Avi

word craft

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Blogging decisions

typewriterMal­colm, from Atlanta asks: “How do you decide what blog post to write?”

It works this way:

I have nev­er known two writ­ers who work exact­ly the same way. Each has indi­vid­ual idio­syn­crasies. At the same time I believe that ALL writ­ers have the same BASIC process. That is, they write, then rewrite, read what they have writ­ten and then rewrite again, as many times as it takes to feel the work is done. It is that re-writ­ing which is at the core of good writing.

So, Mal­colm, while I’m sure I have my own par­tic­u­lar way of working—for exam­ple, I get to work ear­ly in the morn­ing, where­as I know folks who work best at night—I can work in a hotel room—others hate it—I think that the kinds of actu­al writ­ing prob­lems I have are more than like­ly the prob­lems oth­er writ­ers have. In oth­er words, I sim­ply share my own expe­ri­ence as they occur.

There­fore if my blog post is about start­ing a new book, or fin­ish­ing a book, you can be usu­al­ly sure it is because that is where I am in my own work. If it’s about edit­ing, or research, that’s what I am doing at that time. I don’t refer to a giv­en book by title before it’s pub­lished because the title often changes, and besides, I real­ly don’t like to ref­er­ence a par­tic­u­lar book until I’m sure it is going to be published.

The excep­tion to all this is when I get a ques­tion such as the one you sent, Mal­com. Then I try to answer it here. In fact, if any­one out there (wher­ev­er there is) has a ques­tion, which I think will have gen­er­al inter­est, do send it on.

I’ll prob­a­bly decide to write a blog post about it.

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