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| Breathing Experience into Expository Writing |
| What about expository writing: essays, reports, articles, memos, and other conceptual writing? They usually grow more out of thinking than out of sights, sounds, smells, or touch. Must they then fail to have power? fail to make the reader hear music? fail, that is, to make the reader construct an experience for himself? When we look for power in writing we certainly look more often to creative writing -- narrative and descriptive and poetic writing -- than to expository writing. What about expository writing: essays, reports, articles, memos, and other conceptual writing? They usually grow more out of thinking than out of sights, sounds, smells, or touch. Must they then fail to have power? fail to make the reader hear music? fail, that is, to make the reader construct an experience for himself? When we look for power in writing we certainly look more often to creative writing -- narrative and descriptive and poetic writing -- than to expository writing. But there is the same distinction to be made for expository writing that I made above for descriptive or narrative writing: the distinction between words that have power because they grow out of experience and words that lack power because they do not. For the fact is that thinking about the bamboo is just as much an experience as seeing the bamboo. And just as people sometimes describe a remembered tree without fully experiencing it (thus the weaker image of the tree with flowers in the middle of the lawn)-indeed, people sometimes even describe the tree right in front of them without fully experiencing it -- so too people can describe a thought without fully experiencing it. In short, seeing a tree, imagining a tree and having a thought about a tree are all mental events that one can experience fully or not so fully. And the problem in giving power to conceptual writing is the same as it is for giving power to descriptive or narrative writing: if you want your reader to experience your thinking and not just manage to understand it -- if you want him to feel your thoughts alive inside him or hear the music of your ideas -- then you must experience your thoughts fully as you write. But it's not so easy to describe the difference between "really experiencing" a thought and "sort of experiencing" it. For descriptive writing I could just say "See it!" and "Forget about language!" but you can't see thoughts and they only exist in the form of words -- for many people at least. It usually helps to say "Feel it!" but feelings are not really the point. The essential act is participating fully in the thought. We say someone "believes what he's saying" or "speaks with conviction" and those phrases probably indicate that the speaker is experiencing his thought. But you don't really have to believe or have conviction about an idea to put your whole self into it -- you just have to make some kind of inner investment or concentration of energy. But in practice the situation turns out to be much the same for expository writing as for descriptive or narrative writing. The same kind of effort is needed: put all your attention into connecting wholeheartedly with your thoughts and get inside them instead of trying so hard to find the right language for communicating them. The same kind of advice makes it happen: "Close your eyes and go there! Be there! Stop worrying so much about describing your thoughts clearly or well!" Most people, in fact, benefit from being told "See it! Hear it! Feel its texture!" If you are not really experiencing your thoughts as you write, pretend you are the first person who ever had that thought and write excitedly about your new breakthrough. Pretend perhaps that the idea is dangerous and write arguments against it. These are ways to connect with thoughts as though they really matter when you have lost your focus or concentration. It also helps to put your body into it. Let your muscles react in some way as you say or write your thought. See which part of your body the thought wants to erupt through. Some researchers have found that children have a physical reaction -- a piece of tensionrelease in some part of their body, a shiver or jiggle -- when they figure something out. What's special about figuring something out is that it always consists of a new thought or a new connection, and you can't have a new thought without really experiencing it. Thus you usually get more experience into your words when you are figuring something out for the first time than when you write about an old idea you've long understood. You see more in it and teacher about a bad grade on an essay. The teacher says, "I got confused. Tell me what you were driving at," and as the student gets involved in explaining his idea, his meaning gets clearer and his words more alive. "Why didn't you write it that way?" the teacher asks, and the student doesn't know why. But the act of writing an essay for the teacher took so much attention away from experiencing his idea -- attention given to worrying about whether he was saying the right thing and saying it right -- that his words ended up dead and dull and probably unclear. Note, however, that his spoken words were not, strictly speaking, clear or coherent. A transcript would show them as a mess. The teacher praised them because they managed finally to state the essential idea in a pointed and felt way -- probably through some crucial distinctions. But this main idea and these distinctions were scattered here and there in a pudding of language which was a mess -- but felt and alive. Notice, then, how this is a picture of exactly what that student should have written for a rough draft. The teacher is really praising a messy but lively first draft that the student probably didn't dare write. In summary, then, I can make the same statements about expository and creative writing. Even though experiencing requires more energy than not experiencing, if things go well you naturally and easily do experience what you are writing about. To experience fully is natural, human, and alive. But when you are tired, under pressure, seared, or distracted, it takes an act of special effort and self-management to get yourself to experience fully what you are writing about. You need to learn to stop, concentrate your energy, and focus your attention wholeheartedly on your meaning -- and do it so vigorously that you don't have any energy or attention left over for worries or distractions. |
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