How I write
in a word: slowly
(This voiceover is an audio version of the newsletter below. It’s unedited, and today may include some little word stumbles and an easter-egg induced croaky voice! I also mistakenly said that the next episode of The Tortoise podcast would be covering wellness influencers. It’s not! Sorry! If you like/need to listen to these posts I hope you enjoy it regardless!)
Before I get into today’s post, just a few quick things. First, thank you all so much for your lovely comments on my 41 for 41 post last week. You made this 41-year-old feel very loved!
Second, if you’ve ever wanted a personalised, signed copy of one of my books (or might like to give one as a Mother’s Day present), there’s a limited number available for order in my shop now.
And finally, just a heads-up that school holidays start at the end of this week, which means I’ll be posting a little less while my kids are on their break. There will be no posts next week, and the following week I’ll be sending a paid post out on Sunday 15th April (on the difference between recovery and healing). There will also be a new episode of the podcast on Thursday 20th April, and things will be back to normal the week after that.
Being able to speed up and slow down as needed is an important part of slow living for me right now, as well as a really handy tool to help me prevent burnout. I’m so grateful to this brilliant corner of the internet for understanding and allowing me to do that.
So without further ado, let’s get into today’s letter.
Like a lot of things in my life, I write by feel. By intuition mostly. I am certainly not qualified to be a writer in any formal sense of the word. No Bachelor of Writing or Masters in English Literature for me – a fact that has always made me feel a bit dumb, or to put it more kindly, like a kid playing dress-ups.
This has not been helped by the fact that I came through the NSW education system during what was called the “whole language” era – where students weren’t taught even the basics of grammar because whoever wrote the curriculum of the day thought it was a waste of time. (Thankfully that’s now changed).
The result was that I spent years believing I was either stupid or had somehow missed every single grammar lesson at school because I literally didn’t know what an adjective was. I remember my mum being horrified when I struggled to differentiate between a verb and a noun, in high school. (To this day I have been known to reassure myself by singing the grammar songs my kids brought home years ago, “A verb is a word, it’s an action word – if you can do it, then you do it, if you do it, it’s a verb.”)
And I consider myself one of the lucky ones, because I read a lot as a kid. I absorbed much of what I know about writing now via osmosis, and while that’s an imperfect way of learning, and doesn’t give me the tools to describe why I write the way I do; it at least gives some form to it. Some understanding that certain things work while others don’t.
But if you asked me to explain the technical, grammatical reasons for any of it? Fuggedaboutit.
I’m sure I could write more quickly, more succinctly, if I had a firmer grasp of how to structure sentences and larger pieces of writing in a technical sense, but I have, by now, given myself almost wholly over to the fact that my “process” as it were, is messy, organic, and not prone to be rushed.
So, what does this process look like, I hear you ask. (Or maybe I don’t hear you ask. Maybe I hear me ask, because I’m still trying to figure it out myself.)
What I can tell you is that I write a lot of non-fiction and what follows is a pretty good approximation of how I tackle that kind of writing, whether it’s chapters of a book, a newsletter, or a piece of writing for a client. When it comes to creative writing and fiction however, I’m still pretty green and frankly have no real idea what I’m doing. I try to follow a similar process for writing poetry, picture book manuscripts or scenes in my novel, but it’s definitely more of an experiment at this stage.
To start, almost everything I write begins by hand. I land on an idea or theme that I’d like to explore and, as quickly as possible, will scrawl my thoughts freely (and often illegibly) in a bog-standard lined notebook. I don’t stop for spelling, corrections, structure, or any kind of editing.
It’s in these first, messy pages that I’m happy to repeat myself, digging at the same piece of ground until I either hit on the idea I’ve been searching for or give it up for lost and move on. If it’s the latter, often, I’ll do this mid-sentence.
Once I’ve got a few pages under my belt and feel a certain level of rightness to what I’ve written, I transcribe it into a Word doc, adding bits and pieces, and then read over it.
And while I know Anne Lamott and countless other writers talk about the beauty and importance of a “shitty first draft”, to be honest, I don’t know that what I end up with even qualifies as that. It’s usually pretty gross to read. There might be a few little nuggets hidden in amidst the mess, but it’s mostly unfinished paragraphs, half-thoughts and lots of repetition.
Even so, I try to avoid over-thinking it at this stage, because the next step is to give it space anyway (maybe an hour, maybe a week, maybe longer - this piece, for example, sat in my Drafts folder for at least four months) and I know that I’ll be viewing it with different eyes soon enough. Agonising over tiny details at this point is usually a waste of time.
When I do come back to a rough draft, I’m often surprised. So much of it is worse than I remembered. Some of it is actually okay. But it’s always here, in the mess, that I find the seed of what I was trying to say from the outset. Then I baby it along in fits and spurts, cutting and pasting and editing and re-working until a shape begins to emerge.
(Side note: I often find myself wondering how I can speed up this part as it seems to take me the longest, but I have yet to find a way through it that doesn't require me to go through it, you know? It’s kind of annoying.)
This reworking stage expands and extends as long as it needs to (sometimes longer) and there’s often lots of sighing, lots of staring off into space, lots of comparing my work in progress to the published work of other writers. There’s also lots of telling myself I’m self-indulgent or playing too small or aiming too high or just no freaking good.
But then! Miracle of miracles! There may come a breakthrough! One of my periods of staring into space might bear fruit and suddenly I know what I need to do. I’ll delete entire paragraphs or re-write a line or insert another seed-related metaphor and the shape becomes clearer.
Sometimes a piece never makes it past here. Usually that’s because I don’t really know why I’m writing it. There’s probably a seed within it that’s worth planting and tending (see?!) but it might not be the right time. Or maybe I get impatient. Whatever the reason, the intuition I rely so heavily on will sometimes tell me to can a piece. So, sometimes, I do.
If it does survive, I polish and trim and read through and read aloud until it feels close to something I'd say. Then, again, trying not to over-think it, I submit it, schedule it, or send it out into the world. (If I'm feeling particularly nervous and/or proud of it, I might send it to Ben first for either validation or advice as appropriate.)
And if you think it sounds slow, you’re right. To give you an idea of how long this whole process takes, I’d spend at least ten hours on every post here on The Tortoise, and I can’t tell you how many thousands of hours went in to writing each of my books.
If anything, I think I might be getting slower too, which feels as though it should be frustrating. But at the same time, I also think I’m becoming more intentional with what I’m trying to say, so maybe it all evens out. As with so much of my life now, I’m trying to be okay with multiple things being true at the same time.
I used to listen slavishly to writing podcasts, hoping to stumble on the one insight or practical piece of advice that would help me become a better, faster, steadier, more reliable, more productive writer. And while there is no shortage of writers willing to share their personal tips, tricks, hacks, and how-tos, what I found most helpful was the over-riding experience that most writers have:
The writing is the work. Sometimes it’s hard. It’s always messy, and the “process” isn’t some sanctified thing hand-delivered by a muse when you sit at your desk, pencil behind the ear, hair artfully undone, coffee steaming gently.
It’s the handwritten pages and the gross first draft. It’s staring into space, trying to make sense of my tangled thoughts, and it’s putting those thoughts to paper and wrestling with them until I unravel the knots. It’s thinking I’ve finally got a handle on my point, only to feel it slip out of my fingers when I try to hold too tight. It’s the joy of reading back and realising that something I’ve written makes sense, and the confusion of reading it again and realising it’s complete nonsense.
Writing is not the end result. It’s not this piece you’re reading. Writing is the action. (The verb, as it were. See? I have learnt things.)
It’s starting off with an idea and working with it as it becomes something else. It’s wrestling it back into submission, or letting it take the lead.
And, at least in that way, it’s a bit like life. Sometimes I have clarity around what I’m doing and why, other times I go solely off a gut feeling. Sometimes the process is straightforward and relatively painless, other times it’s meandering and messy and I double back over and over, re-treading old ground until I either admit I’m lost, or I stumble upon the way forward.
So that’s my “process”. Messy. Slow. Intuitive. Human. I’ve gotta say, all of that feels very on-brand.
I’m Currently…
Eating Easter eggs. I bought them for gifts, but I accidentally opened a packet and accidentally ate some of them and will probably accidentally eat a few more soon.
Thinking about our government announcement that mobile phones will be banned in all public high schools from October this year. Our kids’ high school had already put a ban in place, and I am a big BIG fan of it. We’re going to do a full episode of The Tortoise podcast on it soon. If there’s anything in particular you’d like us to talk about, let me know in the comments.
Looking for some new, easy weekday meals. These miso eggplant noodles look good.
Listening to this episode of Flightless Bird by David Farrier (author of one of my favourite Substacks –
). It’s all about Waco.Finding delight in the chilly mornings and warm days.
So that’s it for today. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and if you’re spending time with family or friends over Easter, I hope that’s wonderful too.
Until next time, take good care.
Brooke xx
PS. For anyone reading who suffered the same grammar-related black hole in their education, I found Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style super helpful (if not a little dry).
Very nice post - I think that writing is messy because thinking is messy, if we're honest - and also there is alchemy in scrawling pen on paper!
OMG the whole grammar thing suuuuucks! Only that I read a lot, otherwise I am not sure how I would string my words together for my publication here. I am 49, and what most would consider pretty well educated - two bachelors, two masters, researcher - but still, STILL, to this day, I cannot get the "official rules" of grammar to stay in my head! It is like their refusal to teach it to us also *somehow* put a block on the ability to *actually learn it* later in life. It is bizarre (and shamefully embarrassing). I have a table of grammatical terms etc pinned on my phone, and still, from one use to the next, it may as well be a whole new language for my lack of familiarity. Thanks NSW education dept.