There is an interesting little 2025 book by Elizabeth McCracken titled A Long Game: Notes on writing fiction. It is organized into ten untitled chapters, and has a total of 280 brief essays. A Google Books preview covers just the first thirteen pages. There is a detailed index. I quote three essays.
Her third essay describes the book:
“This is a book that dispenses advice, composed by a writer of fiction. As with any such book or craft talk or social media rant or workshop critique, a lot of it is hogwash. I’m talking to myself. That’s all writers really do. Give speeches to the mirror, whisper into a shell on the beach, find a stranger in a dive bar. Teach.
Eventually the odd writer is driven to write a book about writing. Craft books, these volumes are called: chipper, cheerleaderish, generally with an encouraging second-person narrator meant to make the whole exhausting process of writing a book seem possible. You can do it!
It’s a reasonable stance: you’ll never stand on the winner’s podium if you can’t get off the starting block.
But I don’t know if you can write a book. I don’t know if I can write a book. I don’t know if I can write this book, though over the past thirty years I’ve published four novels, three collections of short stories, and a memoir, and have written several more unpublished books. (How many? We won’t speak of that yet.) Everything that I have ever believed was true and immutable about my work has changed. Only certain obsessions remain. A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure.”
The forty-fifth essay describes outlining, and, of course, also applies to the process of writing a speech:
“Proponents of outlining like every-day writers, like to recommend the process to everyone. They are talking to themselves, announcing how their own brains work, As for me, I have tried outlining before a project, and it looks like this:
I. The Waxmans arrive in Iowa.
A. Family unhappiness.
1. The loss of furniture.
i. That buffet, a wedding gift, was an act of revenge.
a) List of Great-Grandmother Waxman’s grudges.
… until the outline threatens to slant around the back of the page.
There’s a wonderful moment while writing a book when, after swimming alone in the ocean of your dream-world, you can sense it becoming actual, you can imagine how another person might navigate it by the landmarks you have installed, but you don’t want to arrive at that shore too soon. For some people, outlining is a form of thought: free from sentences and paragraphs, they can make meaningful decisions about their books. The outline prolongs the dream. Others of us dream in sentences only. We dream as we draft. Nothing is possible. (I am talking to myself) without language. I figure things out. I write with the abandon of a tourist. What interests me at first might bore me later. That’s all right.
No process is wrong that leads to a first draft of a book.”
Her eighty-ninth essay also applies to rehearsing a speech:
“I read my work aloud for a number of reasons, only some of which have to do with vanity. When I write, I hear language, but it’s not direct. Sonic, but not phonetic, a kind of burble that I find beautiful. Like swimming, while nearby a band plays loud music: I sense the sound, and it’s part of the experience, but not the entirety. Notes, not nuances. When I read aloud, I hear everything: accidental rhymes and repetitions, sentences that don’t make sense, five sentences in a row that sound alike, inconsistencies and unparallel constructions. Using my literal voice puts me back in the work as opposed to above it, as happens when I read in my head. If I realize that I’ve stopped reading aloud, it’s because my mouth knows the work is not so good: unclear, listless, unworthy of being declaimed. I read aloud to show off, but to myself. I’d be horrified if anyone could hear me.”
The writer typing was adapted from an image at OpenClipArt.
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