Breaking It Down

The Week In Writing is Back! I’m thrilled and grateful for a coffee conversation with a friend about writing and all its myriad challenges.

Here’s a story that illustrates one of the many of these myriad challenges. Years ago, I was in Boston, visiting friends, and I had a knitting project with me. My host suggested that we go to the local yarn shop, where I got into a great conversation with the manager about the challenges she sees with beginning knitters. She said that it’s rare that students want to start at the beginning and make something achievable, like a scarf. More often, they want to make a sweater, which is an advanced project that you have to work your way up to. Her point was that you have to go through the stages of learning a new skill and that, most importantly, you have to learn to tolerate the frustration of the learning curve.

I’ve seen this over and over with writing students of all ages. They want perfection, and don’t want frustration. Of course they don’t. Who does? Yet, as we all know, you can’t get to at least better writing without frustration.

That said, here’s an idea: before writing sentences, write down words. Words you like, words that please you, words that conjure images you’d like to write about. Why do this? Because you’re just coming up with words, not trying to write the perfect sentence.

Here’s another idea: write down the word perfect. Now write down a few words about its meaning.

See where this takes you…