I’ve written four articles using The Spiral Method, and I’ve been delightfully surprised every time.

I first used The Spiral Method in January, to write the zeroth draft that would become “Strategies for Stability.” I spiraled for a few minutes, and was amazed at quickly The Spiral Method helps me to move my ideas out of my head and onto paper. (Yes, I write my zeroth drafts on paper.) I was also surprised to learn how much material I have floating around in my head behind each of the nuggets I want to write about.

I spent several hours revising. When I was done, I got my next surprise: The nugget that I originally wanted to write about — “People change in order to remain the same.” — was nowhere to be found in the finished article. I’d had that thought in my nugget file for years. Yet while I was spiraling I stumbled onto a question that I wasn’t able to answer, and now I’m no longer sure I believe that initial claim. Somehow, in spiraling and revising, I took the article somewhere I hadn’t foreseen when I started. I was tickled by that.

I next used The Spiral Method for “Tests for Listening.” Before I sat down to write I knew the four “listening tests” that I wanted to write about. I guessed that I’d write about a hundred words about each, plus an introduction and conclusion — maybe 500 words for the whole article. I spiraled on each listening test, revised the zeroth draft into a publishable article, and — surprise! — 1000 words! Who knew I had that much to say? I checked it twice to make sure I hadn’t inserted lots of fluff. Nope.

I worried that 1000 words is a little long for a blog entry. But that’s what it came to, so that’s what I published. It wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t imagine how to write a 1000 word article. Now I may have a hard time keeping my articles short! I guess that’s progress.

When I sat down last week for my third Spiral Writing session, I thought I knew what I wanted to write about: Needs are more important than wants. I’ve had that idea in my nugget file for years, and finally wanted to write about it. But what I wrote at the top of the page was, “Needs come from wants.” Similar, but not the same. This zeroth draft eventually led to “Testing Needs and Wants.” When the article was done, I noticed once again that not only was the original nugget missing, I was no longer sure I believed it. The Spiral Method, it seems, is a great way to destroy the ideas I’ve loved for years!

As I was revising “Testing Needs and Wants,” I noticed that the article included lots of background material about the structure of values. Too much. It distracted from the distinctions I really wanted to highlight between needs and wants. So I sliced the background stuff into an article on its own, “The Structure of Values.” What a lovely side-effect of writing the needs and wants article! I’d known for months that I would eventually write an article about the structure of values, and here it was.

So this one Spiral Method writing session led to two full articles, each bordering on “too long for blogland” — 2000 words in total. I’m a little nervous about spiraling again. I’m having visions of accidentally unleashing The Blog that Ate Manhattan. (But I’m safe here in Sacramento. I think.)

That’s what I’ve learned so far. The Spiral Method helps me to put my ideas onto paper more quickly and with greater ease than I thought possible. It encourages me to question my ideas and create new ones that I like even better. And it gives me confidence that I have plenty to say.

One night in late December, as I was falling asleep, I had a thought about how to flesh out ideas for articles. I sat up, grabbed a pen and an index card from the stack I keep next to the bed, and wrote:

1. Write the nugget.
2. Then write the implications of the nugget.
3. Then support the nugget.

I was excited about this idea, because though I am quite good at inventing nuggets — the central claims that make me want to write articles in the first place — I struggle with the rest of the writing process, the process of growing a nugget into an article worth writing. I keep forgetting the simple principles that every other author surely knows: Say why this claim is worth reading, and justify the claim. Writing those two simple principles gave me a way to remember, and a way to build articles from nuggets.

The next night, as I was falling asleep, I refined the previous night’s thought:

1. Write the nugget.
2. Write any questions I want to ask about what I have written so far.
3. Answer one question. Return to step 2.

This new version generalizes on the first. The earlier version says to ask and answer two questions: So what? and What makes you so sure? The new version extends that to any question, giving me even more ways to build the article. I liked this new version even better.

On the third night, as I was falling asleep, I refined again, resulting in a process that I call The Spiral Method for Writing Zeroth Drafts:

1. Write the nugget.
2. Write any questions I want to ask about what I have written so far.
3. Select the question that I have the most energy for answering, and answer it. Return to step 2.
4. Stop when I’ve answered all of the questions, or when I have little energy to answer any of the unanswered questions.

I liked this version better still, especially the focus on energy as the key criterion for what to write and when to stop. Focusing on energy ensures that each bit I write not only supports the central idea, but also adds some zing.

So far, I’ve used the Spiral Method three times. Each time, I created enough material for a full article (or two!) in about 30 minutes. Next came hours of editing to shape each zeroth draft into publishable form. The result: four articles and lots of surprises.

Several days after I created the Spiral Method I realized that I’d been inspired by Mark Forster’s process for growing an article, which I’d learned about through Keith Ray’s blog entry of November 30. To grow an article, Mark writes a single sentence, then revises it until the article is done.

As you can see, both Mark’s approach and mine start with a core idea and build outward. The Spiral Method has a little more structure than Marks approach, and I find that I need that additional bit of structure. Alternating between questions and answers, using my energy as a guide, keeps my ideas flowing, while providing lots of opportunity for discovery and surprise.

Though I developed the Spiral Method for myself, I’d be delighted to find that it works for you, too. I’d be even more delighted to learn how you’re using it.

At the AYE conference last week, I attended Johanna Rothman‘s and Naomi Karten‘s excellent writing workshop. During the workshop, I mentioned some of my favorite books about writing. Several people asked me to post a list of books that I’ve found helpful. Here’s the list.

First, here are the books that have helped me the most.

Being a Writer by Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff.

“The two main skills in writing are making a mess and cleaning up the mess.”
[Full Review]

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.

How our choices of words, and our choices for arranging words, affect readers. How to revise your writing to better fit those expectations and make your writing clearer and more coherent.
[Full Review]

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

“Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it.”
[Full Review]

Writing from the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo.

“All good writing starts from where you are now.”
[Full Review]

Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico.

Centers on clustering, a technique for quickly making explicit the ideas and associations we have about a topic.
[Full Review]

Writing with Power by Peter Elbow.

Three important themes for writing: freewriting, energy, and experience.
[Full Review]

I’ve also found the following books very helpful.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan.

Giving yourself permission and confidence to be fully creative.

Accidental Genius by Mark Levy.

Writing as a way to solve problems.

Adios, Strunk and White by Gary and Glynis Hoffman.

Fun book with lots of tips from improving your writing style.

The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.

“If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.”

The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams.

How to make a claim and support it.

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

A morbidly hilarious book about grammar.

Edit Yourself by Bruce Ross-Larson.

A zillion examples of troublesome words, phrases, and patterns, with suggestions for improving each.

Effective Writing by Bruce Ross-Larson.

How to improve sentences, paragraphs, and whole pieces. Three books in one.

The Elements of Nonsexist Usage by Val Dumond.

Tips for gender-inclusive and gender-neutral writing.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White.

A classic. Concise and useful.

The New Well-Tempered Sentence by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

A zany and delightful book about punctuation.

One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher.

“If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.”

On Writing Well by William Zinsser.

“The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.”

Rhetorical Grammar by Martha Kolln.

“The purpose here is … to help you understand the structure of sentences so that when you write you will understand the choices that are available to you — and the effect of those choices on your reader.”

Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg.

Expands on the ideas in Writing Down the Bones. Wild Mind includes more exercises than her earlier book.

The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler.

Creating characters and stories based on enduring mythic themes.

You Don’t Have to Write a Book! by Hal and Sidra Stone.

A painfully funny book about a thousand and one ways to make sure you never write a book. I can add a thousand-and-second way from my own experience: before writing your book, read all of these books about writing.

Gabriele Rico’s Writing the Natural Way centers on clustering, a technique for quickly making explicit the ideas and associations we have about a topic:

To create a cluster, you begin with a nucleus word, circled, on a fresh page. Now you simply let go and begin to flow with any current of connections that come into your head. Write these down rapidly, each in its own circle, radiating outward from the center in any direction they want to go. Connect each new word or phrase with a line to the preceding circle. When something new and different strikes you, begin again at the central nucleus and radiate outward until those associations are exhausted.

Clustering, like freewriting or writing practice, is another technique I use frequently to move ideas out of my head and onto paper. Often I will “cluster” about a topic, then freewrite based on the cluster I’ve created.

Early in Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within, Dennis Palumbo says, “All good writing starts from where you are now.” What if “where I am now” is filled with loneliness, doubt, fear of rejection, and writer’s block? Palumbo says that we can use those feelings to serve our writing:

Invariably, once a writer fully experiences and integrates the lessons a block has to teach, his or her work deepens in richness, emotional truth, and, often, personal relevancy. … You can get there from here, not despite your writer’s block, but because of it. It means you’re ready — or, probably, more than ready — to make that important next step in your writing. [Emphasis mine]

How can we benefit from writer’s block? By writing about it!

If you’re frustrated at being stuck, or angry at yourself for your artistic limitations, write about that, as a journal entry, pure stream of consciousness.

I was feeling stuck as I was writing “Untangling Communication” for STQE Magazine (now called Better Software Magazine). I wanted to write about the “acceptance” step of the Ingredients of an Interaction, but I was also fearful. The acceptance step is not only about feelings, but about how we feel about our feelings! I’m going to write about a touchy-feelie subject like that? In a technical magazine!?

I had been reading Writing from the Inside Out around that time, and decided to write about my fears. In the process I discovered what, for me, was the most important point in that article: “The most powerful thing I can do to keep my communications straight, and to untangle them when they get tangled, is to accept what I feel.”

Palumbo also writes about the power of personal details:

[I]t’s one of the paradoxes of writing that the more particular and personal a detail in character or story, the more powerfully its impact generalizes out to the audience.

For an example of how personal details connect with other people, see Alan Francis’s reply to my recent, personal article about defensiveness.

This quote summarizes the book nicely:

If, as I’ve argued throughout this book, you are enough, then wherever you’re at, moment to moment, becomes the crucible out of which your writing flows. Accessing this subjective space, and wedding its range of colors with craft and perseverance, is the writer’s daily job.

Near the end of Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg says, “Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it.” Much of this book is about what happens inside us as writers, and how to bring what’s inside into our writing. Woven throughout are simple, powerful exercises for writing and for exploring ourselves as writers.

Goldberg offers five rules for writing practice (similar to what Peter Elbow calls “freewriting“):

1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don’t cross out.
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Go for the jugular.

As Goldberg says, it’s important to adhere to these rules, because:

[T]he aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, and not what it thinks it should see or feel.

Of all the books in my writing library, Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, helped me to make the biggest leap in the quality of my writing. Williams focuses on how our choices of words, and our choices for arranging our words, affect readers. One key idea is that readers they expect to find certain kinds of information in specific places, and that if we revise our writing to better fit those expectations, our writing will be clearer and more coherent.

For example, readers expect sentences to begin with familiar information, and to end with information that is newer. Also, readers look to the ends of phrases and sentences for information that is more significant. So we can make our writing clearer by shifting familiar, less important information to the beginnings of our sentences, and shifting newer, more important information to the ends. By applying this one tip, I improved both my writing and my confidence that I can write well.

Style and Elbow and Belanoff’s Being a Writer are my two favorite books about writing. While Being a Writer focuses on the writing process, Style focuses on structure and content. The techniques I learned from each book gave me not only the skill to write, but also the confidence to write.

Williams has also written Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, a shorter version of Style that makes a handy reference book.

Being a Writer, by Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, is a gold mine of activities and assignments for exploring variations on your writing process.

One activity introduces “Sondra Perl’s Composing Guidelines” (available online in an excerpt from an earlier version of Being a Writer). Perl’s guidelines, guide you to explore your thoughts by focusing on a number of aspects one at a time. What draws my attention right now? What do I know about this topic? What makes this topic interesting to me? What’s missing? Moving back and forth from one focus to another helps you to explore your topic both broadly and deeply.

Another activity is “The Loop Process.” First you freewrite for ten minutes, letting your thoughts go wherever they will. Then you revise what you’ve written, shaping it and focusing it toward your topic and audience. Then you loop again and again, repeatedly diverging and converging. The authors offer several strategies for diverging during freewriting:

• Simply write whatever comes to mind, your first thoughts.
• Quickly list the moments or situations that somehow seem connected to the topic, or the stories or sequences of events that come to mind, or the people who seem central to the topic. Then choose one and write about it for five or ten minutes.
• Write a dialogue about the topic.
• Write as if you are another author, or as if you are writing to a different audience, or as if you are writing at another time and place.
• Write lies about the topic, or errors (statements that are almost right — tempting, but wrong), or “sayings” (real or invented) about the topic.

Elbow and Belanoff recommend keeping a process journal. After a writing session, journal about what you are experiencing and learning in your writing process. What happened as you wrote? What worked well? What was difficult? What led to the difficulty? How did you feel as you were writing? Process writing can be especially helpful, the authors say, “if you do it after two sessions — especially two sessions on the same piece — and compare what happened.”

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Being a Writer. There is plenty more, including ideas about freewriting, clustering, writing collaboratively, giving and receiving feedback, and the open-ended writing process. And that’s just the first section, on “Creativity and the Writing Process.” Other sections cover revising, researching, interviewing, and persuading and arguing.

My favorite quote from the book (hidden in a writing exercise on page 47): “The two main skills in writing are making a mess and cleaning up the mess.”

Being a Writer and Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace are my two favorite books about writing. While Style focuses on structure and content, Being a Writer focuses on the writing process. The techniques I learned from each book gave me not only the skill to write, but also the confidence to write.

I learned three important themes from Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power: freewriting, energy, and experience. Elbow describes freewriting:

Freewriting is the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all-around practice in writing that I know. To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes.

You can see that freewriting is a simple idea. It is also powerful. When I write without stopping, I don’t have time to pay attention to my inner critic. I almost always delve past my surface thoughts (the ones it’s “okay” to write about), and find ideas that surprise me in their energy, clarity, and “truth.” Much of what I write while freewriting is junk (as I later allow my inner critic to tell me). But I can find a single idea that has energy, I’ve spent those ten minutes well.

Freewriting is one way to create energy in my writing. Another is revising: Discard any word, sentence, or paragraph that isn’t carrying its weight. As Elbow says, “Every word you throw away means another unit of energy preserved.”

About experience, Elbow says:

If you want readers to breathe life into your reading so that they get a powerful experience from it, then you must breathe experience into your words as you write. I don’t know why it should be the case that if you experience what you are writing about — if you go to the bamboo — it increases the chances of the reader’s experiencing the bamboo. But that’s the way it seems to work.

I’ve rescued more than one piece of limp writing by setting it aside, closing my eyes and revisiting the experiences that made me want to write the piece in the first place, and writing from that experience. In some cases I fold the new writing — which always has more energy — into the original piece. In most cases, I throw the original piece away and continue with the new.

Last Wednesday I was in a book store at the airport in Minneapolis, looking for something to read. I saw Dan Brown’s Deception Point on the shelf. I’d recently read his earlier book Angels & Demons, and was still feeling annoyed at an underhanded writing trick that Brown had used repeatedly. But I’d had fun reading Angels & Demons despite the overused writing trick, and despite the number of times Brown’s characters (all described as brilliant) did boneheaded things. “Well,” I thought, “maybe Brown learned how to create suspense without trickery.” No such luck. The underhanded writing trick showed up on the second page of the prologue. Here’s an example of the trick from later in the book (at this point in the story, Corky, Rachel, and Tolland are on a ship, being chased by a helicopter full of bad guys):

At the far end of the decking below, a small powerboat was moored. Corky ran toward it.

Rachel stared. Outrun a helicopter in a motorboat?

“It has a radio,” Tolland said. “And if we can get far enough away from the helicopter’s jamming…”

Rachel did not hear another word he said. She had just spied something that made her blood run cold. “Too late,” she croaked, extending a trembling finger. We’re finished…

Here’s my problem. If we know what Rachel is thinking throughout this scene, how come we don’t know what she sees that makes her blood run cold? What point of view is the author using here? There’s a common fictional viewpoint called third-person-limited, in which the author makes us privy to the thoughts and feelings of one character in a scene. Brown uses third-person-limited point of view most of the time. But at the most crucial points, he swindles us by switching momentarily to some other point of view, in which we are privy to the character’s private response to seeing or hearing something, but we aren’t privy to what they are responding to!

I chose the snippet above not because it is the most egregious example, but because it was short enough to quote without lots of context. In both Deception Point and Angels & Demons, this point-of-view switch seems to be Brown’s key trick for creating suspense. I guess we’re supposed to think, “Gosh, I wonder what Rachel just saw! It must be horrifying! Better keep reading!”

I think this point-of-view switch is underhanded, a swindle. We’re told everything that the character knows except the crucial information. Maybe there’s a name for this kind of point-of-view. I call it third-person-underhanded.

The day I bought Angels & Demons, I also bought the audio version of The Da Vinci Code. I’m cringing at the thought of listening to it, even though it’s enormously popular. Maybe Brown has learned other ways to create suspense.