The Open-ended Writing Process - Term paper / research paper writing service

The open-ended writing process is at the opposite extreme from the direct writing process. It is a way to bring to birth an unknown, unthought-of piece of writing -- a piece of writing that is not yet in you. It is a technique for thinking, seeing, and feeling new things. This process invites maximum chaos and disorientation. You have to be willing to nurse something through many stages over a long period of time and to put up with not knowing where you are going. Thus it is a process that can change you, not just your words. The open-ended writing process is at the opposite extreme from the direct writing process. It is a way to bring to birth an unknown, unthought-of piece of writing -- a piece of writing that is not yet in you. It is a technique for thinking, seeing, and feeling new things. This process invites maximum chaos and disorientation. You have to be willing to nurse something through many stages over a long period of time and to put up with not knowing where you are going. Thus it is a process that can change you, not just your words. As the most creative and unmethodical writing process, I associate it with poems or stories or novels. But it will also lead you to essays. It has led me to parts of this and my previous book about writing. Ideally you should not choose in advance what you are going to end up with. Perhaps you start out thinking and hoping for a poem, but you may well end up with a story in prose, a letter to someone, an essay that works out one of your perplexities. The open-ended writing process goes on and on till the potential piece of writing is fully cooked and grown. Sometimes this happens quickly, sometimes you nurse it through decades (though I will suggest some ways to hasten the process a bit). I think of the open-ended writing process as a voyage in two stages: a sea voyage and a coming to new land. For the sea voyage you are trying to lose sight of land -- the place you began. Getting lost is the best source of new material. In coming to new land you develop a new conception of what you are writing about-a new idea or vision -- and then you gradually reshape your material to fit this new vision. The sea voyage is a process of divergence, branching, proliferation, and confusion; the coming to land is a process of convergence, pruning, centralizing, and clarifying. To begin the sea voyage, do a nonstop freewriting that starts from wherever you happen to be. Most often you just start with a thought or a feeling or a memory that seems for some reason important to you. But perhaps you have something in mind for a possible piece of writing: perhaps you have some ideas for an essay; or certain images stick in mind as belonging in a poem; or certain characters or events are getting ready to make a story. You can also start by describing what you wish you could end up with. Realize of course that you probably won't. Just start writing. The open-ended writing process is ideal for the situation where you sense you have something to write but you don't quite know what. Just start writing about anything at all. If you have special trouble with that first moment of writing -- that confrontation with a blank page -- ask yourself what you don't want to write about and start writing about it before you have a chance to resist. First thoughts. They are very likely to lead you to what you are needing to write. Keep writing for at least ten or twenty or thirty minutes, depending on how much material and energy you come up with. You have to write long enough to get tired and get past what's on the top of your mind. But not so long that you start pausing in the midst of your writing. Then stop, sit back, be quiet, and bring all that writing to a point. That is, by reading back or just thinking back over it, find the center or focus or point of those words and write it down in a sentence. This may mean different things: you can find the main idea that is there; or the new idea that is trying to be there; or the imaginative focus or center of gravity -- an image or object or feeling; or perhaps some brand new thing occurs to you now as very important -- it may even seem unrelated to what you wrote, but it comes to you now as a result of having done that burst of writing. Try to stand out of the way and let the center or focus itself decide to come forward. In any event, don't worry about it. Choose or invent something for your focus and then go on. The only requirement is that it be a single thing. Skip a few lines and write it down. Underline it or put a box around it so you can easily find it later. (Some people find it helpful to let themselves write down two or three focusing sentences.) If this center of gravity is a feeling or an image, perhaps a mere phrase will do: "a feeling that something good will happen" or "mervyn the stuffed monkey slumped under the dining room table." But a complete sentence or assertion is better, especially if the focus is an idea or thought or insight. Try, that is, to get more than "economics" or "economic dimension" -- since those words just vaguely point in a general direction -- and try for something like "there must be an economic reason for these events." You have now gone through a cycle that consists of nonstop writing and then sitting back to probe for the center. You have used two kinds of consciousness: immersion, where you have your head down and are scurrying along a trail of words in the underbrush; and perspective, where you stand back and look down on things from a height and get a sense of shape and outline. Now repeat this cycle. Use the focus you just wrote down as the springboard for a new piece of nonstop writing. There are various ways in which you can let it bounce you into new writing. Perhaps you just take it and write more about it. Or perhaps that doesn't seem right because what you already wrote has finished an idea and the focusing sentence has put the lid on it. If you wrote more about it, you would just be repeating yourself. In this case, start now with what comes next: the next step, the following thing, the reply, the answering salvo, Perhaps "what comes next" is what follows logically. Perhaps the next thing is what comes next in your mind even though it involves a jump in logic. Perhaps the next thing is a questioning or denial of what you have already written: arguments against it, writing in an opposite mood, or writing in a different mode (from prose to poetry). Stand out of the way and see what happens. Whatever kind of jump it is, jump into a second burst of nonstop writing for however long you can keep it up. Long enough to get tired and lose track of where you started; not so long that you keep pausing and lose momentum. And then, again, stop and come out from the underbrush of your immersion in words, attain some calm and perspective, and find the summing up or focus or center of gravity for this second piece of writing. The sea voyage consists of repeating this cycle over and over again. Keep up one session of writing long enough to get loosened up and tired -- long enough in fact to make a bit of a voyage and probably to pass beyond what happened to be in mind and in mood. But usually a piece of open -- ended writing takes several or even many long sittings. One of the major ingredients in the openended process is time and the attendant changes of mood and outlook. As'you change modes from writing to focusing and back to writing and back to focusing, practice letting the process itself decide what happens next -- decide, for example, whether your focusing sentence springboards you into a new treatment of the same material, into a response to that material or into some other new topic or mode that "wants" to come next. If it sounds a bit mystical to say "Let it decide," I don't mean to rule out hard conscious thinking. "Letting it decide" will often mean realizing you should be rigorously logical at this point in the writing cycle. As you practice the open-ended writing process, you will get better at feeling what kind of step needs to be taken at any given point. The main thing is not to worry about doing it right. Just do it a lot. As you engage in this sea voyage, invite yourself to lose sight of what you had in mind at the beginning, invite digressions, new ideas, seeds falling from unexpected sources, changes of mind. You are trying to nurse your thoughts, perceptions and feelings through a process, of continual transformation -- cooking and growing. (For a fuller treatment of the cooking and growing processes, see Chapters 2 and 3 of Writing Without Teachers.) The sea voyage is most obviously finished when you sight new land -- when you get a trustworthy vision of your final piece of writing. You see that it's an argument and where it is going; or you see it is a poem and feel the general shape of it. To come to land you need to get this vision clearer and more complete. Perhaps your first glimpse showed you what is central: now you need to write out that central event or idea more fully. If what is emerging is primarily conceptual, such as an essay, you may well need to make an outline. You won't be able to see your structure clearly until you go through all you have written to find the points that feel important, write each one into a complete sentence, and then put these sentences into the most logical or easily understood order. Even for a long story or poem, you may need some kind of schematic representation of the whole so you can see it all in one glance. But perhaps it is too early for any outline or overview. Perhaps you cannot really get this final vision clear and right except by plunging into a new draft in your present fame of mind-starting the first scene of the story or novel, the first line of the poem, the introductory thought for your essay -- and just plowing along. Perhaps doing it is more helpful at this point than any method of planning or outlining. What if you keep writing and writing and you sense that the sea voyage is really done, but you lack any glimpse of land. You feel you have gotten down everything you can get down, you are beginning to repeat yourself, there is no more divergence. You've succeeded in getting productively lost, but now this unknown territory starts to get depressingly familiar. You can try to hasten the convergent process of coming to land. Go back over all the centers or focuses you have written down in the course of the sea voyage. Ponder them for a while. Then engage in some nonstop writing on the basis of them. Start writing "I don't yet know what all this writing is really about, but here's what the important elements seem to be: . . . "Of course you can't put them in the right or logical order -- that's just what you don't know. You are trying to bring them together into the same burst of energy and attention. You might write something like this: There's writing that sounds like the writer talking, there's writing that somehow just resonates in some mysterious way, there's radio announcer speech with great energy and liveliness but sounding completely fake, there's-----, and there's-----. How can I make sense of it all. You are trying to get the important elements to bounce against each other in a tight place. Keep up this burst of writing -- this attempt to figure out what your writing is about -- as long as you can. Perhaps a center will emerge. If not, go on to the step of standing back and looking for a center. If that isn't the final center, then go on to another wave of writing. Keep this up for a while. Keep up, that is, the same process you used for the sea voyage, but instead of using it for divergence and getting lost, use it for convergence and getting lbund. If this doesn't work, you may simply have to stop and rest. Give your writing more time in a drawer unlooked at. Anything that takes this long simply to emerge is probably important. Some complicated and important reordering of things is trying to take place inside you.Now that I've suggested some of the different ways that nonstop writing can lead to focusing sentences, and that focusing sentences can lead to new bursts of nonstop writing, I would like to suggest some of the larger patterns of unfolding you might encounter in the whole cycle of the open-ended process.

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The writing may change moods and modes: from prose to poetry; from experiential to conceptual; from logical to associational; from first person to second or third person; from talk aimed at one person to talk aimed at someone entirely different or aimed at no one at all.

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Perhaps all the writing throughout the open-ended writing process hovers over the same territory. You are gnawing on a single tough bone. You are circling around and around like a plane zeroing in on an airport. Your writing yields successive photographs of the same general scene till you finally get the right perspective and focus. For example, you start writing about a particular afternoon that seems important in your life; your writing leads you to different views of that afternoon, successive versions of what happened, successive attempts to say what it means. Or perhaps you start writing about a particular fight and that's what all your writing continues to be about, but first you find yourself describing what actually happened, then how it felt from your point of view, then what the other person must have felt, and then a fantasy version. In the end you produce a piece of thinking that explains what the fight was really about; or perhaps you end up with a fictional version of a similar fight.

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But on the other hand, perhaps the open-ended writing process carries you not on a circling path over the same territory but on a traversing journey depositing you far from where you started: each stage is, as it were, a sketch of an entirely new scene, a treatment of new subject matter. Perhaps, for example, you start with that same fight, but you are led to a portrait of the other person, then to another person from the distant past, and finally to an important event from your childhood that is unrelated to that original fight. (Of course these pieces of writing may only appear unrelated: the childhood event may actually unlock the meaning of the fight.)

The open-ended writing process may lead to successive versions of a short piece of writing as it goes through various stages or transformations: you end up keeping what is in effect the "last version" and throwing away all the previous ones -- that is, throwing

But on the other hand, perhaps you will find you have been engaged almost all the time in writing what is more or less one draft of a single, very long work. The periodic focusings are merely pauses in the slow unwinding of a single long thread. Perhaps it is a novel; perhaps it is a long letter where the focusings are pauses for the voice to say, "Let me pause to sum up what I seem to be saying to you." Or perhaps it is a long record of what has been going on with you: even though it goes through a lot of changes of mood or form, everything you've written seems to belong.

There is some danger that I have made the open-ended writing process sound too complicated. I could describe it more simply as follows: just start writing, keep writing, don't stop writing except for eating, sleeping, and living, and keep the process going till you have figured out what you are writing, and when you have done that, keep writing still until you get it right. This is the heart of the process and if it is what you do and it works, terrific. But I am trying to emphasize two additional elements that may well be part of your process without your paying much attention to them: first, let yourself start without knowing where you are going and even get more lost as you proceed; and second, alternate between nonstop writing and pausing to focus what you've written. As long as your nonstop writing is going well there is no need, of course, to stop and focus. But if you are writing and writing without getting anywhere, it will help to move deliberately back and forth between immersion and perspective. Doing so will help each wave of writing carry you farther and make each pause not just a rest but an occasion for progress. for eventually I hope to turn the subject into a different kind of travel book about the Middle East when I'm able to take another trip. Trying to explain what happened to writing friends, I described the process as the complete opposite of the traditional way of doing a piece; that is, standing back far enough to get an objective look at the material. In Open-Ended Writing, when I arrived at that first center, it was like standing in the middle of a circle, looking out and not being able to see the whole thing, but feeling quite excited about what I might see next if I turned just a bit more. What a different way to look at a subject. It's a bit scary too. Must be how a sculptor feels when he first starts to chip away. JOANNE TURPIN After you have your vision of your final piece and after you have worked out that vision in a new draft -- perhaps starting with an outline -- you need of course to revise and polish your way to your final draft. Sometimes the open-ended writing process yields a draft that needs little revising, sometimes lots. (See Section III for options in revising.)

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