In his essay “Writing,” William Stafford emphasizes that a writer is not so much a person with a message to deliver as one engaged in a process that generates something to say. Writing, in other words, is a process of discovery. As Flannery O’connor put it, she wrote to discover what she knew. I suspect that much the same is true for just about every kind of writing, even the most hard-nosed, top-down, thesis-driven, logocentric forms. Of course, there are significant differences of genre to take into account, but even when it is helpful or necessary to work from an outline and notes and to work through multiple drafts, writing may be a a process of discovery, a creative act–all the more reason to work from notes and an outline, to struggle through multiple drafts; the muse favors the prepared mind.
So taking advantage of writing as a process of discovery involves mucking around in language’s messy details. William Gass has said that writing is not a skill, but rather a hundred skills. More and more I’m inclined to alter this statement to assert that writing is a thousand skills or more, including sentence structure, word choice, grammar, metaphor, thesis statement, overall structure, pattern of sound, and on and on. Somehow by engaging in this often messy process one will land on what to say. As the words come together, we may “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” as T. S. Eliot said.
At some point, however, the writing must come to closure, even if the closure is provisional. The moment of liberation can be the deadline by which the writing must have whatever finish or polish it’s going to have–at least for the time being. While generally I believe in the value of extensive revision, at some point it seems that such labor will not be worth the extra hours. It can be instructive to consider the character Grand in Camus’s The Plague. Grand, whose job it is in the time of plague to act “as a sort of general secretary to the sanitary squads,” spends hours and hours on his literary pursuit. A deeply disturbing moment occurs when Grand’s friend Rieux finally examines Grand’s fifty-page manuscript and discovers that almost every page is covered with variations of a single sentence. One version goes this way: “One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a glossy sorrel mare along the flower-strewn avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.” Here is another: “One fine morning in May a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.” As he obsessively tinkers with one adjective after another, Grand is more caught in a fixation than engaged in a process. One irony of his pursuit for the perfect combination of adjectives is that the sentence is much improved by their removal. Were one, having removed the adjectives, to take the further step of allowing the verb to make a simple declaration, then it seems to me the sentence would not be bad at all: ‘One morning in May a horsewoman rode a mare along the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.’ Here is an instance to illustrate the principle that less is more. Of course, there are times when, as Stanley Elkin said, more is more, but this is subject matter for another entry.