“I never write down a word until I know exactly what I want to say.”
This statement was made by my advisor in graduate school. And I’ve wrestled with it ever since.
It all started because I overwrote and struggled with outlines. The professor asked me to rewrite my thesis several times.
And over the years I’ve had multiple conversations with other writers who have argued against this idea. “I write precisely because I need to figure out what I’m going to say,” my friend Clifford Thompson told me.
Here’s where I think this concept does work well: the academic assignment. Working with high school seniors on the Common App, I do not ask them to write a draft. We focus our first sessions on brainstorming their ideas, then, only when we are sure about what they are going to write, do we get to the sentence structure. I even find myself telling my students it would be harder to cut back their writing rather than expanding it in the later stages.
After all this time, I finally get what the professor was getting at.