A keyboard ready to be used (Connor Willis)
By Connor Willis
Writing for school is hard – or at least it can be. Students are so used to overthinking, making sure every sentence is perfect, chasing the good grade, just to forget everything once the assignment is over.
I used to do this, but months ago I dusted off my bookshelf and found “How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci,” by Michael J. Gelb. Flicking through the pages, I came across the best writing advice I’ve ever heard.
When finals came, the teacher asked the class: “What advice would you give to someone taking the class?” On my turn, I said, plain and simple: “Write drunk, revise sober.”
Don’t mistake this as a suggestion to get wasted the night before your assignments are due. Don’t be stupid.
This tip means abandon perfection. Embrace failure. Kill the hesitation. Hence, the stream-of-consciousness method. Step one is the only step: fingers to keys, not lifting or pausing, nor checking grammar and spelling; just writing, writing, writing until the words spill out, not second guessing yourself, like a cat just walked across the keyboard. Don’t worry if you are writing gibberish; that’s the point. You clean it up later, tailor it to the academic standards.
Some people like to build slowly, placing each word brick by brick. That works, too. But many equate quick writing with bad writing, which is not the case. Stream-of-consciousness writing trains the mind to think fast, problem-solve, and to work through ideas without fear. It’s the practice of the greats.
Jack Kerouac spent many years on the road and typed for 30 days to tell the tale. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in a “white-hot” frenzy of three days. Werner Herzog wrote the screenplay of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” in two days while on a couch with drunken footballers.
The best writing doesn’t come from hesitation. It comes from the mess. So write first and fix later. Because the words that matter most are never from playing it safe. And what’s the result? You write quicker with more excitement. Something that’s desperately needed in academic systems today: excitement.
