writing-tips – Page 2 – Andrew Careaga

On ‘wrediting’

‘Write first, edit later’ is common advice. But how does it work in the real world?

I have a confession: Try as I might to follow the writer’s maxim to “write first, edit later,” I just can’t seem to stick with it.

“Write first, edit later” is one of the more common ground rules for writers. If you want to be a great writer, you’ve got to create that first draft without inhibition. Just vomit those ideas out on the page. Don’t even think about editing, fixing grammatical errors or problems with syntax, or other stylistic issues. Just write. Just “give your creativity free rein” as you create your first draft, knowing you can go back and fix it later.

Let’s have fun with it

Writing should not be drudgery

Sometimes, we writers take ourselves too seriously. We’re so busy writing and revising, polishing our jewels of poetry and prose to a high gloss, obsessively monitoring book sales or social media likes, and fretting over audience reaction — will anyone read it? will it even get accepted? — that we forget to enjoy the exciting, invigorating process of the creative act.

We would do well to heed the guidance of Sgt. Hulka from the comedy Stripes and “lighten up, Francis.”

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Maybe I’m just giving myself a pep talk here. Maybe no on else takes themselves so seriously. Or maybe you’ve got those worrisome thoughts of perfectionism crawling around in the back of your mind like a cluster of spiders (I envision the daddy long legs variety: creepy but ultimately harmless).

Thoughts on copywork

And my brief experiment with this process.

There’s this guy who used to be a dentist, but now he’s a marketing copywriter. His weekly newsletter for other marketing writers offers some good tips for, I think, just about any kind of writer.

A couple of months ago, this former dentist — Kieran Drew is his name — wrote about how copywork can help writers get better at the craft.

“Copywork,” he writes, “is where you copy, by hand, great writing.”

Practicing patience

My freshman year of college, I became friends with an older student. (He was old enough to buy beer, which made him a very good friend indeed.) He lived in a nondescript apartment downtown, above one of the local businesses, and the only thing I remember about the place was a poster that depicted two cartoon vultures perched on a dead tree limb in a desert. One vulture is saying to the other, “Patience my ass. I’m gonna kill something.”

Beginner’s mind and the writer

Perhaps for the writer, beginner’s mind can begin with the notion of writing as a journey, an exploration with no specific destination in mind.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,

but in the expert’s there are few.

— Shunryu Suzuki

I’ve only been at this creative writing thing for a year, but sometimes I forget that I’m a beginner. With that in mind, I’m trying to embrace and understand anew the concept of beginner’s mind. So in an attempt to wipe the slate clean, I’m going back to the beginning, or near beginning, of this writing journey by republishing a post from exactly a year ago. I post it to remind myself how much I need to still unlearn — and to remind me that I ain’t no guru.