The Red Velvet Lawyer

Writing Imperfectly While We Strive for Perfection Pam Jenoff -- in her  article :  The Self-Assessed Writer: Harnessing Fiction-Writing Process to Understand Ourselves as Legal Writers and Maximize Legal Writing Productivity,  10  JALWD  (Fall 2013) -- admits that students have a hard time committing fully to the timed writing exercise I described in my last post. She explains: When I use Goldberg’s exercise with writing groups, I read a passage that explains the importance of such exercises in silencing our inner editors: "Our “monkey mind” says we can’t write, we’re no good, we’re failures, fools for even picking up a pen; we listen to it. We drift. We listen and get tossed away. Meanwhile, wild mind surrounds us—sink into the big sky and write from there, let everything run through us and grab as much as we can of it with a pen and paper. This is all about a loss of control." Janoff then asks her students to do the timed writing exercise.  She may in

Vomiting on the Page The timed writing exercise can help a writer jump start the creative writing process.  Pam Jenoff, in her article :  The Self-Assessed Writer: Harnessing Fiction-Writing Process to Understand Ourselves as Legal Writers and Maximize Legal Writing Productivity,  10  JALWD  (Fall 2013) describes the technique: Keep your hand moving. Frequently, a writer pens a sentence, then stops to consider it and edit, losing the flow of the idea. This exercise requires the writer to commit to writing without stopping for a specific period of time.  Lose control. Write without fear that the work is not good enough — a common problem that can stop writers mid-project. This underscores the idea, which many of us already teach in both legal and fiction writing, to “get it out there” and then fix it up later.   Be specific. Even on the first draft, look for language that gets to the heart of what you are trying to say and that captures the essence of the idea.