Anna Koop

I have realized something about my writing process.

Progress on my proposal has been slow. Not discouragingly slow, but incredibly painstaking. Other than the usual battles with perfectionism and undue diligence and scope explosion/implosion, I haven’t quite known why. A possible (addition) explanation occurred to me just now.

One of the artifacts of working on writing with Rich, particularly if it’s a topic he cares about, is the constant scrapping of what’s-been-done. I bring something in (when I bring actual writing in and not just the latest point to discuss!), we look at it, we discuss what works and what doesn’t, and I go out to start over from scratch. It’s not just Rich’s critique that does it—I have a strong tendency towards restarting anyway. Restarting after discussing the whole pictures leads to an excellent narrative and very clear ideas about what the work is about. However.

It does not lead to a complete draft. Ever, really. Hence, right now, although I have written several hundred thousands of words over the last two years, my (incomplete) proposal draft contains 680. Subject to change. Always. That’s down from one of the earlier iterations, which did have a couple thousand, I believe (pardon my obsession with word counts—progress must be measured in some way, for sanity’s sake).

I don’t know if this is something I should embrace or resolve. Free-writing tends to lead to this sort of thing, and free-writing is the lowest-pressure way to get work done. The perfectionism and diligence and scope expansion all lead to paralysis, and free-writing knocks me out of that. But . . . I would like to have a draft. As Mike said, only five people are ever going to read this document. Perhaps I am perfecting just a little too much?