A Novel Process

For most of my life, my writing process was more like gestation than construction; an essay or story would grow in my head until I put it on paper fully-formed. When a high-school English teacher wanted us to include a “jot outline” of rough ideas along with the essay, I would do the outline after I finished (sometimes as late as the beginning of class) because writing down half-formed notions was simply not part of my writing process, and even in university I typically wrote my term papers at the (manual) typewriter, and the only necessary revisions could be accomplished with Liquid Paper. When I got my first computer in the spring of 1989 this process became even quicker and more seamless, because with a word processor I could revise without even leaving a detectable trace. And while this may sound wonderful to those of you who struggle to write, it meant I never developed the cognitive tools to write anything more than a few thousand words long, just as I never developed the…