Developing the Writing Process: Cleaning the Litter Box, Constipation, and Other Metaphors

Most people don’t usually experience quiet moments of realization while cleaning out a cat’s litter box, but this is sort of how the writing and editing process goes:

Here I crouch, sifting through environmentally-friendly litter and scooping out poops. Several paces away, my handsome tuxedo derpface sits primly, tail curled around his hind legs, silently judging. After I’ve bagged the waste and gone to wash my hands, he’ll wander over, sniff around the corners of the box, and stick a paw inside to dig through the litter once again. It’s his way of saying he’s unsatisfied with my removal methods and would much rather complete the process himself.

At multiple points throughout my academic career, I have found myself hovering over the metaphorical litter box of my own writing. This process involves sifting through sentences, deleting entire paragraphs here, rearranging the topic and transitional sentences there, and then saving the remains to multiple files with variations of the name “working draft,” “redraft,” and “revisions.” Sometimes, passing the draft off to a supervisor — of the four-legged and bewhiskered or the two-legged and tenured kind — brings a certain sense of relief; an unwinding of the knots at the base of the neck, a long-deserved nap, and maybe a celebratory binge-watching of The Great British Bake-Off while eating lemon curd straight from the jar. Other times, it’s a week or two of anxiously avoiding Microsoft Word, OneNote pad or Google Docs all together until receiving the marked up draft with more words (litter) outside the box than remaining in.

Yet working, writing, and waiting do not exist as the only known states of being throughout this process. Personally, from undergraduate days to Ph.D. Candidacy, it has been necessary for this process to evolve. At one point, you may switch over from clay-based to corn-based litter, judging the annoying tracking out of the box a fair exchange for the health of your cat. At another point, you may exchange regular plastic bags for biodegradable bags, and move the box under a window, for better ventilation. Sometimes your cat puts on a number of pounds, and simply outgrows their previous box.

As an undergraduate student, I never worked through multiple drafts. I was (and still am, to be perfectly candid) the “edit as you go” type, who can agonize over a single sentence for far too long before allowing myself to move onto the next. This, when combined with an obstinate preference for writing in chronological order — meaning I must come up with a title before the opening sentence, and then the opening sentence before the thesis statement, only after which could follow each claim alphabetically, A through D or so, all rounded out by a proper conclusion — was formulaic and time-consuming to a fault, but for papers which ranged from seven to thirteen pages, could be done. This quickly becomes inadvisable at the graduate school level, when faced with the task of writing three to four different twenty-five-page seminar papers within a span of three weeks.

When writing, we does what we must.

This is not to encourage you to completely overhaul your writing style or methods of putting words on the page; as I soon discovered, I cannot write a graduate seminar paper the same way that I write a conference paper full of exciting theoretical what-ifs; I do not write a blog post the same way that I approach a dissertation chapter. Although the ideas may generate from the same noggin, the style and manner of articulation must develop in a way that suits the substance. Not only does this apply to wrestling with other scholars over argumentation, citation, and analytical intervention, but consider other genres of writing you have been asked to adapt, with or without instruction. A proposal for a travel grant may take you half an hour to draft, while trying to compose a letter of recommendation for a student may take twice that time, as you trawl through the thesaurus for alternate ways to say “a pleasure to have in class.”

We’ve all heard the usual metaphors, and inhaled advice of innumerable flavors: writing is a marathon, not a sprint; here is how you write like an architect and here is how you write like a gardener. If you dedicate yourself to writing a consistent 500 words per day, no matter the level of quality of those words, you will commit yourself to writing like Neil Gaiman, or that Ph.D. candidate who miraculously managed to finish their dissertation a year ahead of schedule. One of my favorite exchanges between individuals who write spells out the differences quite candidly:

I have not come to you with a list of how-to’s or to reiterate the differences between this type of writer or that type of writer. At one point or another, we have all felt like Sisyphus (or perhaps a dung beetle?) rolling a rock of our own making up the steep hill of multiple drafts. But whether you start your day with a fresh cup of coffee, the morning sunrise, and hammering out six hundred words, or find yourself dashing out of the bathroom mid-shower, suds and all, to jot down a phrase before it leaves your brain forever, it’s important to take a moment for self-realization.

This is your sandbox. Full of your words. After all, you are the one with opposable thumbs, the ability to write, and with thoughts in your head. If you won’t attend to these, in whatever fashion you deem appropriate, no one else will.

Get to writing, y’all.

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.