Everyone remembers the first time their mother asks them to iron their clothes. Unwillingly, you erect the creaky board, flatten your clothing on the slender surface, and with one hand wield your iron. The grudging task involves taking your material and smoothing every wrinkle, pressing every seam, and striving to keep every fiber unburned. In other words, iron clothes is like writing.
At first, the writing process is daunting and confusing. You begin to write your first draft in a breeze. Every sentence seems to leap like an Augustinian revelation and every analogy flows with antiquated wisdom. Then the revelation unfolds and the folly proceeds. You reread your work and your writing is spontaneous, incoherent, and of ogresque quality. The conglomeration of letters, sentences, and paragraphs ends with the reader managing to crawl away – never to return. Every wrinkle is left visible, every seam is found unpressed, and the smoke from your paper is clouting the room.
My first lessons in writing was a manhunt to find a proper board - and nothing can be more frustrating. You spend entire days editing and re-editing the same work. Your sentences are too long or too short, they are vague and unintelligible, and you don't know how to fix them. With your sentences floating belly-up, your paragraphs aren't swimming any better. With a secession of convoluted thoughts, there's no epic view to a final draft. You are lost on a misty mountain. So, the first step to ironing your clothes is to find a concrete surface that isn't going to move; by understanding the English language. Learn your mechanics, learn your sentence structures, learn how to punctuate, learn how organize your work, and, above all, learn patience. This even means throwing away your mothers ironing board – or perhaps saving it for another day - you'll be rewarded in the end for doing it.
Then, you must trust your material. Too many times your half way finished when you decide to throw another pair of shorts on to the ironing board. You exchange pairs with a feint hope that the errors will fix themselves. Talent and ability will never remedy the problem. Writing is about doing and redoing until the task is finished. The first copy will be rough. The second copy will be rough. The third copy will be rough. Every copy will be rough until you have corrected and re-corrected a thousand times. Each time you correct again, every moment you spend after wanting to quit, is the skill required for you to smooth the wrinkles of your writing. You need to trust you material, stop changing, and finish what you've started.
And, lastly, the most elusive of the writing virtues is a good voice. You can write, write, and write, but if you don't have a voice no one will hear you – and most certainly no one will want to. Grab a book written by a favorite author and read aloud. Hear your voice rise and fall, hear the pitch and stress of the author's words, and pause and begin again at the signs of punctuation. To become better at ironing, you need to hear the sound of the steam. Is it the sound of a gentle rain, bubbling of skin under hot oil, or the blast of a train at full tilt? You are the writer, so choose; your voice will only expand or contract to describe what you already hear.
The difficulty in writing is “beginning and finishing your work.” Work until you fail, and keep working until you have succeeded. Don't worry about failing, and don't shudder at the sight of your mother's ironing board. Those are the lessons that will guide you to becoming what you were designed to do. So plug in your iron, wait until the ready light turns on, and start writing.
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