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I've described the two ends of the spectrum of writing processes. One extreme is the dangerous method of painstaking writing where you figure out your meaning entirely before you start and thereby maintain complete control while you write. (Not quite so far in that direction is the direct writing process where, by and large, you maintain control of where you are going.) The other extreme is the open-ended process where you let the writing steer itself and let yourself be ignorant of where you might end up. The dangerous method may save you time and perplexity but it often gets you in trouble or leads to dull thinking. Open-ended writing maximizes growth in yourself and new thinking on paper but you pay the obvious price in time, energy, and uncertainty. The loop writing process is a way to get the best of both worlds: both control and creativity. On the one hand it lets you steer where you are going. Perhaps, for example, you have to write an essay on the causes of the French Revolution and the teacher won't accept a novel or love letter instead. But on the other hand it expands your point of view -- sometimes even more than the open-ended process does; it generates copious new thinking; and it is a way to focus that creativity on goals other than the ones you happen to carry around inside you. Thus it is especially useful if you can't think of much to write or are stuck with a topic that bores you. The loop writing process will take you longer than the direct writing process, but not so long as open ended writing. (I will write as though your task were an essay or some other kind of nonfiction writing. It will be obvious how to apply the loop writing process to poems, stories, or plays.) I call this process a loop because it takes you on an elliptical orbiting voyage. For the first half, the voyage out, you do pieces of almost-freewriting during which you allow yourself to curve out into space -- allow yourself, that is, to ignore or even forget exactly what your topic is. For the second half, the voyage home, you bend your efforts back into the gravitational field of your original topic as you select, organize, and revise parts of what you produced during the voyage out. Where open-ended writing is a voyage of discovery to a new land, the loop process takes a circling route so you can return to the original topic -- but now with a fresh view of it. Where open-ended writing is only suitable if you have free choice over the topic and form, loop writing is useful if you have no choice-and especially if you hate it or feel bored by it. The loop writing process is really my response to something many people told me about Writing Without Teachers: that what I said about, well, growing and cooking" was all very well for creative writing but it didn't help them to write an essay on the causes of the French Revolution for Monday morning. At first this response made me mad. "Yes, it does help," I wanted to say. "Everything you need is right there. I was thinking very much about just such a task." But after hearing the response often enough I finally had to admit I hadn't given as many directions as I could have for using fast and free writing on required essays, memos, or reports that you may not be interested in. When I finally gave in and set about trying to write what these people were asking for, the process led me to new ideas. I tell this story as a lesson in feedback. So often when readers complain that something is missing in a piece of your writing, you know they are wrong. But if you can finally manage to see it through their eyes, to have some of their experience, you don't just get new perceptions of your writing, you usually get completely new ideas that please you. The creative element in the loop writing process comes from letting your topic slide half out of mind and doing some initial bursts of directed raw writing. This gets more of your experience linked to your thinking. Some teachers have objected, "Why encourage unskilled writers to put more into their essays when they can't even handle the little that is there?" But I have found that people produce their best writing when they finally have ideas that are powerful and exciting to them. When they try to weave an essay out of ideas that are watery and uninteresting to them, their language often disintegrates into incoherence: they are trying to make something solid out of what they know isn't really worth the effort. How can you reason well and produce strong language if you aren't connected to the topic and don't have any ideas that excite you? After you have that connection and after you have produced lots of writing that interests you, then you will be willing to summon the cold, hard discipline needed for the voyage home -- for building an organized and focused piece of writing.
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