From: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com (Fred Welden)
Subject: Re: Carefull, studied splatting
Originator: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 16:48:14 GMT
Organization: Dobonia


In article <15928@mindlink.bc.ca>, Alan_Barclay@mindlink.bc.ca (Alan Barclay) writes:
|In a message #4543731 Fred Welden says:
|
|In _my_ arrogant opinion, what a one is better off doing is learning to
|write clearly the first time.  Then you don't have to rewrite half as much.
|I believe a writer can learn his tools (words, grammar, etc.) well enough
|to write clearly out of habit.  One time-saving habit is reviewing the
|meaning of each sentence as it is written--then one can rewrite the sentence
|on the spot and in context of the thoughts that produced it.  For me this is
|such an ingrained habit that it directs my sentences as I write them.

Or one can learn to think clearly about what one wants to say before one
begins splatting anything down on the paper (or edit buffer) in the
first place.  As I've said before, my real writing, or composition if
you will, takes place in my head, and what I do with the word processor
is like taking dictation from someone with an attention-deficit
disorder.

The splatting-it-down-all-at-once method that I described is (in part)
the closest external equivalent I can come up with to what I feel goes
on in my mind when I create a story.  And (in part) it is a description
of the physical process I go through when I transfer a story from my
mind to a disk file--I know long passages verbatim, but they do not
always arrange themselves neatly in proper order for transcription.  So
I end up splatting down a big chunk of text that has parts of several
paragraphs embedded in it, which I then cut-and-paste to their proper
positions.  Or it will have noise in it holding the place of a few
particularly good sentences that I know I've written, but I can't quite
recall at the moment.  Later, these come back to me and I can splat them
down on top of the noise sentences that held their place.

And occasionally I find that something that sounded good in my mind has
an unfortunate appearance on the page, and must be replaced with
something that serves the same purpose with different words.  But since
I don't write at the keyboard in the same sense that it seems you do,
reviewing each sentence "as it is written" has already long since
happened.

In the end, it is only the resulting text that matters, anyway, not how
you got there.  I recommend the "splat" technique for those who have
difficulty completing a work for any of the following reasons:

1) They find the physical process of putting down the words too tedious.
2) Anxiety over the quality of their writing accumulates as they write
   more and more paragraphs that they're sure could be improved, to
   the point where perfection seems beyond their grasp so they give up.
3) They suffer from the "the right word is on the tip on my tongue"
   syndrome, and get stuck waiting for it to come.

|I like the analogy of the Zen painter.  As a novice the painter will study
|strokes of the brush and uses of paint.  After his control of the brush
|becomes a nearly unconscious response to desire, the painter can produce
|beautiful work in one sitting without corrections.

I guess I would liken myself to a painter who has conceived the finished
work before he even begins mixing his paints, and consequently may put
in a few background details over there, a bit of the foreground subject
over here, in no apparent order as he recreates the painting on the
canvas.  And then sometimes it happens that the particular shade of blue
that I had thought was going to turn out just right doesn't look quite
so good by the light of day, and must be replaced by a slightly greener
tint.  Once again, of course, the end product may turn out to look like
a Vermeer, or it may turn out to be a clown holding a puppy--I won't
pretend to be an unbiased judge of my own work.  I'm just trying to
describe the technique.

-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |