I love to write. I love the process of writing. First deciding what you want to write, then what writing style, if should it be written by hand or on computer, who is the audience and what language to write in. I like these decisions. They are easy to make and once made you can get on with the task at hand, writing.
The process is totally different for the different kinds of writing . Postcards, essays for university, emails, blog-posts official letters and letters to friends.They all require certain things of you as a writer, there is certain expectations to how it should be written and what it should contain.
My favourites for a relaxing nice time is by far postcards and letters to friends. The words flow easily onto the card or page and I can just let my mind drift and tell my friend about what is going on in my mind right now. This is probably one of the more uninhibited writing processes, my attitude to postcards and letters to friends is pretty much anything goes. My friends are my friends because they accept me for who I am, so nothing I would think to put in a postcard would surprise them much, not in a way to make them dislike me anyway.
Postcards that I send though postcrossing are slightly different, I still try to fill the entire back of the card with writing. To me this is what makes the postcard stand out in the crowd, what makes it personal and the reason I want to send it. I try telling the receiver a bit about myself and what I have been up to lately and what events are on my mind. It all depends on my mood what the person gets to lean about me, but I try to only send postcards that lets the receiver have a glimpse of me. The day I send a card that reads only “Happy postcrossing!” I will inactivate my postcrossing account and find something else to do.
The worst thing to write is official emails or letters. Each time I have to write one I am at a loss for words. I never know what is appropriate to write and how to get the message across. I am better with this if there is a deadline and there is something I really desperately want at the end of it. When there is a deadline I push myself to get it done, if not I am more likely to delay it untill there is no point of writing it anymore. Like my application letter for the summer job. I dreaded writing it and then in the end I just sat down and did it. After many rounds back and forth I got a letter that I was really pleased with.
That is something I like about writing. The going back and forth. Writing a first rough draft, going back and editing it, looking if over, move things around a bit, edit some sentences because they no longer look right. Spell-checking, finding new things that just have to be included and looking for the right place to fit them in. And eventually sitting there with the last draft and making minor adjustments, sometimes changing one word in a paragraph can change the impact of it. Make it a stronger statement, make the criticism less harsh, show the world that you are passionate about the subject or simply make it look prettier when printed.
If I do not know some details while I am drafting I mark it in the text as I am writing by writing it as a question in all caps. Nothing stands out like things written in all caps. When I go back it is easy to see where I need to do soe research to fill in the missing information. Even more important is that it allows me to keep going even if there are things I need to find more about or verify. If I had to stop and look things up while writing I would lose track of what I was trying to say and might miss out on the point. If I did not clearly mark my questions I would forget them and maybe miss out on an important point in the text because I did not know all the facts while I was drafting it. If I am unsure of spelling I just write it in a way that makes me understand what I meant and hope that I catch it while spell-checking later.
When looking at the first draft of essays I can usually tell where I got fed up with the subject and decide just to write anything just to get to the end. Suddenly there is more things written in all caps, there are unanswered questions all over the place and the sentences no longer flows together, they are more like individual statements rather than part of a whole. It does not really matter as I know I will go over it many times and can always fill in the gaps at a later point and it is so much easier filling in gaps than trying to write the whole text from beginning to end at once.
The constant going back and forth takes time. A lot of time. I usually have to print out the drafts to make corrections by hand before going back and correcting them. Somehow mistakes pop out more for me when on paper than when I just see them on a computer screen. Paragraphs that needs moved also appear more clearly to me when I see it on paper then when it is on the screen. Corrections are all done in red or green pen, in a desperate situation blue might be used, but preferably not. When I am done correcting it looks like I can’t spell and that I have just had it corrected by a teacher in a foul mood.
Since it is so time-consuming I only do this for essays and other important things where I want what I have written to stand out or if it is to be graded or somehow judged. Blog posts does not get as many reviews, but a fair few of them started out as a bullet point list, was fleshed out, saved as a draft and then read through, modified and scheduled in a day or two, allowing time to go back and look it over before it finally posts for all to see. This does not happen to all blog posts, if that was the case I would never get anything posted. The quality of the posts might be better, or I would think they were. I have decided to post some posts as they are written without mush more editing than a quick spellcheck, but I hope that as I get better at writing I will find the time to write more and find time for more well thought out posts that I spend more time writing, both because I want to write a good blog and because I truly enjoy the process of writing.
Some of the rawness and openness of a freshly written text is lost in the editing process. Some pieces will never be finished if they are to be edited and looked over, and sometimes it is not necessary to do more than a spellcheck and send the piece of writing away, I like both.
