The older I get and the more writers I work with, the more I become convinced that if you want to write, it’s never too early to start writing.
In academia, which is most familiar to me, the main reasons people offer for why they aren’t writing is that they need to learn more—they need do more reading or they need to do more other research (e.g., gathering data; analyzing data; etc.).
In the world of artistic writing, such excuses are perhaps less common, but still, looking at social media forums on writing, like on Reddit, there are people who ask “Have I read enough to start writing,” and people who assert “You will be a better writer if you read more, regardless of when you start writing,” which implies that you can improve as a writer just by reading, even if you don’t write.
We can always learn more, so more reading/research always seems a viable, even necessary, next step. The greater the self-doubt, the more likely it is that a person will avoid writing in favor of trying to learn more before writing. But, because we can always learn more, there is no point at which it is too early to start writing: if we will never know “enough,” then waiting another day or week or month or year, and reading another article, or book, or entire library, will only leave us in much the same place: we won’t know everything; we won’t know enough.
But the writing we do on any given day does not inevitably commit us to some course of action. I can start writing this morning, do some reading in the afternoon and decide to throw away the morning’s writing and start something new. Even if you throw away a draft, I assert that the time has been well spent and that you become a better writer by writing. For this reason, it’s never too early to start writing.
A Bad Letter Early Is Better than a Good Letter Late
It could be argued that a good idea must be incubated sufficiently before it can be presented in an effective form, and that writing too soon will damage or destroy the idea. It’s possible that there is some abstract “idea” that the writer captures, and then somehow damages by writing poorly. This does not seem like a realistic explanation to me. Writers build and refine their ideas by writing. The idea is within the writer, and the writer must cultivate it by thinking about it and exploring it (including writing about it).
Although we can stop writing too soon—we can be overconfident in our work and submit it to others while it is still a bad mess—starting to write early does not commit us to submitting our work to the scrutiny of others before it’s ready. It’s not as if a timer begins running when you first put words on the page. Starting writing early does not commit you to early submission. If there is an external deadline—a contract with a publisher, an assignment for school, even a Christmas card for your mom—that deadline doesn’t wait for you to start writing. It might be weird to write your mom a Christmas card in August, but you don’t have to mail it until December and it will be fine (assuming it doesn’t contain news that you have otherwise communicated to her).
Starting writing enables early submission and reduces the chance of late submission. There is absolutely no chance that you can submit your work before you have started writing. Starting early is unlikely to delay completion or submission. It’s possible that a writer who gets too absorbed in writing neglects some work of importance. But even such an error is unlikely to be missed during revision.
The sooner you start writing, the sooner you can finish a draft, and then the sooner you can start revising. If William Germano is correct in saying that revision is “the only writing that matters,” as the subtitle of his book On Revision claims, then we want to get to revision as soon as possible. The earlier we start writing, the sooner we can advance our project.
Generally, I think most writers would benefit from getting a bad manuscript out early in preference to delaying to work on the draft longer. Too many writers keep working on their manuscript, endlessly revising, when they should finish that work and move on to another. Academic writers are often tempted to get an extension on their work, but I discourage the practice.
As you write, you learn, and you make choices about which way to go
Writing alters our perception of the world. We may start writing with a certain image of the world and of our message in mind, but this image is imperfectly related to what we can put on the page, and the attempt to put ideas on the page generally reveals perspectives we have not seen before.
The learning of the writer lies on multiple level. At the physical level, there is the basic development of neurophysiology that comes with working on any task or any set of ideas, including the neurophysiology for putting words on the pae (whether that be by typing, handwriting, or dictation). At the purely intellectual level of writing, there are choices in many dimensions, including:
- word choice
- sentence structure and style
- narrative structure
- authorial voice
- which ideas to include and which to exclude
With each draft, if we reflect on our options for all these different dimensions, we learn abot our choices as a writer.
The learning can be a problem: as you learn, you can be tempted to change what you did in the past; you can be tempted by new projects. We want to keep learning, of course; we don’t want to refuse learning because it maybe makes us dissatisfied with our earlier efforts. Despite the problems of learning, we want to learn, and writing enables more learning about writing than any other activity.
Note: Because of the “problem” of learning, I recommend trying to write quickly and to finish drafts quickly, but that’s a separate discussion.
Time Management
Our imaginations are essentially boundless. We can basically imagine anything, my mentor’s mentor, Horst Rittel argued: “there are no limits to the conceivable” (Universe p.129; p.172 “Reasoning of the Designer”). Knowledge, or at least the accumulated knowledge of academia and humanity, is practically boundless, at least within the capabilities of a human.
As humans, our time is limited. There may be uncounted paths of interest—uncounted research projects, uncounted novels or poems—but there is very countable, limited time, as expressed over centuries, including “Time’s winged chariot” in Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress,” and rock band Pink Floyd’s song “Time,” which laments:
Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines
We want our plans to come to something—they may start or incubate with half a page of scribbled lines—and it is for that reason that we want to start writing sooner than later. If we want to produce some good work, we have to be willing to produce our pages of scribbled lines that “come to naught.” If we want to achieve our plans, we benefit by writing sooner rather than later. The sooner we start, the better chance we have to improve our plans, and find people to support us as we try to realize them—particularly the professors, editors, reviewers, agents, publishers, and others who might facilitate our getting published or achieving other writing goals.
You are always making choices about what you do with your time. If you want to be a writer, it’s valuable to practice writing. There is no better way to improve as a writer. Unless you’re writing, other activities—reading, course work, etc.—won’t help you become a better writer or finish your manuscripts.
If you want to be a writer, choose to spend time writing now so that you can finish your writing projects.