The Deleted Scenes - Just Write
If you’ve ever followed an old, longtime newspaper columnist, you may have noticed that eventually they start to write more or less the same column, with only the immediate news hook changing. Or, more precisely, they seem to develop a rotating stable of columns, which you don’t really notice as a casual reader, but which you very much do if you read them religiously. (“Oh, this week is this column again!”) The thing about a classic column is that it sort of encourages this. It’s basically a five-paragraph essay. The format wants a tightly argued, unsubtle, straight-line argument. Now, obviously, I have a stable of topics I write about frequently, but I try not to write the same article over and over. And as I spend more and more time “newslettering,” I’ve come to really appreciate this format. Initially, it just felt like a blank canvas. “Okay…so I write something every day. It can be short, long, bloggy, formal…whatever I want?” But over time, the general shape, incentives, and “rules” of the newsletter format—which is, basically, a polished blog—have started to become clear to me. Newslettering is like telling a long story in many pieces. Each article stands alone but isn’t necessarily meant to stand alone. The really fun thing about a newsletter is getting to write almost the same piece over and over—not beating the dead horse and filling column inches, but slowly sharpening an idea until it’s just right. I guess I think of a series of newsletters on a topic—say, the urbanity of small towns—as a series of manufactured or handcrafted items, each a bit better than the last, reflecting the process of learning by doing. If the column is a mass-produced identical item, the newsletter/blog is an artisan one. And eventually, the idea gets there. When you’re baking something, there’s always a point in time when it’s half-baked. This is a really valuable thing for writers to have. Here, for example, is one of the first times I wrote about small towns as tiny cities:
Here’s an intermediate piece:
And here’s my most recent, where I feel like I finally put this into the words I’ve really been looking for (it’s a magazine article, but it builds on the ideas I’ve developed here):
If hadn’t written several previous iterations of this, I would not have been able to put it just right here. This process of working through, sharpening, developing an idea via public writing, with each particular article being a waypoint or an installment of sorts, is so different from how opinion/magazine writing used to be. I sometime encounter this attitude from older folks that you shouldn’t publish something until you’re sure you fully understand the topic through laborious research; that getting your work seen is a treat, a reward for hard work. Some of this is an old-fashioned viewpoint; some just the way publishing actually worked. And this is probably true of, say, writing a book. But it’s not true of this; in fact, operating that way would make this impossible. Much, if not most of the development of my ideas and knowledge is because of readers and commenters agreeing, disagreeing, adding counterpoints or adjacent points, recommending books or authors that might be interesting or useful to me, etc. In some ways the whole point of writing in this format is that I don’t know everything there is to know, and putting it out there helps me complete it in concert with my readers. Which is you. So thank you! Related Reading: Getting Good at Doing Things Wrong Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 600 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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