The Prose Space

Here are two related rules that can help you define the "space" of your writing process. I should qualify them by saying they don't forbid anything absolutely. That is, you're free to "break" them outside of your formal writing process. The point is just that there should be regular occasions (preferably at least half an hour every day) when they are observed.

Don't write onto a blank page. You are of course filling in the "white" space of the page, but make sure that the boundaries around that space are well defined. This means you should know not just what text you are working on, and not just what section of that text, but exactly what paragraph you are writing at a particular time. You can easily mark off this paragraph by giving yourself a key sentence to write to. That is, decide in advance—i.e., before you go to bed the day before—what truth you are going to be expressing in prose. Your task will be to spend 27 (or 17 or 13) minutes writing at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that support it. This morning, for example, I knew that the space of my writing problem was a blog post with two main paragraphs, one defined by the first sentence of this one, the other defined by the first sentence of the next. I knew I would have about thirteen minutes to write each one.

Don't write in an unstructured space. The author you are needs to trust that there will be no interruptions during the scheduled writing time, nothing that you have to "see to" immediately. For many people this means having what Virginia Woolf called "a room of one's own", but this is by no means necessary, and for some people just not possible. In any case, it's not the physical room, the walls and the door, that protect your writing process, it's the respect you are able to establish around your process. A door works not, in the main, because you can lock it, but because people know that when it is closed they have to knock before entering, and that they have accept it if you tell them you're busy. I write my morning blog post at the dining room table and sometimes my family is up and beginning their day all around me. But they know that from 6:30 to 7:00 I'm not to be disturbed. They respect my writing for half an hour. In that sense, my space is structured.

Don't expect your author (the part of you that writes) to work effectively on a blank page in an open space. Frame the problem of writing with a key sentence and a modicum of tranquility. It only takes a little bit of resolve to make the necessary decisions about your text and maintain the necessary relations to those around you. Your author will thank you. And reward you with a reliable supply of prose.