It's the 1oth of April and I am nowhere near the estimated number of pages I need to hit my ScriptFrenzy goal. My original idea has splintered so often that the pages I have written are a disparate mess, two of which are devoted to a SNL sketch about Ariel's inevitable appearance on Hoarders. (You know it's true.)
Thankfully, writing for ScriptFrenzy has not felt like cranking out high school essays for word count. My mindset has changed. I found a balance between quantity and quality. Ernest Hemingway, the icon of pithy prose, knew the siren call of excess verbiage led to bad writing. "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."
That notion is not easy to teach students weened on word count targets. Some students refuse to believe that "See Spot run" is a more convincing story than "From across the vast spaces of time, one can view the quick running of Spot as he scampers." I understand their resistance. They want to sound like the books their teachers make them read because they've been told that's what good writers sound like. They want to sound like they know what their talking about. And that's the problem.
I can't write clearly unless I have a clear message. Students think I'm crazy when I propose that to improve their timed writing pieces, they take 5 minutes away from actually writing and brainstorm. Forget the outline too. Brainstorm. Think about the prompt/story and write those ideas down. Thoughtful writing is purposeful writing. Bad writers are hoarders. Bad writing, the writing we were trained to do by meeting page and word requirements, can't distinguish words that are essential from words that are peripheral. A good idea, if one exists, is smothered by the horde. Good writing should stand up to a scalpel because there is nothing unnecessary left to cleave away.
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over." -Hemingway
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