“It’s not that I’m so smart. It’s just that I stay with problems longer.” -Albert Einstein
When I work with speakers who are writing speech or presentation scripts, they often lament their lack of writing skill. Surely, they think, if they were just better writers, it wouldn’t be such a painful process. I wish I could tell them that is true, but it isn’t.
Writing well is a talent and a skill, but it’s more than that. Sometimes, it’s just the stubborn willingness to keep wrestling with your text until you wear the bastard down.
On “Mythbusters”, the TV program in which two geeks set out to empirically test the validity of various myths, idioms, viral videos and urban legends, the hosts once decided to test various ways of maintaining a straight and steady course while walking blindfolded.
Left to their own devices, they were shocked to find how quickly they veered wildly off course, despite their best efforts to walk in a straight line.
Writing can feel a lot like that. When I am hacking through the underbrush of sentence structure and word choice, it’s so easy to go off course. No matter how clear and straight my path feels, when I pause long enough to lift the blindfold and peek at the goal, I often find myself going in the completely wrong direction.
It’s depressing to realize how much of my own writing I have thrown away over the years, but that’s part of the process. So I backtrack and delete, and think hard again about what I am trying to say.
Usually, somewhere in all that wasted verbiage, I’ll find just a few lines that point in the right direction or hold a tiny kernel of the truth of what I am trying to say. It may not be much, but it’s something to build on.
So I take a fresh bearing on my goal, put my head down and stagger on, until the next time I look up to realize I have gone off course again. Each time the salvageable core of my words grows a bit larger, my path a little straighter, the goal a little clearer in my mind.
But it’s almost never easy. Like most things in life, talent and skill help, but stubborn determination and a willingness to work hard are what lead most often to success.
It never really gets easier either, because as you become more sure-footed, your goals and purposes invariably get more ambitious and once again you find yourself hacking through the brush.
But that’s OK. Keep your head down and keep hacking. In time, your path will emerge from the brambles, and as you clear and widen it, it will come to seem as if the course was obvious.
It was there all along, you just couldn’t see it through the brush.
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