This post will focus on the writing process and how it is different for each and every writer. I read these three articles Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product (Don Murray) -- introduction is not required reading, Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision (Mary Karr) , and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life | pp. 28 -34 | Short Assignments & Shitty First Drafts (Anne Lamott) and analyzed each of the writers' different processes.
Every writer has a different style of a writers’ roundtable in their mind. For example I see mine as “a class of third graders who have no interest in being at school” at times. Other times I see “my writing process as a jungle, tangled with thoughts that have no relation to writing” with “each idea flowing by faster than I can write them down leaving me concentrating on what is passed not what is coming”. To summarize, my writing could use a little bit of organization, but even though it is messy and unorthodox it still gets the job done. I like the process that all three of these authors use, but my favorite one has to be Lamott’s. I like the description that "’Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.”(Anne Lamott), it shows that no matter the size of the project you can only work one sentence at a time which she also shows in her story about her brother. “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.”(Anne Lamott). The way Lamott describes writing is very similar to my view of writing in the way that “they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back”(Anne Lamott). Both Murray, and Karr see writing in two different parts, “In the early draft, the generative self shakes pom-poms at every pen stroke and cheers every crossed t. In a month or so, this diligent and optimistic creature gins out, say, two hundred pages. The editor self then shows up to heft the pages, give a sniff, and say: Yeah, but . . . The editor condenses two hundred pages down to about thirty. I don’t mean she cuts the rest; she may well boil the whole thing down so the same amount of stuff happens more economically.”(Mary Karr), “Don’t look back. Yes, the draft needs fixing. But first it needs writing.”(Don Murray). The early draft is just your test but the final revised copy is where you take your draft and comb through it making it shorter and easier to read “The pieces of writing I have not yet thought of writing will become different from what I expect them to be when I propose them to myself. My constant is change.”(Don Murray), “Every writer I know who’s worth a damn spends way more time ‘losing’ than ‘winning’”(Mary Karr). Both Murray and Karr also believe that writers today do not express themselves in their writing but instead express who the public wants to see, “Of course the writer attends to an “other self” that reflects the voices and expectations of a wider public”(Don Murray), “Through reading and thinking, they’ve raised their taste beyond their skill levels. So when they stare down at their pages, they can no longer superimpose what’s in their heads onto the work.”(Mary Karr).
3 Comments
Sabatino
2/10/2020 10:24:53 am
I am glad to see content here. I appreciate the use of metaphor to represent your writing process. This post provides direct quotes from each author. These quotes explore the writing process. Let's discuss in person the genre in this blog post...for now does this post read as a narrative scene of roundtable discussion or as an analysis of three readings?
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Tiffany
2/11/2020 02:55:55 pm
I love the quotes that you use in here. Great!
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Blake Quay
2/11/2020 02:59:31 pm
Although this isn't like any of the other I have read I liked the way you did this. I agree with Sabatino and am unsure of what genre this is labeled. Good Job
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conor mcgrathWelcome! I am pretty laid back and chill. glad you all could join me here on my journey. if you have any suggestions let me know. Archives
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