I Didn’t Write This

This essay is part of The Headlight Review’s series, “The Process,” which features writers describing the steps they take to develop and realize a literary work. Writers discuss their inspirations, stages of their drafting, the swings and misses, and the messes they’ve made.

A narrative can focus on the story of a single creation or may instead frame a process the writer employs on a regular basis. We dig hearing writers talking about writing and understand not everything can result in success. Failures can tell a story, too.

In addition to a submission call, we asked a quartet of our favorites—Jason Crawford, John Henry Fleming, Robin Silbergleid, and James Whorton Jr.—to participate. These essays will kick off our series.  

We hope to continue publishing narratives on “The Process.” Any writer interested in participating may contact THR with a pitch, or we’ll be glad to look over a submission in its entirety.

Word count: 1500 or thereabouts. Multi-media essays are encouraged.

Drafting is the struggle to write like yourself and read like someone else.

The “write like yourself” part sounds easy until you become a writer. You’ll find it takes years of chipping away at a block of granite to find the authentic writer-self within.

Then comes the hard part. If you write for an audience, you want to know if your work has the intended effect on that audience. At the revision stage, this means trying as much as possible to be someone else, or at least to read like someone else—not necessarily your ideal reader but a discerning one who is inclined to appreciate your best work, but not any of the sloppier efforts you’ve spewed forth in the past.

I have two strategies for this. One is to change the person who wrote the document; the other is to change the person who reads it.

To change the writer, you cheat a little. You try to make the document look like someone else wrote it. It’s a form of gamesmanship with your brain. If I wrote the document in Word, as I usually do, the first and easiest step is to print it out and read it on paper. Writers get a thrill from seeing their words take on physical dimension, and the tactile experience of reading them on paper offers just enough objectivity to see the work through new eyes.

Sadly, that objectivity is brief and requires more extreme measures to refresh it. The next step is to try a new font. Something tasteful and elegant that will clash with clumsy sentences. If I write the first draft in Times New Roman, I’ll try Garamond, Palatino, or Revival. I’ve written a couple of novels set in the nineteenth century, so at one point in the drafting process, I downloaded a nineteenth-century font and pretended I was reading a nineteenth-century author. I’d found an undiscovered manuscript by Mark Twain!

That worked, briefly.

Next, I’ll reformat the document to make it look like an already-published book (landscape, two columns, single-spaced). I’ll try to match the interior design of a book on my shelf—one by a favorite author.  Book formatting is one of my favorite techniques because it gives me a preview of what my work might look like when it’s published. Also, because one does not expect to see crappy writing in published books, the format lets me know that my book is not ready for publication.

How about another digital format? I’ll convert the Word doc into a Kindle file and send it to my Kindle library, which is easy to do with Word’s “Export” option (you can link it to your Kindle account, where it magically appears). Maybe I’ll put that Kindle on my nightstand and pick it up before bed like I’m reading someone else’s book that I’ve just downloaded. The downside? If it sucks, I may not sleep. I will, however, be anxious to get up early and revise the hell out of it.

Audiobooks, too. I don’t read my work aloud as some do, but I’ve experimented with Word’s “Read Aloud” feature to have the work read back to me—awkwardly, but okay. I can imagine making a recording and listening to it on a road trip, though if I’m driving, the consequences of anger or sudden despair might be deadly.

I’ve tried translating to other genres. For my first novel, I rewrote the entire draft as a screenplay before reconverting it to prose. This forced me to focus on structural matters and avoid the seduction of well-crafted sentences carrying me toward a plotless oblivion.

If I were fluent in a second language, I might try translating my own work into that language, but Duolingo says I’m not there yet. Someday.

All of these reformatting and translating techniques have one goal: to outpace the brain’s attempts to calcify the written word. You want to read it fresh—as though someone else wrote the words. And you have to keep tricking your brain to do so.

My second strategy is to change myself as a reader. Some writers use drugs or alcohol to accomplish this. That’s the quickest (and most desperate) way to change yourself. But editing while wasted is usually a wasted effort. Imbibing dulls my skills.

The surest way I know to become someone else is to let time pass. The future me has been changed by experience. The future me has forgotten at least some of what I wrote and why I wrote it. The future me has been reading and writing and is now, at least in theory, a better reader and writer.

At some point in the drafting process, I retype the entire manuscript from scratch. It comes easier the second time around. As I retype, I think, I am a different writer now; I’m a writer who has already written a novel remarkably like this one. A draft has been bequeathed to me, and because I’m so much more skilled than I used to be, it won’t be hard to improve upon. At least in theory.

I recently had the experience of rediscovering a novel draft I wrote fourteen years ago. In the years since I wrote the draft, I’d written a lot, including multiple novels, and read a lot, mostly good stuff. I’d had life experiences. Also, most of the cells in my body had been replaced twice over.

When I printed out and read over what the 2010 me had written, I was delighted to discover that the younger me was not only a pretty good writer, he’d tirelessly (even foolishly) revised as he wrote, so that the novel, even if not quite complete, had pleasant surprises at every turn. That 2010 me gifted the 2024 me a quality draft I could work with. Now I intend to honor the efforts of the 2010 me by finishing his novel. My revision isn’t simply a selfless tribute to the twice-vanished former me; I’m happy to steal from my younger self. I’ve dropped what I was working on to devote myself to this new-old novel, more energized than ever.

Why did I abandon the novel in the first place? I’m glad I don’t remember. If I’d stalled out for some reason, if I’d agonized over some plot problem, I’ve forgotten what it was. The present-day me is a little better at forgetting the many reasons not to write. Let’s leave it at that.