Excellent post, Alexa! I would not have been able to write something as good when I was your age.
Figuring out exactly what I want to say has always been difficult for me. At the beginning of the writing process, all I have is pages and pages of notes of all kinds of things I want to say, most of which will get deleted during the writing process. During this process I try to see through these massive amount of notes to understand what’s truly important to me, and what will be left later for another piece.
Then I take a look at what I have left, and do it all over again until I have a basic outline. That’s when the trouble starts because the outline usually feels hallow when I try to convince myself there is a speech in there. It might have felt good when I put together the outline, but I don’t always remember the substances I wanted to fill the outline with. Other times the outline don’t look so good and have to be rewritten to fit the substances.
So, what you get is this seesawing process that goes back and forth between the outline and the substances, and you keep working it and hope that eventually you will reach a point of equilibrium where both the outline and the substances agree with each other, and you will be able to fine tune the words until everything looks really good.
What you see is draft #6 after an outline was put together from lots of notes. It took me a total of 10 days to complete the entire process. That’s not to mention the months before this piece, the time I spent to experience life and all the things it threw at me. I have absolutely no control over how much experience is enough for me to be able to write something, and I can’t force it neither, which is why writing is always a scary thing… I never know if I can make it until the very end.
Having said that, it always feels great after it is done.