I’m a pretty monologuey person myself but still recognise this ‘thinking on the page’ thing. It’s a good way to describe it. I get into a state where I’m just writing… stuff… because it’s ‘there in my head’ for some reason, but doesn’t feel like it particularly corresponds to anything.
I’ve always found the advice you get from the old ‘close reading’ style of criticism useful for getting out of this state, the kind of thing you’d find in, say, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language essay: work at the word level and pick those words carefully. One place where ‘thinking on the page’ seems to creep in for me is when I start working at the phrase level instead, tacking together premade phrases that already sound good.
Orwell and the New Critics were maybe more interested in doing justice to sensory experience—finding new vivid images instead of stale old ones—rather than doing justice to internal felt meaning, but I think their advice of thinking about the individual words can still work.
I appreciate this perspective! My first instinct is to zoom out from stock phrases to entire ideas or arguments while drafting (when everything is working well, sentences or paragraphs get translated atomically like this), then use ‘close reading’ as an editing tactic. But you’re right that zooming in to find the exact word when stuck on the page can also be very focusing (as it were). And there’s a lot of room for interplay between the two approaches, as far as there’s even a clean separation between self-expression and self-editing in the first place.
I’m a pretty monologuey person myself but still recognise this ‘thinking on the page’ thing. It’s a good way to describe it. I get into a state where I’m just writing… stuff… because it’s ‘there in my head’ for some reason, but doesn’t feel like it particularly corresponds to anything.
I’ve always found the advice you get from the old ‘close reading’ style of criticism useful for getting out of this state, the kind of thing you’d find in, say, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language essay: work at the word level and pick those words carefully. One place where ‘thinking on the page’ seems to creep in for me is when I start working at the phrase level instead, tacking together premade phrases that already sound good.
Orwell and the New Critics were maybe more interested in doing justice to sensory experience—finding new vivid images instead of stale old ones—rather than doing justice to internal felt meaning, but I think their advice of thinking about the individual words can still work.
I appreciate this perspective! My first instinct is to zoom out from stock phrases to entire ideas or arguments while drafting (when everything is working well, sentences or paragraphs get translated atomically like this), then use ‘close reading’ as an editing tactic. But you’re right that zooming in to find the exact word when stuck on the page can also be very focusing (as it were). And there’s a lot of room for interplay between the two approaches, as far as there’s even a clean separation between self-expression and self-editing in the first place.