Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be!
First: it’s spring break at Page by Page! Due to Geneva’s new school schedule and some upcoming travel plans, the next post you get will be during the week of 15 April. I’ll probably still hang out on Notes, and sporadically on Chat, but apart from that you’ll have to come find me in Zermatt, Oxford, or London. (Do give me a wave if you might be passing through any of these places at the same time! Hopefully the British Library will have sorted out some of their hacking drama….)
Now: on to today’s post, which is all about when to set everything and everyone else aside and just write from you.
As you know, I love working with other people. In fact, it’s precisely because I love working with others that I wrote last week’s post about how to protect your ideas while working with others. I also believe that things like copywork can help you improve as a writer.
But what about the times when even being inspired by other people keeps you from writing as, well, you?
I’ve got several writing projects on the go at the moment. The biggest of these is the revision of my BFB (‘Big Effing Book’), which is a 600-year history of how readers have responded to Chaucer’s dirty jokes. (I love my job.) But when I asked a colleague to read over my first chapter, she pointed out that I was leaning on other people pretty heavily: quoting people on basic topics instead of simply providing a synopsis or overview in my own words, cramming as many citations as possible into footnotes (hey, it is academia), and generally not letting my own voice shine through.
Now, this was a very rough draft, and these were issues that I’m confident I would have resolved on my own in later versions. But my colleague asked me a question that got me thinking.
‘What would it be like’, she asked, ‘if you just sat down and tried writing the first draft of your next piece of writing without looking at any sources at all?’
Earlier this week, I gave it a shot. I had to write a paper for a presentation I’m giving next week. It was based on research I’d already done, and I have a truly horrible draft of a chapter based on that research somewhere, so I had a pretty clear idea about the big points I wanted to make. But I decided I was going to write the first draft of this new thing from scratch while following my colleague’s suggestion.
So I did. And it felt wonderful.
The words just came pouring out! It was like they were already there, waiting to be turned loose! Before I knew it, I had a surprisingly articulate draft/outline of my talk. All I had to do was fill in the gaps with my textual and statistical evidence!
Of course, the burden of citation for a talk (even an academic talk) is much lighter than it is for an academic publication. And yes, I did have to look at my sources and supporting scholarship eventually. But by starting out the way I did, I got to my destination much more quickly and easily than usual.
So this week, I’d like to invite you to try this exercise out yourself for 30 minutes at the beginning of your drafting process. It’s not exactly freewriting (which is a very valuable warm-up and clarification exercise and featured in Day 1 of Writing Camp). Think of it more as ‘free drafting’—you have a pretty clear sense of what you want to write, and you’re just shutting yourself off from everything and everyone else in the world in order to tap into your voice.
Let me know how it goes, and I’ll see you all after spring break!
As ever, thanks for reading. This is a reader-supported publication, and the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber (either at $5 per month or $50 per year), which gets you access to absolutely everything on PBP as well as access to a weekly Monday check-in Chat thread where you can receive support, encouragement, and tools for your writing!
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VB,
M