To take another example, “Cooking” is a subject broad enough for a Mrs. Ralston, a Mrs. Lincoln, or a Miss Farmer. “Making Desserts” is too comprehensive for any but an exhaustive treatise. “Making Ice Cream” requires at least a booklet. Good short theme subjects would be “How I Make My Favorite Sherbet,” “How to Make Chocolate Ice Cream without Cream,” or “How to Make Ice Cream Roll with a Frozen Whipped Cream Center.”
2. Reflect, read, ask questions, observe in order to gather material which will enable you to carry out your design. Gather, as applied to material for writing, implies a go-and-get-it attitude. Gathering material requires a physical as well as a mental search. Do not expect material to come to you; go after it. Talk with persons who know. Read what they have written. Good writing is most likely to result when the writer fuses his own experience and observation with the experience and observation of others. Gather all the material possible without trying to decide, while you are getting it, what is important and what is not. Keep your mind, your eyes, and your ears wide open. Get details and get plenty of them. Steep, saturate yourself in your subject.
3. After you have gathered the material, discard everything that will not help you to produce the effect you are trying for. Then if there are any gaps in your composition, gather more material to fill them up. Some writers get the best results by putting a plan on paper before starting to write; others let a plan take more or less definite shape in their minds, but do not try to set down any hard and fast outline. The reason for not making a hard and fast outline is that a curious thing often happens to any writer who has written much. He finds—on occasion—that his composition seems to write itself. The characters he thought he had created have minds of their own and refuse to let him treat them like puppets. His thoughts seem to be alive and to exist apart from him. They insist on expressing themselves in their own way. An experienced writer does some of his best work when he seems to be merely the medium through which ideas are seeking to translate themselves from whatever world it is they inhabit to this one. If, on the other hand, a writer is continually consulting a plan, his ideas and characters never take things into their own hands.
Write for someone to read. Put yourself in that reader’s place and see if your writing is producing the desired effect. Begin your composition with the details that will most effectively attract his attention and arouse his interest. Continue writing so that you will retain his attention and interest. Stop when you have said all you have to say.
4. Write rapidly and at white heat. If pertinent ideas keep coming to you forget about your plan. Get your inspiration on paper before it cools. If you finally find a system—or even a lack of one—that enables you to write fast and at the same time to feel that you are creating something, do not let anyone talk you into trying some other plan. Stick to your own.
5. Revise at leisure, but ruthlessly, in cold blood, and continue to revise, rearrange, and rewrite indefinitely until the finished product satisfies you.
Make the final draft absolutely correct. Avoid especially the common faults that denote the semi-illiterate man or woman. If you make errors that would not be made by a twelve-year-old child, your composition will get scant consideration from an intelligent reader. While revising, question everything, spelling, grammar, choice of words, punctuation; question the usefulness of each idea, and the arrangement of the parts of the completed composition.
Start writing soon enough to give yourself ample time for revision. Let the first draft get cold before you look at it again. If you wait several days after the first draft is finished you can approach your own writing as objectively as if it had been done by someone else. It will then be much easier to question every letter, every word, every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph, every idea, besides the whole composition and each of its parts.
Make everything in your composition justify itself. Whenever you are satisfied to do mediocre work the rest of the world is satisfied with the valuation you have set on yourself. Be your own severest critic. Show your own writing no mercy. Some of the world’s most successful writers of advertisements as well as of novels have rewritten their best work time and again before giving it to the public. What reads smoothly takes hours of toil to produce.
Many good instructors insist on receiving two copies of every composition from each student; one a rough, lead pencil draft, and the other the finished manuscript.