Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

There are various techniques to start a piece of writing. One involves copying the words of another writer for a sentence or two until your brain warms and your own words flow. I think of those words as writing seeds.

Staring at the screen with the little cursor bar blinking with a frequency that someone at Microsoft knew was the most irritating Hertz for frustrated writers. Okay, I know the subject matter I am about to describe, but the first sentence or two, what are they? What are they? What are they?

I was writing parts of a proposal at work this last week and I was stuck. Pause. Reflect. Pause again. Reflect some more, but still nothing on the screen. Then it hit me. Writing seeds or page starters or ticklers or some title for what I was about to do. I grabbed a paper I had recently read on the technology concerning the technology we were proposing. Scanning a bit, there it is, that paragraph. I typed the first sentence of the paragraph verbatim. I paraphrased the second sentence of the paragraph. I took off from there and didn’t stop typing words into the document for an hour. Done.

I first learned this technique when in graduate school. Dr. Richard Conners I and were writing an academic paper. We knew the subject matter and basically how we were to describe it, but we were stuck at the first page. I say we, but I was the graduate student and responsible for writing the entire first draft. Dr. Conners. “Wait a minute,” he told me. He then reached into his bookcase and pulled an academic journal, thumbed through the pages, and returned, “Here. Let’s use this one.” He was pointing to a paper that had a similar form to the one we were to write. “Copy this first paragraph and use it as our first paragraph.” I protested mildly about plagiarism and such. “We’ll change it later,” he said, “but copy this to get us started.”

I used the technique several times during the 25 years between that day in graduate school and last week at work. I was re-taught the technique on several other occasions. It was featured in one of my favorite movies “Finding Forrester.” Sean Connery pushed it on Jamal Wallace. Connery, however, didn’t tell him the entire technique about going back and editing to avoid plagiarism. That was one of the major events in the movie. Ooops, a plot spoiler.

I don’t know if there is a name for this technique. I think of it as “writing seeds” or “seeds to help you start writing something that you can’t seem to start on your own.” “Writing seeds” is shorter and easier to remember.

So, if you are stuck at the beginning. One technique, yes there are others, is to type someone else’s words from some other place. Copy a sentence or two or an entire paragraph. Your fingers will be moving, your brain will be warming, and before you know it you are writing on your own. Please remember to go back and edit or attribute the words to the original author. Cheating? I think not. What more tribute can a write give to another writer than to read and use their words?