Eat, Walk, Write: Food for Thought
One of my challenges in the writing process is how to be connected to the work and far enough away at the same time. It is like the desire to look through the wrong end of a telescope and be magnified unto myself – at a distance. I can work for hours laying down words and sentences and still feel I am not quite “there” on the page. My usual impulse is to get up and go to the refrigerator, just to check and see if something delicious has magically appeared there. I can convince myself that, even though I stock the frig, something new and different might have arrived by magic between paragraphs. The amazing thing is that this little trip away from the desk helps the writing almost instantly. As soon as I stand up from my desk, a sentence will reorganize itself in my head.
Jonah Lehrer says in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works that this is the “outsider” problem. A writer reads her sentences again and again and very soon begins to lose the ability to see her prose as a reader. (In other words, I think I know exactly what I’m trying to say, but that’s because I’m the one saying it.) A writer must edit as if she knows nothing and doesn’t know what these words mean. She must somehow become an outsider to her own work.
Novelist Zadie Smith […]