Sarah's Response

[Website Services Admin]

#545

Reading this week’s article made me consider my own process, which I don’t pay attention to closely. In paying more attention, I found that my process was very similar to Anne’s:

“I almost never move from the writing of one sentence directly to the next. After each sentence I pause to read what I’ve written, assess, sometimes edit and think about what will come next” (366).

When constructing this response, I didn’t start at the beginning. I pulled random excerpts that I “felt” a connection to and built from there. This short paragraph is one of the final paragraphs I wrote, before editing all my chunks and putting them into an order that made sense. To say it was the final paragraph isn’t completely true, because every paragraph has gone through so much random revision: paragraphs, lines, words, punctuation.

The longer I have been a writer, the less attached I am to the words I put down. In the process I have almost completely moved away from projective structuring and asking myself: “Is what I’m writing correct?” and “Does it conform to the rules I’ve been taught?” (368). That is, unless I can’t relate to or don’t understand something I’ve read and have to respond to. My words still feel like a piece of me, but a piece that I am able to distance myself from in order to take criticism effectively. Over the years, as I have become less sensitive about what I write, it has been much easier to put myself in the place of the reader (though, I don’t think I do it consciously). When students struggle with writing, they don’t seem to understand how writing can be fun and exploratory, rather than formulaic. And while I can’t remember worrying about strict paragraph structures since my first year in college, it’s funny how hyper-critical I’ve become of this response, which has taken the most time to write and I am the least satisfied with. It feels disjointed because I have struggled with what to say about each excerpt. I can “feel” that a lot of these things are true but I am unable to verbalize them. The feeling is very much like this:

“The basic process begins with paying attention. If we are given a topic, it begins with taking the topic in and attending to what it evokes in us. There is less “figuring out” an answer and more “waiting” to see what forms” (366).

This article also made me consider my writing process across the various types of writing that I do. Research papers, magazine articles, fiction, blogs, etc. Having written all of these in the past few months, I would say that my process definitely varies, especially when research is involved, but when it comes to paragraph-level writing, it’s all the same: writing chunks and rewriting chunks.

I asked my boyfriend (a professional writer and former editor) about his process. He will often start writing an article, abandon it for days out of frustration, and then return to it. For an article he wrote this week, he completely rewrote the introduction multiple times, wondering what “felt” right. He claims that he has never written an entire article and then returned to rewrite, but he sees this as negative. He cited a friend who can write long-form journalism in one swoop and then return to the entire piece and edit line by line. He thinks being able to write that way would be so much easier.

• This topic was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by Website Services Admin.
• This topic was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by Website Services Admin.

[Sondra Perl]

#552

About the friend who writes a piece in one fell swoop: I would suggest that he does a lot of composing in his head so that by the time he gets to paper or the computer screen he’s already been revising or going back in order to go forward. It only looks linear.

[Author]

Posts