{"id":969,"date":"2014-06-16T14:37:18","date_gmt":"2014-06-16T02:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=969"},"modified":"2014-06-16T14:37:18","modified_gmt":"2014-06-16T02:37:18","slug":"what-do-you-want-to-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=969","title":{"rendered":"What do you want to say?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"keys\"<\/a>When I was just starting out in the writing business, I had an editor who insisted that good writing was largely a matter of thinking carefully about what you wanted to say; saying it as simply as possible; and then making sure that you had, indeed, said what you intended to say.<\/p>\n

It was good advice.\u00a0 But I soon discovered that the hardest part is usually the first part: deciding what you want to say.<\/p>\n

Among my more-experienced colleagues, there seemed to be two main approaches to this potential difficulty.<\/p>\n

The first was what I came to think of as \u2018the Ernie approach.\u2019\u00a0 Ernie was one of the most-respected senior writers on the team.\u00a0 His approach was to spend great chunks of time pacing the corridors with his eyes on some far distant horizon before suddenly ducking back into his cubbyhole and banging out a thousand or so words of near-perfect prose.<\/p>\n

The second approach was what I came to think of as \u2018the David approach\u2019.\u00a0 David didn\u2019t bother with any of the corridor pacing.\u00a0 He just sat down at his typewriter and started pounding away.\u00a0 Once he had covered ten or 15 pages, he put them in a stack, face down, on his desk, and wandered off to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee.<\/p>\n

Fortified with a shot of caffeine, he would then take up a blue pencil and quickly read through what he had written, circling a sentence here and a sentence there, highlighting a word here and a word there.\u00a0 And then, when he had worked his way through all ten or 15 pages, he would put a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter and start saying what he really<\/em> wanted to say.\u00a0 As he said, the first part of the process was just to clarify his thoughts and canvass some possibilities.<\/p>\n

Over the years, I\u2019ve used both the Ernie approach and the David approach.\u00a0 They both work.\u00a0 But, increasingly, I find myself leaning towards the David approach.\u00a0 Perhaps I shouldn\u2019t be surprised.\u00a0 As another editor said: Most writers become writers in order to discover what they think.\u00a0 Or was that Joan Didion who said that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was just starting out in the writing business, I had an editor who insisted that good writing was largely a matter of thinking carefully about what you wanted to say; saying it as simply as possible; and then … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":970,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/969\/revisions\/970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}