On Improvisation and Pace
When I was a teen, I was an odd kid who listened to more jazz than pop music. I was a third-generation jazz fan, so I came by it honestly, and I also grew up in a place, Berkeley, California, which had a great jazz tradition. There were several jazz stations on public radio, so you didn’t have to bother with commercials, and you could hear jazz at any hour of the day or night. And because they played so much jazz to a sophisticated audience, they played avant-garde music, not just the most familiar jazz recordings.
But the real reason I was into jazz was that the Berkeley public schools had a terrific jazz program, and Berkeley High School’s jazz band had been winning gold medals in major jazz competitions since the 1970s. I was not a very good trumpeter. But I learned from jazz the art of improvisation, and I try to bring it to my writing.
Writing is a creative act, without doubt, but it can also be an improvisational one. It takes a lot of practice, of course, but the idea that writing must be agonizingly difficult or slow is just an idea, and not a very good one. It takes practice to hone your skills, but when you sit down to write it can flow, particularly if you do not have a preconceived idea that you can only write a very small amount every day.
I have found that the first way I put words down is often the best way. It has the most movement and life. I think there is a connection between the pace at which you write and the pace at which your writing will be read. When you can write quickly, your writing becomes an improvisational act. The way you write and what you write becomes influenced by your mood, your wakefulness, and all the imagery that you put into your brain in the course of your life—vistas, films, poetry, art, and the day-to-day of life—gardening, farmers’ markets, cooking, raising kids, or whatever inspires you and feeds your soul.
To say that I strive for an improvisational writing style does not mean that I lack a plan or an organizational system. Far from it. When I was starting out, everything I wrote had an outline. Now, I tend to keep that outline in my head, but I can do so without the story becoming a jagged mess. In fact, having a strong organizational system helps you to be freer in assembling the actual words and sentences that make up your text.
A good way to start improvising in your writing is to trick yourself into writing freely by prewriting and brainstorming, with the rule being that you shut off the editor in your head, the rate-limiting voice that constantly critiques or corrects your writing, and instead tell yourself that you are just going to riff on whatever comes into your head, whether that is statements, questions, or sections of text. Set a timer of, say, twenty minutes and see what comes out.
This kind of writing is low-stakes and hence less emotionally freighted than writing your text itself. It can also teach you to increase the pace of your writing. You may love your prewriting, or you may hate it, but the point is not to polish this writing but to get ideas and sentences down on paper or screen—I always used to do this freehand, but now I am just as comfortable writing on my computer.
Many writers will object, saying they “have” to write slowly. Or that writing is an arduous and painful act. It doesn’t have to be, however. You can retrain your brain and your fingers to write with pace just as you can train your feet to dance salsa or tango, if you only believe in your ability to do so, and put in the work to get there.
With practice, your pace of writing can increase to the point that you begin to trust the choices you make when you sequence one word after the other. You will clean it up later—or, alternatively, hire an editor to do so. But I try to line out my words as quickly as possible, like a fresco painter painting on fresh stucco who must paint before the wall dries.
When you write improvisationally, your writing has a fresh character that wants to be read. It becomes engaging for your readers rather than a long, painful slog. If you did not have fun writing a text, why would your readers enjoy reading it? Good jazz musicians spend hours upon hours “in the woodshed,” honing their craft, running scales, studying, practicing, and playing along to records. But the performance itself is always improvisational, created fresh in the moment.
Similarly, woodshedding for a writer is all the practice, reading, and studying you do for years before you start to write. Even if you don’t remember all those words, they live in the synapses of your brain somewhere, like dormant seeds just waiting for the rains to come. But the writing can flow like the rain itself, can collect in pools and wallows, can run like a stream or a river. When it does, the key thing is not to dam it up but to let it roll. You can always edit later. But it is perfectly okay to honor the choices you made in the first pass, when your writing is freest and most vital, when what you put down was at its most improvisational. Even if you rewrite a dozen times, you can honor the way you wrote at the first pass and lean into the art of writing improvisationally.
