Saturday, March 29, 2014

Talking About Writing

Today I have the Scholars Conference where I’ll be presenting my paper.  Unlike the last couple of years, I froze it on Tuesday night and printed it out first thing Wednesday morning before I left for the airport.  I will be delivering it acoustically… that is, I won’t be reading it off the computer as I did before but off the paper at the rostrum.

I spent most of Friday listening to writers talk about writing, so when I came back to the hotel to get rested and ready for the gala dinner, I did a little work on a play that I started a couple of years ago and haven’t gotten past Act I, Scene 2.  Thank you, Arthur Kopit.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about the writing process, and I don’t plan to launch into a long post about it now (you’re welcome), but coming to Inge always makes me re-evaluate the process I go through when I write.  That covers everything from your average BBWW blog rant to a novel or play.  I’ve had the chance to do that this week, too, and in a lot of ways hearing how really successful and brilliant writers do it has affirmed my own methods.

What a relief.

One bark on “Talking About Writing

  1. As a wannabe writer, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the writing process sometime, somehow. I always find it fascinating. I remember reading a Philip Roth novel some years ago where (if my memory serves me) the protagonist is a writer who describes his writing technique. It went something like this: after breakfast, begin working where you left off yesterday, then take a mid-morning break, then finally write a sentence, then spend the rest of the morning editing it, then in the afternoon without looking at the morning’s work rewrite the sentence, then take a mid afternoon walk, then come back and edit the new sentence. By the end of the day his accomplishment for the day’s work is 1 sentence. Yeow! Contrast that approach with the process described by the prolific novelist Lawrence Block, who claims to sit down and write a novel straight thru over the course of a few days, then when he’s reached the end go back over it to make minor edits, mostly of a grammatical nature. Go figure.

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