SPECIAL EDITION FOR NEW BAR MEMBERS

How I Write

by James W. McElhaney

Writing justifies brushing almost everything else aside. The freedom it gives is exhilarating. But with it comes the price of actually producing the piece. If you are going to do it more than once or twice, you have to have a system-a method that makes the most of your freedom. Here is mine.

Write first, research second.

"Hold on," you say, "you've got that backwards." Nope. If you don't know anything about your topic, then of course you've got to do the research first. But if you don't know anything about your topic, you probably shouldn't write the article. If you know the subject, you can start writing and later do research to fill in the holes as you go.

How you start writing makes all the difference.

Write down every point you want to make before you try to organize your thoughts. I still do this for every piece I write. I make a list of everything I want to say. I call it "Ideas Not in Order" so I won't worry about how I'm going to put it together. I just concentrate on listing every idea that the topic deserves.

You are brainstorming, and you have to understand what that means. You are writing down every idea you have on the subject, as fast as you can. At first, every thought brings up three or four others, and you are in a state of manic productivity. As you go on, you find you are listing the more important ideas three or four times, using different words.

That's okay. Keep on writing everything down. At this point there are no good ideas or bad ideas-there are just ideas. If you reject something now because it's a bad idea, you will cut off the train of thought that might have led to a new insight or a telling argument.

When you can't think of anything else, read through what you've got. Cull through your list, rejecting the points you don't like, setting aside the good ideas that just don't fit. But don't actually throw the first list away. You will be surprised to see how often you can write about why some suggestion is a bad idea.

Now write an outline that covers every point that's left on your list. Don't take a lot of time, because this is not an outline of your article-it's only a logical organization of what's going into your article.

Then why do it?

Because it lets you see what you've got and what is missing. It is a simple method that will let you look at the whole topic at once and avoid short-circuting yourself by leaving out something essential-like the articles in airline magazines that always seem to promise more than they deliver.

Now you're ready to organize what you've got into a working outline that will guide you through the entire piece. It is an amazingly fast way to work that avoids rewrites, reworks, and shuffling pieces and parts from one section of the article to another. It works so well I don't even know the block commands for moving words and paragraphs around with my word-processor-I don't ever use them.

Instead, spend your time polishing. Read your article out loud to everyone you can make listen. When you polish your piece, get rid of unnecessary words. Strike every adjective and adverb you can-let nouns and verbs do the work. And keep listening.

Let me share something with you that the late Irving Younger told me 15 years ago when we were teaching together at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy in Boulder, Colorado.

"Jim," he said, "you will appreciate this. When Rudyard Kipling finished writing something, he would put it in a desk drawer for 30 days-to 'drain,' as he said.

"At the end of 30 days he would take it out and read it. After 30 days he would see the words he had actually written, instead of just remembering what he had wanted to say." What an elegant way to listen to the conversation.

James W. McElhaney is a columnist and Senior Editor of Litigation, the quarterly magazine of the ABA Litigation Section, and columnist for the ABA Journal. He is also Joseph C. Hostetler Professor of Trial Practice and Advocacy at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. This article is reprinted from The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing (1993), with the permission of Scribes and the author.