Writing in Public

Somewhere out there in the cosmos, an idea was born that all writers have some innate talent, some creative gene, such that beautiful prose springs naturally from their neurons through their Mont Blanc fountain pen onto the page. Dazzling sentences, beautiful plots, perfect imagery dancing out of a calm mind, without any work at all.

It is the bane of freelancers, this image. We all secretly think that everyone else is more organized, more dedicated, more creative, more something than we are. That the world is filled with journalists and authors who spout their writing effortlessly, and that we, we alone, are perpetrating a sham.

I belong to the National Association of Science Writers, and one of my favorite on-line conversations took place a number of years ago, when everyone admitted that the thought of calling up someone to interview sent them into a panic. We all had rituals and procrastination tools we used to avoid calling someone the first time -- and all of us had assumed we were the only ones who hated this very fundamental part of being a journalist.

As it is, I have worked long and hard at creating the routines that actually keep me in a chair to write or to call an interview. I have had to train myself that the first draft of anything is a disaster, and that no one puts out a perfect piece on the first go-round (with the possible exception of John McPhee, who insists that whole books pop out full-blown from his head to the page -- but I think this belies the fact that he spends years researching and editing the book in his head before he commits it to paper. . . ) And you know what I'm really horrible at? I have all these great ideas and then I don't pitch them. It kills me. I have a great idea, I think I should send it off to someone, I don't, and then invariably the article I wanted to write shows up in the exact magazine I wanted to write it for, but someone else wrote it. It's just unforgivable that I should have had this happen so many times and yet haven't adjusted my behavior.

And so, I've decided to do it all publicly. Perhaps if I keep an honest record of what I'm doing, I will manage both to be a little more together about it, as well as to do some damage to the fiction that all other writers are better at this freelancing stuff than we. I'd like to flatter myself that despite what I see as my own inefficiencies I am a "successful" writer. So perhaps I can convince others, or at least myself, that "successful" writers aren't all paragons of organization.

It's a good time for it. I have just handed in the first draft of a manuscript on a book on Einstein, so I'm in a "beginning" phase. One of those glorious times where you're convinced that for the next project you will be organized, motivated, efficient. It's like the beginning of a school semester -- I have new notebooks and new pens, and am developing all my new routines . . . Of course, when I was at school, such organization lasted me about a week, but perhaps, maybe, possibly, keeping a writer's journal about my routines, might actually help me keep them.