Developing Your Text and Managing the Writing Process

Abstract

For creative non-fiction the heart of the authoring process is a person sitting at a desk, surrounded by information, notes, scribbles and sources, or otherwise jammed with ideas, and struggling to organize their thoughts on a blank screen or sheet of paper. This particular image is so dominant in our thinking about authoring because it is so awe-full, so hard to manage your way through at the time, so difficult to capture what you were doing afterwards, and so psychologically stressful or unnerving to contemplate at almost any time. In another field, writing novels, its practitioners’ collective obsession with the angst of an author imagining something out of nothing has gone even further, as John Fowles noted ironically:

Serious modern fiction has only one subject, the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction … . The natural consequence of this is that writing about fiction has become a far more important matter than writing fiction itself. It’s one of the best ways you can tell a true novelist nowadays. He’s not going to waste his time over the messy garage-mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters on paper … Yes, all right. Obviously he has at some point to write something, just to show how irrelevant and unnecessary the actual writing part of it is. But that’s all.²

Never ignore, never refuse to see, what may be thought against your thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche ¹