Happy Saturday, WriteByNighters,
By the time you read this message, I will
have gone through it word by word "painstakingly," as Kurt Vonnegut put it, "fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work."
Because I, dear reader, am a
swooper.
At least according to Vonnegut, who split writers into two categories: swoopers, those who write quickly and, often, carelessly until they reach the end of a draft, and bashers, who
won't move to the next line until the current line is perfect.
(Note: This comes from Timequake, Vonnegut's last novel. In theory, one could say that this swooper/basher thing isn't KV's opinion -- it's his
character's. But hey.)
Justine, for what it's worth, is a basher. (I know! It should be almost impossible for us to get along.)
In the time it takes her to write one page, I can write one novella. But that novella will be total chaos; her page will be spotless.
There's no right or wrong. I need to swoop and Justine needs to bash, for whatever reason, but at the end we both have a product.
So what kind of writer are you: a swooper or a basher? (Or none of the above?)
And perhaps more importantly, what can we learn from this about
who we are as writers, or even as people?
That's what I want to discuss on the blog this week, if you're game. Click on this link to add your thoughts.
If you'd rather swoop or bash your answer off the public record, you can reply to
this email instead.
Either way, we want to hear from you. Whether you swoop your comment or you bash it, the result is the same -- we get to know each other better!
