Category: Process

Getting Started

Sean Flynn

Above all other steps in the writing process, like research and revision, getting started on a project has always been the hardest part for me. I never know what to say or what I’m trying to accomplish. And I know I’m not alone. Unsurprisingly, most of my clients and students also feel an intense amount of anxiety when facing that ominous blank screen, or deathly-white sheet of paper. Writing those first words is tough. We feel like that initial sentence sets the tone for the rest of the project, effectively sealing our fate. Unable to start, we prime the pump and spend hours, days sometimes, mulling over phrases as we fall asleep, wash our hair, or do the dishes. I used to think of this period of internal thinking as unproductive procrastination until I realized how much of the writing process occurs off-paper.

Talking about a project before actually writing is critical. Chatting helps you understand not only the prompt and what is expected of you, but also where to begin. By talking with classmates, or one of our consultants, you discover what you already know and what you need to research. Having another human being to respond to you, rather than a silent piece of paper, also allows you to consider other points of view at the earliest stages of writing, rather than waiting until you have a rough draft. Rather than get hung up on outlining, thesis statements, or topic sentences, talk with someone who can help you get on paper what you have in your head. Tossing around ideas with someone capable of questioning and interpreting them will lead you to what you want to say in a given writing situation. Your partner can doubt, support, or clarify your ideas, which you then commit to paper as part of your individual writing process.

Aside from talk as a useful tool in the writing process, exercising, creating art, cooking, and spending time with friends and loved ones can also help you when you feel like you can’t start. Personally, it’s often while on a bike ride or vacuuming my apartment that those “eureka” moments strike and I suddenly know just the right bit of evidence to use, what my overall thesis is, or how I should organize my paper. Forcing yourself to write when your brain and body want to do anything else only results in frustration and bad work, so taking a few hours off can give your subconscious the time and space to work out what you are trying to say. Repetitive tasks in particular are well-suited for keeping your body moving while your mind gets a chance to think.

If you still can’t find a starting point after talking and doing some other activity for a while, then try stream-of-consciousness writing. Simply write down everything that pops into your head for a set period of time, not worrying about grammar or whether anything will relate to your paper. This can clear the pipes, so to speak, and make it easier for the words to flow out.

Above all, the most important thing to remember about the writing process is that there is no single correct way to go about it. Also, no writing situation is the same, or every writer, so what worked for you for the last paper may not work for the next one. Always be willing to experiment, and don’t dwell on something if it isn’t working—move on.

Who is a Writer?

Lauren Dimmer

Today I woke up the way I normally do: too late in the afternoon and too tired for anything but a good cup of coffee. I stumbled my way into my living room, slumped down by the window, and stared at my computer with the kind of hatred usually reserved for mass murderers or bad rainstorms on the highway.

I’ve been trying to write something creative every day for the last five years.

It’s not going so well.

Obviously.

For the last five years of my life, every day starts with a big list of all the reasons that I really shouldn’t be writing. My slacks from work need to be washed, my new kitten needs her medicine to help get over some random fungus, the floor’s dirty, articles really need reading for school, my girlfriend’s getting over a root canal and needs me to make another smoothie so she can have breakfast, I need to check my facebook feed, I need to check the news.

Of course writing is hard. Of course writing is exhausting. But this morning, I started thinking: what is it, exactly, that’s burrowing into my brain whenever I reach for a pen and a keyboard?

The more I thought about it, the more complicated it became. For example: what do I really mean when I say that writing is hard? I write probably three e-mails every morning, and none of those bother me. I text my friends. I comment on some blog posts. None of that writing makes me grind my teeth the way my daily creative exercises do. I don’t try to do the laundry just to have an excuse to avoid updating my status on facebook. I don’t sweep the floor to avoid e-mailing my friends. Is it the kind of writing I’m doing that’s so hard? What makes writing a story harder than responding to a blog post? When you’re writing a story, you can write anything you want. You can make whatever kind of sense you want, too. It’s the kind of freedom that should make you feel inspired and happy, but I still feel trapped as ever.

I think, ultimately, some of the most damaging baggage we have to shoulder whenever we try to write is really baggage about writers.

Think about it: we’re taught that “real writers” are sad, solitary, lonely creatures. “Real writers” are geniuses. Real writers are tortured. Real writers are quirky and original. Real writers drink whiskey every morning. Maybe the worst thing we’re taught about “real writers” is the way that they can just dash out an absolutely perfect first draft. I never heard about Hemingway slaving away over a single paragraph for five hours while his laundry got dirtier and dirtier. I never heard about Oscar Wilde having to practice whenever he wanted to write a new, brilliant play. They just did it, those guys, their talent was innate and spooky and hard to understand; they had a mysterious, weird, natural link to whatever “good art” was, and it just poured out of them whenever they needed it.
The end.

I write my first draft and it is crap. I write my second draft and it is also crap. I pour another cup of coffee. I write a third draft. Still crap. I sweep the floor. I talk to my girlfriend. I go to a movie. I am still working on a poem I wrote when I was sixteen years old. That poem? Crap!

And every time I do this, I make a list of why writing is stupid, and I am stupid, and I can never, never ever be a real writer. Every day, this list gets longer and longer. That list is what’s pressing into me whenever I stop and grab a few extra minutes and pick up a pen and try, try, try to write something. Anything.

But you know what? Just because no one ever bothered to tell me Hemingway went through fifty versions of “Hills Like White Elephants” doesn’t mean that he never practiced all the ways to make a tight, crystalline, tiny image in his text. Hemingway practiced. Oscar Wilde practiced. Every piece of creative work you read is just the latest draft in a huge army of incredibly crappy drafts, and maybe, if we saw some of those drafts, we wouldn’t feel so bad when our first version doesn’t measure up. Maybe studying those drafts would tell us more about writing than reading everything when it’s all perfect and polished and beautiful.

But even if you don’t believe all that, I’d like you to try to believe this, okay?

A writer is a person who writes. That’s what writer means. That’s all writer means.
The only way you’ll never ever be a real writer is if you let all those “real writers” keep you from writing.

And I have a poem to write.

Again.

Invisible Lines

Mark Williams

I dropped composition 102 two—maybe three—times in college. I did finally complete it in my last semester. It was “take comp or don’t graduate”: I took comp. But even then, it turned out to be the worst grade of my college career, by about an entire grade.

The first time I took the class, at community college, I stayed in almost the entire semester, but at some point halfway through I quit turning in the assignments. The turning point was a long “article summary” that the teacher gave me a D on, some article by a scientist named John Polkinghorne. (It bothered me enough that I’ve remembered, apparently.) I thought I understood the article, I thought I’d written a summary, and the teacher simply said (over and over) that I “had not summarized the article.” I couldn’t get any farther than that with him. So when he began giving small assignment after small assignment and telling us that they would be “helpful,” I no longer trusted him—I’d already decided that he was not helpful, so why would his assignments be helpful? I quit turning things in, then dropped the class on the last possible date.

The next time I took composition, I walked out halfway through the first class. I had some important reasons: first, he called the writing process “percolating,” a really obnoxious metaphor for people like me who hated coffee. I still smell that bitter coffee smell when I picture his classroom. Second, he was using his percolating metaphor to justify a mountain of assignments that I thought were way overboard for a simple gen. ed. requirement. I don’t like coffee and I don’t like being overworked in a gen. ed., so I walked out before he’d finished the syllabus. I picked up stellar astronomy instead.

I arrived at the last semester of college, finally forced to take ENG 102. I felt dragged along, alternately insulted and embarrassed by what I was learning, until the final paper when we were required to have a tutoring session at the writing center. I remember my writing center tutor was a girl I’d gone to junior high with named Courtney, and how much it embarrassed me to be “asking” for help on an English 102 paper from someone I wanted to view as an equal. But I didn’t see much choice, and Courtney was quiet, and thoughtful, and patient, and helpful—and forty-five minutes later I was walking out of the library into the cold Chicago air with a new blue pencil and the uncomfortable realization that I could’ve been a lot better student, and a lot better writer, than I would now be as a college graduate. I felt as if an opportunity had been there, and I was too late to make good on it.

That was nine years ago this month. I still feel the almost infuriating helplessness I felt in those moments—moments when I knew there was something I could not do but needed to do, something just on the other side of a paper-thin curtain. The causes of those impotent moments can be different—in my stories I can see circumstances, a teacher’s failure, my laziness and my pride all getting in the way; for other people it can be language barriers, or educational differences, or a language disorder. But in all those cases writing doesn’t work like other skills. It’s not like basketball, where we always can see that we’re missing our shots or dribbling the ball off our foot or just getting beaten by bigger, faster, stronger players. Oftentimes, success and failure in writing operate along invisible lines for those of us who are failing. As a writing tutor and teacher—a “success”—I have to say that the lines haven’t really gotten more visible. They’re more strongly felt, I want to say—but then again, I felt my failures as a writer so deeply back then, too. I think it comes down to this, for all of us: we may not be able to recognize what’s going on in our writing, but we do acquire a “feel” as writers. Good feelings, but bad feelings too, feelings that make writing impossible, undesirable, beyond us. If I’m right, then we need to work to pay attention to the forceful, invisible lines writing continually bumps us up against. And trust that everyone else feels them too.

Reading with Writers

Emily Freund

Autumn! While the daylight subsides and leaves a blaze like a phoenix, we have more excuses to curl up in a comfy chair and hold a cup of piping-hot coffee in one hand and a good book in the other. As winter approaches, I’ve noticed that I have started thinking about my holiday reading list. Although I enjoy reading my classes’ assigned texts, my fellow recreational readers must agree that nothing compares to winter and summer reading. However, not everyone is as excited about reading and writing. Since I am relatively new to Writing Center consulting, I had never considered the close connection that reading and writing enjoys. After a few months of holding my own consultations, I am settling in and becoming more improvisational and collaborative with writers. I have learned more about how I view myself and strategize as a tutor, realizing that the Writing Center offers a cooperative environment composed of many ideas about writing and reading.

I have realized that by sharing and exhibiting reading strategies within the Center, I am a better tutor by being an engaged reader. Reading puts me in the role of the writer’s audience, and I give the writer ownership of his or her text while offering a thoughtful interaction with his or her work – which is what every writer wants, right? As a responsive reader, I show that writers can define their own roles as scholars, and I help others find a distinct voice in the academic dialogue. By paying close attention to the way I read a text, I have the opportunity to better serve the writers’ requests and allow them to guide the session. I give writers the power to guide my reading by asking where they want me to focus. Making meaning based on the writers’ requests gives tutors the chance to help them in a resonating way.

Writers come in to the Writing Center for many reasons, but one thing that everyone wants is someone engaging with and investing in their writing. By reading, we as tutors ask questions and help writers find what their text is and what it could be saying to their audience. Although we are working on making “better writers,” writers expect us to enter into a conversation about their work. Focusing on the text does not mean forgetting about the writer; instead, using the session-specific text allows tutors to offer their own techniques and strategies or give examples that can be improvisationally modified for new or different concerns. By inhabiting our roles as readers and tutors, we can exhibit qualities and show possibilities for each writer’s own new readings, giving writers the tools to read their texts from a new and focused point of view.

So, as the semester reaches its most stressful weeks, remember that we’re here to help. We all love to read and discuss our interpretations, and we would love to spend some time with your thoughts and ideas. We even have comfy chairs and hot coffee.