The process of writing anything – whether it’s a book or an article for a professional journal in your field – has quite a bit in common with learning to play the trombone (or any other musical instrument, for that matter). Your first efforts don’t sound so great, but eventually, if you keep at it, you can produce some fine sounds.
What prompted this analogy? My daughter just started learning how to play the trombone. While the sounds at first veered between comical and ear-splitting, it didn’t take long for a few actual musical notes to emerge from the happy din. Over time, I expect the music-to-din ratio to improve.
So too, with writing: The first draft of any piece of writing — be it a book chapter, blog post, or brochure text — is likely to be full of not-quite-formed ideas and rough prose. If you Google “Hemingway on first drafts,” you’ll find his famous opinion on what all first drafts resemble. A crummy first draft is actually a good problem to have – because it means you have something you can revise, edit, and polish.
A side benefit: sometimes writing badly is fun and freeing, especially in the world of fiction – Exhibit A would be the winners of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (see www.bulwer-lytton.com/2009.htm to read the winning entries). The exuberantly bad writing warms the heart – congratulations to overall winner David McKenzie, and to the winners of the individual categories, particularly the Vile Puns division. Go ahead, take a minute or two to read some of these deliberately terrible opening lines of novels – then get back to work on your writing project.
Give yourself permission to write badly, to pound out a messy first draft. Once you have something on the page or on the screen, you can start revising, and keep on revising, until your writing says what you mean it to say.
Somewhere, in a heaven where fictive meets factual, Professor Henry Hill and Papa Hemingway are smiling, as 76 trombone players trade tips with writers …