a very rough amount, say two or three full pages of text.
Don’t beat yourself up if you happen to be writing a scene with lots of dialogue, lots of white space on the page. Whilst writing, you should not be thinking about how many words you’ve written, but trying to be as absorbed in the qualities of those words as possible.
So back to being alone with the words.
Some final thoughts, in the shape of a list.
I’m not going to write a technical manual for Word for Windows or Word for Mac. You may very well be using some other piece of word processing software. Anything I say here would likely be out of date before this is published as well.
Instead, I’m going to give you a few general principles to consider for drafting.
Work in focus mode or the equivalent. Keep the screen as empty as possible, no icons, no prompts, no intrusions.
Turn off word count so it’s not in constant view.
Turn off spelling and grammar suggestions, or even worse, corrections.
Build up your dictionary of autocorrect so that when you type in the, it corrects it to the. When you type in adn, it types and.
Use grammar check retrospectively as a separate draft. Go through grammar and spelling once, later on, as a separate draft.
Create an ugly template for drafting that resets most of the defaults, especially the extra space between lines. I’m putting a link into something I’ve written about yourself on the page only better.
Create another template that looks as close to the finished text as you can imagine it, but only use that at the very end. Use your ugly one for drafting and your beautiful one for finishing.
Thank you very much for listening. I hope that’s useful.
See you again soon.
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