Formerly titled: For young writers, in both age and experience
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With time comes confidence. With writing comes your story.
I’ve never known a life outside being a writer. Being 11 years old when I began my first 300-page novel, my identity has become fused with this art. I may be an educator. I may be an astronomer. But I am first and foremost a writer. My stories are the voice in my head.
You wouldn’t know it if I didn’t tell you here, but I’ve just deleted four paragraphs of this blog post. I realized I was telling the tale of my writing life rather than the learned advice I want to pass on to you over the next two or three minutes I’ll have you on this page. Don’t worry, however; I pasted the deleted paragraphs to a new file for safekeeping. I’ll use them elsewhere.
Why do I tell you this? It’s an easy answer: I might be 20 years into my writing career, but I wrote excessive information that didn’t fit the purpose of this post. That’s a good thing. I recognized that those paragraphs likely would not have been helpful in this context and may have pushed you away from this post. No doubt, as a writer, you’ve looked at your own words and crinkled your nose. You may have told yourself, “I could have written that better,” or, “Nobody is ever going to like this,” or any variation of these words that is self-critical of your own writing. I’ll address the latter phrase in a future blog post.
Faced with this dilemma, you have two options. I favor neither, allowing the post’s context to determine my ultimate decision. First, you can keep the paragraphs you wrote and continue on with the story. Second, you can cut and paste the paragraphs into a separate document and save them for later.
Notice the lack of a third option that tells you to delete the paragraphs entirely. Deleting gives you nothing to work with. If you have a substantial amount of material, I advise against outright deletion.
In 20 years of writing, I’ve learned that every word builds upon the next, whether you write them tomorrow or five years from now. It took me years to discover this truth. Now–and I didn’t always do this–at the start of each project, I create a separate folder titled “Scraps.” Writing, like every art, is a project. Think of it like baking sugar cookies: you roll the dough flat, cut the shapes, then ball the dough back up and roll it out flat again. Every re-roll, you roll the scraps of the previous iteration into usable dough that forms a cookie just as good as the previous batch.
I just did it again, deleted half a paragraph that your eyes won’t see today. If I find any necessity, then perhaps this section will appear in a future blog post. I’ve added it to the scraps file for safekeeping.
I have a saying I’ve embraced over the years: “Books are edited.” That is to say, however long you spend writing your first draft, you will spend far longer editing several drafts. There is no final version of a book; only the version you wish to show the world.
So, to reiterate, with time comes confidence. But with editing comes your story.
Alex
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