Justice Notes: Writing
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
This week’s Justice Notes is a bit different. Instead of focusing on the issues of criminal justice reform and what we write about. I wanted to pause and reflect on the effort behind the writing itself.
Justice Notes is usually a place for essays, reflections on criminal justice reform, and the lived realities that shape both. It is meant to inform, to challenge, and, at its best, to move something in the reader.
This week, I found myself thinking less about what we write and more about how we write. I’ve written before about why I write. But I haven’t said much about the process itself.
For me, organizing words into something coherent, something with rhythm, something that carries meaning, is like hammering nails. Each sentence has to be driven into place. Sometimes it bends. Sometimes it has to be pulled out and started again. Most of the time, it resists.
My wife, who writes reviews of cabaret shows in New York City, can craft a 500-word summary in one sitting, with few revisions required. Always clear, organized, and flowing. How I envy her, as my first drafts are often a kind of clumsy, disorganized pig-Latin
That’s why I rely on a method often attributed to Ernest Hemingway: I never begin where I left off. Each session starts with everything I’ve written before, revising as I go, reworking sentences, adjusting tone, trying to hear whether it still holds together. Only then do I go on from there and write until, as Hemingway says, “come to a place where you still have your juice,” know what’s going to happen next, but stop to hit it the next day.
It’s the only way I’ve found to return to something with some sense of direction. It is a slow process. As a result, my long-form manuscripts take years to write.
There are moments when an idea feels fully formed in my head. Clear and organized in my mind. I can almost hear the sentence. But getting it onto the page, in a way that feels true and compelling, is something else entirely. The transition from thought to coherent prose is rarely clean. More often, it’s strained, uneven, and incomplete.
And so the revision process never really ends. Each time I sit down, I am not continuing. I am reworking, reconsidering, reshaping. Starting again, in some sense.
I suspect this is not unique to me.
So this week is simply a note of appreciation to those who have contributed to Justice Notes, and to those who may in the future. Writing something worthwhile rarely comes easily. It asks something of the person doing it: time, patience, and a willingness to wrestle with the page.
I never take that effort for granted. Thank you to all who have contributed to Justice Notes this past year. I look forward to hearing your voices in the year ahead.
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