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If I have learned anything from working with lawyers for the past 15 years it is that good lawyers are essentially, writers in disguise. They are constantly writing and honing those skills, writing complaints, briefs, memos of law and journal articles. I constantly hear and see young attorneys being admonished by senior attorneys about their writing. Here their motto is a quote from the great Justice Brandeis “There is no great writing, only great rewriting.”
While legal writing is more closely aligned with scholarly/academic writing, the end results are the same with the narrative form; to write well means you need to be a good storyteller. Good lawyers build on that premise, using case facts persuasively to convey their argument.
In Chapter 7, Picasso’s Bulls crystallized for me that writers are really no different than visual artists. Here the writer’s medium is words, words that get chiseled throughout the process of writing, sentences that get molded and paragraphs build up or get flushed out. The rewrite process is the finalization of seeing the form (whatever art) come into existence.
Gornick’s ideas on creative nonfiction writing helped to delineate narrative structure. When deconstructed, the premise determining “the situation” from “the story” makes complete sense. I think those two words should be taped to any desk I do my writing. As well as remembering Gornick’s explanation of “situations are rarely of inherent interest our take/our struggle make it interesting.”
Rewriting material is always a trial for me. I hate “killing my darlings.” Sometimes my whole essay is around a word/idea or paragraph that in the end has to be deleted. I should learn to cut/copy/paste “darlings” sentences/words in an index. But that seems so daunting. After I have finalized a paper, essay, story, most of my drafts have ended in the garbage. After reading this chapter perhaps I should start saving drafts for future rewrites and measurement of writing growth. I was surprised to read that E.B. White let 22 years go by before completing his childhood essay!
Finally, I have to learn to write and discover simultaneously as if on an adventure and not listen to my inner critic who begs me to turn around and go back.
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