Trying to find your writing rhythm

Writing is an unexpected process. It Involves a great deal of throat clearing, false starts, wandering about lost in the undergrowth, heading off in various directions, going around in circles and finally, coming to a complete standstill. It’s at this point, ready to give up, that clarity typically arrives and the clever phrases and intellectual poses fall away. This is the point at which I find a voice but, more importantly, accept that voice without feeling the need to embellish it or make it sound like anybody else’s voice – no matter how much better that other voice may seem. But this process needs to be speeded up, as agonising over every word, with a deadline in sight, results in very little being written. Either the idea is abandoned, or slapped together at the last moment and betraying all the signs of having been put together in a hurry.

How do journalists, especially the good ones, get it right?

The discipline involved in regularly completing something, within a specified time frame, surely helps. Perhaps the demand to get things done also strips away the need to be precious and perfect; that luxury cannot exist on a deadline. Is the strategy then to write, for a set period, a certain number of words every day, no matter how rubbishy they may seem? This helped on Friday when I thought, for about five seconds, to give up on my PhD. Instead, I decided to simply set out the ideas, one after the other, unadorned. And so the introduction suddenly started to write itself. As a result I made real progress today, discarding much of the fluff, starting to understand the points I was trying to make and writing another 800 words. I’ll round off what feels like a solid day’s work with another 200 words and try to use today as a model for the next seven days: six hours/day and 1000 words written. I have to put together a draft before I can start stripping and refining.