What's Real Writing?

This week I’ve been working on new writing for my next MFA submission (October 9). I’m chipping away at it but most of the scenes that I’ve written need to be scrapped. I’m back wondering what counts as real writing. I like to think in terms of process, but when there is a product deadline, this ideal becomes challenging.

Every morning, I do my three longhand morning pages. These are more like journal writing, and even though I would say I put about 750 words on the page every morning, to me they just don’t count because they won’t be published and they are just meandering, rambling, stream of consciousness “brain drain.” Priming the pump, I guess. I can’t live without them but they’re not real writing.

Then there’s the blog. I feel as if I have an appreciative audience (thank you!!), but is it real writing?

A few times a week, I do free-writing. Lately, I am getting prompts from a helpful craft book suggested by my advisor, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. The thing I like most about this book is that she makes it seem possible. Anything that keeps that sense of possibility alive is worth reading. DeMarco is a big fan of free-writing to a timer. Last night’s exercise involved listing events in your life that are difficult to write about – low-points, embarrassing moments, regrets. Then pick one, set the timer, and write about it as a scene. I did. The timer went off and I kept writing. I was really in the flow too, with my favourite fountain pen filled with appropriately dark ink from a brand new jar. By the end, I had a rich and textured scene about an excruciating period of my adult life that I would rather not re-visit. No plans for that piece. Not real writing. This is what happens with a lot of my free-writing.

So I decided to turn to some real writing. And that’s when I wrote those scenes that are headed for the trash. Of course I know that no writer writes keeper material every time she or he sits down to write (except for, reportedly, Bertrand Russell who wrote one perfect longhand draft of everything). But there is that defeated sense of having wasted my time if I don’t end up with something whose use is immediately obvious to me. I want to trust the process, I really do. Maybe I need to start thinking in terms of the recycling bin rather than the trash can. Meanwhile, writing friends, tell me: what is real writing to you? My apologies for today's angst.