3/9/2006
How writers write
As a student in elementary school, I was a troubling disappointment to my parents. It didn't get any better in high school, but I did develop an interest in writing that would help carry me through those years and through college.
I was, however, beset by the typical frustrations that writers experience. My method was to write something down on paper, read it, crumple it into a ball and start over. I began to wonder how writers could afford to buy so much paper. While at home on winter break one year, I asked my friend, Ben, what method his father - the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Cheever - used to write. What Ben told me would have a profound effect, not just on me but in the academic lives of my children, to whom I passed down this secret.
John Cheever, who died in 1982, did not spend a lot of time at his typewriter, Ben told me. He composed everything in his head. While he was puttering around the house, or running errands, or going out to lunch with people or drinking gin, he was constructing and reconstructing sentences and combining them into paragraphs. At some point, he would be satisfied with a particular paragraph and simply sit down and type it out.
Over the years, I applied this creative process for fiction writing to journalism. Writing is a thought process, and clear writing is a direct result of clear thinking. I keep telling myself and anyone else who will listen: Don't start writing until you have thoroughly contemplated the subject and have decided what it is you want to express and how you are going to do it.
When my children sat down to write theme papers for school (at the last minute, usually) and begged me for help, this was the advice I gave them. I refused to write their papers for them, but I would coach them through the thinking process.
Unlike their father, my children were good students, from kindergarten through graduate school. Probably, their mother's genes had much to do with that, but I like to think that the advice I learned from Ben Cheever helped them along.
(Note: Ben Cheever is an accomplished writer himself. Click HERE to read an exerpt from his book, "Selling Ben Cheever.")
