My writing peers would occasionally talk with me as they were working on a project. When they started on the first page, they weren't even sure what they were trying to do. When they got to the second page, they were sure that what they were writing was crap. By the third page, they had an idea. On the fourth page, they were building up steam. At the fifth page, they were really into it and excited about what they were writing.
If my peers were writing 20-page papers, or even 10-page papers, that wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately, they mostly wrote 5-page papers. Sometimes they wrote less than that. My professor made the comment that most of his students work in the same fashion, taking several pages to reach an interesting point, and that by the time they finally said something that captured his interest, the essay had finished.
He would have liked his students to continue writing even though they had met the page requirement. He also would have been happy for us to delete this first four or five pages and start an essay from the most interesting sentence.
The mind is like a muscle, he would tell us. You don't get out of bed and run a marathon. You walk around, stretch your legs, get warmed up to work out. I have to agree with Dr. Franke; our best writing comes after we have been writing for a while. It comes when we have gotten into a groove and a mindset of writing.
I think any writing warm-ups will be beneficial, though. If, say, you are in the middle of writing a novel and you don't want to waste your time writing a bunch of crappy pages to warm up, then write something else. Make up a short story, describe a scene, write some dialogue. Do whatever writing exercises you have picked up or make some new ones for yourself. These can then be totally throwaway works that get you into the mindset that you need to be in to do your best.
I will say, though, that the more time you spend exploring and creating in a work, the more likely you are to find something good you weren't looking for. That is one reason that you may be best off warming up on your primary project. Either way, you can't really lose. The only way to lose is to never warm up.
About Me
- Kevin Bahler
- I am a writer. A writer is one who writes. By the same logic, I am also a thinker, an observer, and a puzzle solver. I am a graduate from the State University of New York at Cortland with a degree in Professional Writing. The idea of the program is that one studies all three aspects of writing as a whole: Creative Writing, Technical Writing, and Rhetoric. The knowledge I have gained in those subjects is put to use in every aspect of my life. The worst thing a person can be is boring. I am most interested in people who can pique my interests. An example is people who can correctly use the word 'pique'.
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