Lend Me Your Ear

The sound of language accounts for a lot of its power – and if you doubt this, just look at how many people listen to the radio or watch TV compared to how many read books. The art of enjoying writing is to hear the language (to hear the voice speaking to you), and the art of writing well is to hear what you have written. Even textbooks have a voice, though it is subtle and often dry. This is one reason why reading your work out loud is helpful. It is the best way to discover errors or ambiguities. Your ears will pick up on things that your eyes do not – awkward sentences or words used out of context. Having someone else read your work out loud is a great method to test the effectiveness of your written clues, especially punctuation.

The War of the Words

There is often some kind of tension in a piece of writing – something that is unsettled; something that is not known; something not completely understood. For tension to be created and resolved, the question must be real and have some level of complexity.

Is ESP real or not? Is depression psychological or chemical? Is intelligence genetic or influenced by environment? There are several problems with these questions, at least in the way that they are formulated. Some are unanswerable, and a writer can only state an opinion. The real interest is not the yes or no but the writer’s ideas and leanings, the evidence he/she dredges up and how it is examined. Questions that demand yes or no answers are not questions to be written about. They reduce the world to black and white, and we become simplistic. The world is not simplistic. The world is black and white and blue and crimson and day-glo green.

A question is not real if there is only one possible solution or if the solution is known beforehand. Or the lack of a solution is known beforehand.

Respect the Process

You have a writing process—we all do—whether you realize it or not. Just because you don’t think of yourself as a “writer” doesn’t mean that you don’t have either a conscious or subconscious routine that you go through as you assemble your thoughts on paper. For the beginning writer, or the writer who finds the act difficult, perhaps the process involves a lot of structured prewriting: taking notes, making outlines, freewriting, brainstorming, strange internal conversations that no one outside his head would understand—whatever it is, all writers start from somewhere in an attempt to collect ideas.

More experienced writers internalize the prewriting process. They’ve done it so many times that it has become second nature, so the first step of the writing process may be almost entirely within his mind, and the first time he puts words to paper may be the 4th step for someone else. It’s not a race: it’s an experience, this thing called writing. It’s important to respect the process and understand how you personally work through that process. Do you have a special place in your house where you feel you can work best? Do you work best with music, or silence? Do you work best with a cup of coffee, tea, vodka? Are there certain hours of the day where you feel most productive? These things all combine into your personal process, and I can guarantee that no two people have the exact same writing process.

Here’s something that I do, and this is normally in the final stages of my process, after the hard stuff is done and I’m in the editing/rewriting stage: I find a quiet space where I am alone and free from distraction and I have room to walk around. With paper in hand, I walk back and forth across the room as I read my writing out loud, to myself. I let my ear be the final judge for me. There is something about the walking, the steadiness of the paces and the rhythm of the movement, that lulls me and gets my brain going. It doesn’t work for me in any other stage of the process except for the end when I am rewriting. I can’t explain it, and I don’t feel like I want to know why this works for me. It just does, and that is good enough for me.

As you write, take a moment to observe the process. Keep what works, and try new things. Make the process your own

Draining Your Brain

There is such a thing as working too hard. When we spend too much time and energy on one task, we eventually exhaust ourselves, and this leads to frustration and inertia. And when you are frustrated and stuck, the ego tends to step in and start that dialogue in your brain that is telling you that you are going to fail.

When I was learning to play the piano, I used to practice so much that I would eventually begin to sound worse at the end of a practice than I did at the beginning. My wise instructor could sense what was going on and one day told me that I was wearing myself out. It was true–I would practiced until my eyes and fingers and brain were tired, and I inevitably would start to make very basic mistakes that I had worked years to overcome.

This same principle applies to our writing. When we work very hard on writing something, we can eventually reach a point where we burn ourselves out and start writing garbage. And because we are exhausted, we don't even have the critical thinking skills intact to recognize that what we are doing is actually counter-productive. I learned this important lesson as a child, but I took many years to develop the skill of recognizing when my body and brain were telling me that enough was enough. We need to learn how to recognize this breaking point and allow ourselves the time and space away from the project that is draining our intellectual and emotional resources. If you’ve left yourself enough time, you can always come back to it another day with a fresh mind.

Discovering

A very dear and wise friend pointed out to me that in my previous post I may have given the impression that writers only write about things that they already know. This is only partially true.

Writing also is a process of discovery.

The writer writes in order to solve a problem, or come to an answer about something unknown, to make an attempt at rectifying what is known with what is unattainable—to discover something he didn't know about himself or his world. Some of the best writing begins with a question that evolves into a quest. While seeking the answer, often the journey itself is more valuable than the final destination. In fact, many writers seek to discover knowing full well that the answer will never be found. But just because we know we may never find the answer doesn't mean we should stop asking the questions.

So use your writing to discover, to seek — to explore.

To quote Emily Dickinson: "The Brain—is wider than the Sky."

The Experience of Self

It’s become almost a cliché that writers write about what they know. You’ve probably even heard an English teacher or a writer say that the best way to start writing is to just write what you know. And it’s true that this is what writers do. The act of writing is the act of collecting the world around us into language—taking the concrete and making it abstract, and taking the abstract and transforming it into the concrete. What we know best is ourselves, and what we know second best is the world around us. So it is true that writers write about what they know.
 
But does this mean that we can only write about our hobbies or our families or our jobs, or what we did over the weekend, or conversations that we have had? No. Our brains know things—the best way to throw a football, our loved one’s birthdays, the easiest way to commute to work, how to rebuild an engine—but our hearts and our imaginations also know things, and if we let those two facets of our being have a voice, our writing begins to reflect our individuality, or what is also known as our authentic voice.
 
So as you begin your short career as a writer this semester, keep in mind that your best writing will come out of you when you write with honesty and with all your heart and imagination knows, when you look down into yourself and honor the creativity that distinguishes you from every other person in your class, and from every other person in the world.

Peter Elbow's Five Essential Affirmations

1. Everyone has a strong, unique voice.
2. Everyone is born with creative genius.
3. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level.
4. The teaching of craft can be done without damage to a writer's original voice or artistic self-esteem.
5. A writer is someone who writes.

Welcome To The Garden

It wouldn't be fair of me to ask my students to blog and not do the same myself, so here it is! My plan for this page is to not only provide a place to share some of my philosophies on writing but to also write about things that may or may not be directly related to class and provide links to places where I think students may find useful information. I hope you enjoy this side of my brain. I hope to make the Garden of Adonis a place of value and interest.