Writing Process Revealed
Sunday, January 12, 2014 at 1:34PM 
red mill, vermont studio center
I've been at Vermont Studio Center for one week as of today, which means that I'm one-quarter of the way through my writing residency. I'm not writing tons of words each day, but I am writing so very much more than I have been for a long time. I'm starting to sink into my writing life again, and I'm happy about that. The other day I felt fairly glum about a new piece I was working on, until I realized that I had simply hit a slump that shows up in my process.
This new essay, like many that I write, started with a confluence of a visual and a sentence. (In this case, the view out my studio window and the line, "The statue is closer today.") From there, I was hooked into a general landscape and some meanderings thoughts about what it evokes. I immediately sensed some metaphors that might crystallize, but I was careful to not hold too tightly to them too early, since they might morph along the way.
I wrote a bit about what I saw and thought, and then I did some research about the local landscape. This led me to additional research about the names of things, other local landscape features, and so on down the rabbit hole. As I gather all of this information, I sense connections and a resonance among all the pieces, but I'm still not sure how it's all going to fit together.
Then I went back to the writing and started adding in bits from my research. At this point, I hit the boring and cumbersome phase of the essay. It's at this point -- when I have a bunch of information and some half-formed thoughts about what that information means -- that I'm often tempted to give up. This is the phase of writing when I am sure nothing will come of it.
But this week I realized what's happening on a deeper level during this boring and cumbersome phase: I'm integrating the information I learned in my research into my mental foundation. I'm taking facts and weaving them into my own personal knowledge base. Part of the way I integrate these into my mind is by taking notes (during research) and then writing really boring paragraphs that paraphrase what I've just learned.
Realizing what was happening at this part of the process has been a revelation to me. It helped me to realize that I'm not failing or coming up against a wall. Instead, I'm simply integrating new information into my knowledge bank. And once I have that new data in place, I can use it to write something much more interesting and evocative.
So what I did this time was leave my Word document full of boring research-driven statements, and switch over to Ommwriter to start a new draft of the essay, one that uses my new understanding and begins to build an atmosphere and experience around my original visual and sentence.
In between writing, I've been doing more research, taking notes on this and that, all of which might join the essay. Very likely, I'll research stuff I don't need, and very likely, my first draft will include stuff (facts, thoughts, descriptions, and metaphors) that don't end up in the final draft -- or they might end up in there in drastically different forms.
I've heard painters say that every piece goes through an ugly phase. The ugly phase in my essay-making process can be disheartening. But seeing the process for what it is -- a process with different components and phases -- is helping me to move through the ugly phase and beyond it.
I can see now that this process (initial visual and idea; first bits of writing; research; integration; deeper writing; more research and integration; deeper writing, etc.) is how I've written most of the essays in the collection I've been working on for a few years now. I'm not sure why the process finally took shape and revealed itself to me, but I'm glad that it has. It will now be interesting to notice if this process holds, or if it changes for future essays.
