Aside from the nice promotional graphic that Harvard Science Talks used to promote my recent talk with bestselling science writer Leonard Mlodinow — which I really appreciate because it’s using a ten-year-old photo of me when I had a little more hair — I enjoyed talking with him about a topic near and dear to my heart: how we write.
Len — whom I’ve known since my L.A. Times days — talked about his new book, Emotional, but I also asked him about the writing process that he uses for all of his work, whether it’s a newspaper piece, an academic article, or one of his books. (Check out more information about Len’s new book here.)
What did he say that I liked so much that I’m writing about it here?
Len doesn’t believe in some of those old grammar and composition lessons that most of us learned in school. That makes me really happy —- the older I get, and the more I work on various projects, the less I care about the old rules anymore.
The one rule that annoys me (and Len) the most is the practice of using an outline.
Remember that one? Remember how your teacher made you fill out a long outline with Roman numerals, subheadings, supporting details etc before writing your classroom essay?
I totally understand why they taught us that way: They wanted to make sure we had a genuine compositional shape in our minds before we ever (in those days) put pen to paper. No teacher wants to grade a paper written by a 12- or 13-year-old in stream of consciousness.
But there’s a time—to get all evangelical for a minute—when, like St. Paul said, we need to put childish things away. Any seasoned writer will still plan out an essay or a book (of course), but the sequence and organization part should be more second nature and less like the training wheels on a bicycle. When I work with clients, that’s something I try to get at in order to help them: Sometimes writers are so worried about following an outline that it blocks them. They don’t realize that they have much more freedom to take their manuscript in whatever direction is calling to them.
I could go on, but I won’t—or maybe I will in a future blog item. For now, you’re welcome to enjoy watching/listening to my interview with Len Mlodinow here and hopefully it will prove useful on your own writer’s journey.