When I do school visits and teachers ask me about process and I say for example that when my editor gets a first draft that’s probably my fifth draft and the kid’s eyes go wide and I say writing is rewriting and they look around at their teachers like oh, you haven’t been lying to me. And I say it’s rewriting, it’s rewriting because you want to get the flow of it down first.
And I tell them I say when I’m writing I’m not thinking about subject-verb agreement, parallelism, or spelling even. I said, in part, because when I was younger I paid attention and I did what my teachers told me to do and I listened to, when I was younger I was also taught grammar. And I had teachers who marked off, who didn’t give you an A for a good idea. Who took points off if your grammar and your spelling were in trouble.
And so I said so a lot of times I don’t consciously think about subject-verb agreement. I say, “but there are times I know there are words like concurrent, I’m like two C’s, two R’s, I don’t know but I’ll figure that out later.” So first of all, you want to get your soul, your passion out on paper. And then it’s like sculpting. Then you refine it and you say oh this is repetitive or I need a stronger transition. I think the great thing for writers is “TK”.
You know it’s a symbol they use for “to come” for some reason, they say it’s because the only consonant cluster that doesn’t appear in an English word. So if I mapped writing a first paragraph and I know where I want to go to a second one but I don’t have the transition I put “TK transition” and I move on. Some writers have to get everything perfect as they go, I’m the type of writer that can go through and say okay this is fuzzy, TK it, move on, it’ll come to you later.