The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well. Tom Goldstein
George Gopen, of Duke University, selects a strategy to match the document he is drafting. For a letter, he turns on his computer and sits down. “For an article or a book chapter,” he says, “I do a great deal of putting the rest of my life in order (make the phone calls, prepare the diet Coke, put on the music, etc.), do a great deal of pacing about, get intensely tense, and hope to sit down.”
In their sometimes zany approaches to getting words on paper, lawyers join a distinguished group of writers. Samuel Johnson needed a “purring cat, orange peel and plenty of tea.” Ernest Hemingway stood while writing, typewriter and reading board chest high opposite him. For years, Raymond Carver worked at his kitchen table, a library carrel, or in his car. In Thinking through Writing, Susan R. Horton compiled a splendid list of the idiosyncrasies of famous authors: Balzac wrote only at night; Emile Zola worked only in the daytime but drew the blinds because he could not write without artificial light; and Carlyle craved an atmosphere without sound. For inspiration, Schiller needed the scent of rotting apples, Stephen Spender insisted on tea, and W. H. Auden relied on coffee and tobacco. Only black ink would do for Kipling. Malcolm Lowry stood up, leaned his knuckles against a lectern, and dictated his text to his wife.1
The point of these stories is that there is no one correct way to begin. The most dangerous approach is not to begin at all. Procrastination may be the surest sign that you have not worked through what you wish to say. It is better just to plunge in. Yield to your quirks.
If you are unable to take the plunge, you need to figure out why. Is your block psychological or is it conceptual? A psychological block is usually the result of having too many choices or being too much of a perfectionist. A conceptual block is usually a sign of inadequate preparation.
V. A. Howard and J. H. Barton, two educational researchers at Harvard, identify the single greatest block to getting started: “the self-defeating quest to get it right the first time.”2 Establishing an unrealistic goal for a first draft can paralyze your mind. Lower your standards— temporarily. Arrange your writing schedule so that you know you can write a rough first draft and have enough time to turn it into a finished product. That will reduce the pressure on you as you start to compose.
If you still feel blocked—and you know it is psychological, not conceptual—change something about your habits: If you usually write at midday, write in the morning. If you usually dictate or write longhand, try typing. If you usually write at your desk, move to a conference room or to a library. Or try jotting down thoughts and pieces of sentences on the fly, using scraps of paper or a small pad, or keep a miniature tape recorder with you at all times. You can also trick yourself into getting started by breaking the task into small pieces and setting intermediate deadlines. Do not get bogged down in writing the introductory paragraphs—many writers leave these for last. Jump in wherever you feel most comfortable.
Donald Murray, a columnist at the Boston Globe who is also a journalism professor and an elder statesman among newsroom writing coaches, offers four more tips:3
Pretend you are writing a letter. “Many writers, including Tom Wolfe,” Murray says, “have fooled themselves into writing by starting the first draft ‘Dear…’”
Write the end first. “This is a technique used by John McPhee and other writers,” according to Murray. If you can't start at the beginning, start at the end, Murray advises: “Once you know where you are going, you may see how to get there.”
Read a fine piece of prose. “One writer friend reads the King James Version of the Bible when he gets stuck,” Murray recalls. “It is amazing how stimulating the flow of fine language can be to the writer.”
Write every day. Nulla dies sine linea (Never a day without writing), a saying attributed to both Horace and Pliny, “hung over Anthony Trollope's writing desk, John Updike's and mine,” notes Murray. He recommends exercising the writing muscle every day, so that writing becomes “a normal, not an abnormal form of behavior.”
The lawyer who procrastinates at the start may be resisting the hard work of articulating thought. The lawyer who is blocked in the middle of a writing assignment or near the conclusion may have the will to continue but not the facts. If you find that your power to compose suddenly wanes, that you are spinning out aimless and meaningless sentences, or that you are repeating yourself, you may have exhausted your knowledge of the subject. You may need to collect some additional information before you can resume writing.
But interrupting the act of composing should be your last resort. Do not put your draft down until you are sure that the block is conceptual, not psychological. Try writing yourself a memorandum that addresses the problem you are facing: “I have reached an impasse here because I can't figure out how to go from this point to that one. Perhaps if I…” The change of tone might reinvigorate your thinking or help you identify which information you need.
If writing yourself a memorandum does not work, the block might be caused by fatigue; a brief rest could provide the cure. Or you might be bored; a change of topic might refresh your capacity to think. Instead of finishing the section that has you stuck, move on. Ignore the unsolved problem and tackle the next one; in the meantime, a solution may sneak up on you. Or copy over a passage you've already written. “Many times,” Donald Murray says, “it helps, when stuck in the middle of a piece, to copy over a part of the writing that has gone well. This helps you recover the voice and flow.”
If nothing works, you're through for the day. Sleep on it.
5 THE MECHANICS OFGETTING IT DOWN
FROM QUILL PENS TO COMPUTERS
The first machine for writing, the typewriter, came on the market in the United States in the 1870s; the second machine, the personal computer, arrived a century later. Each provoked hallelujahs in some quarters and criticism in others. The comparison is instructive, for each sparked a revolution not merely in the mechanics of composition but in the content of the documents produced.
Businessmen were initially suspicious of typewriters, but they were soon won over by the endorsements of such luminaries as Mark Twain, the first author to send his publisher a typewritten manuscript (Tom Sawyer), and Lloyd George, a prominent lawyer who had learned to type during his apprenticeship and who later became the prime minister of Britain. (At that time, most secretaries were male, and clerical work was part of a legal apprenticeship.) Still, businessmen grumbled that typists, all of whom hunted for and pecked at keys with two or three or four fingers, were no faster than an accomplished office stenographer writing in longhand. Their prayers were answered in 1888, when Frank E. McGurrin, a federal court stenographer in Salt Lake City, demonstrated his system for using all ten fingers and not looking at the keyboard. In a widely publicized contest, McGurrin was judged the fastest typist in the world, and touch typing was born.1
Once the typewriter relieved businesses of the tedium and expense of handwriting, “verbosity was within the reach of everyone, especially lawyers,” noted David Mellinkoff, the chronicler of the use and misuse of law language, in a decidedly curmudgeonly mood in his pioneering 1963 book, The Language of the Law. Producing words on a typewriter, he added, was “so fast, so effortless, that one inclines to lavishness, and forgetfulness.”2 And some inclined to composing reams of paper. Distressed by a 284-page brief, New York Court of Appeals Judge Matthew Jasen in 1975 rebuked the writers from the bench: “In recent years, we have witnessed great technological advances in the methods of reproduction of the written word. Too often this progress is merely viewed as a license to substitute volume for logic in an apparent attempt to overwhelm the courts, as though quantity, and not quality, was the virtue to be extolled.” Jasen cited with approval a 1902 court decision that noted that prolixity was seldom seen when “every lawyer wrote his points with a pen.”3
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