Writing as Crashing/process/good work

On writing as crashing:

This sort of "dancing," this accretion of new beginnings, the overgeneration of new framing schemes, is a probably a symptom of something very simple: I find ideas *while* writing, not before. For me, writing is a mode of discovery, and though I revise all the time, I revise as I'm writing. Invention and revision are the same moment for me. My writing process moves like a crayfish (backwards). I crash into my ideas that way, running a full-tilt boogie backwards, rather than stalk them. I'm hell in those writing process china shops.

It occurs to me that I've been trying to understand for a long time what it means to develop finished and coherent art: the finished poem, dissertation, curriculum, class, assignment. I think there is something very valuable about the organization and formal qualities of a something well made. But what occurs to me is that such organization is probably not at all as fixed as we are taught to think about it in school. The "well-wrought urn" image is misleading because, like all fundamentalism, it forgets to account for change.

Fundamentalism often gets mighty righteous when it starts to defend form (as in "form-ality" or "in-form-ation").  Form is always understood as "final" form, but that word "final" gets skipped over, doesn't it?  The result is that you start to be oriented by an ever-elusive picture of perfect form.  Audience, process, joy, purpose and discover, in the form-worshipping model, tend to seem like stupid impediments, problems of individual distraction and ability, stopping to pee when you're trying to make time on the interstate.  I see this in teaching a lot. Just tonight I was surprised and disappointed to see a peer nominate himself as the adjudicator of a student magazine project because he knows better and could "increase the quality" of the magazine.  That's no doubt true.  But is it the quality of the final form or the quality of the process that we're after? Sure, it's both.  But it's hard to value the lambent act of learning, as fast to lose its center as a drop of oil on water.  But I'd argue it matters more.  Our job is to teach learning, not form.

What would happen if the focus was on the process of making meaning--on the dynamics (communities, populations, technologies, classrooms) where meaning was made, not on the individual final products? What if instead of focusing on the final and canonized form of great issues, we were actually trusting enough of students to ask them to address the issues that they consider most pressing?  Love, sex, religion, living a meaningful life, excitement, autonomy, authenticity might figure as a pretty serious start--at least these were my issues and in many ways still are.  Are they yours?  If not, isn't it your responsibility to find them?  The big goal of a composition program, it seems to me, is to provide for students a real audience (not real-ish, but real, people who read their stuff with care) and to make the writing important enough to enlist the thoughts of other thinkers (that is, to "write with sources"). Finding older teachers who can read kids writing is very hard.  Richard Haswell has a book that starts with that challenge or paradox.....

I was listening to the radio today.  For the folks at the station, what brought true happiness was not just pleasure, which is ephemeral as everyone over the age of 12 knows, but engagement. In class I call this the difference between "fun" and something that's "interesting." In love relationships, it's the difference between flirting and being in a serious relationship.  In writing, it's the difference between inspiration and revision.  And as anyone who has ever been in a marriage knows, there is nothing about the final form of the union with all its legal guarantees and strictures and allowances that makes it valuable.  What makes is valuable is the day-to-day process of making it valuable, and it's a painful process sometimes because you have to admit your thinking and behavior might need to change.  So it is with true writing: the day-to-day process of sustaining your thinking eventually challenges you to grow up.

More and more, I don't think the final form matters much. Excellence matters, and the process of revising and reflecting will bring about excellence in most cases if pursued sincerely.  Let others worry about the final form.  Let them say Lou Reed is too talky, Kenneth Burke is too dense, Steven King is too derivative and gross, etc.  My brother and I were talking today about workmanship -- he is an excellent craftsman and honorable worker, though he charges WAY too little everything he does -- and he said the most interesting thing, that when he's working on a house he is always thinking "what would someone think if they came behind me and looked at how I decided to solve problems?"  And yet, he is able to take risks, be creative, and stay in the moment.  He has good products because he has a good (and sustained) process.  This is perhaps all another way of saying, hard work with take care of its worker.  When it doesn't then we need to kick the system in the teeth.

DF