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| The Writing Blues |
| With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, it took me about as long to arrive at the final draft of "Teachers, Not Testers" as it has taken you to read this far in Writing Under Pressure. After two rounds of revision, what remains must stand for a lot of thinking and some writing that is no longer visible in the final draft. But the paper has a substantial feel to it, representing more than it actually states as information or opinion. QUICK WRITING PROCESS's organic process enabled me to select for the best material, and to strip away excesses and inconsistencies in tone, style, and meaning. I see the main argument clearly, and it is expressed with some of the passion that I feel about it. It is also a paper I've worked hard over, and that gives me a sense of satisfaction as well. With QUICK WRITING PROCESS, it took me about as long to arrive at the final draft of "Teachers, Not Testers" as it has taken you to read this far in Writing Under Pressure. After two rounds of revision, what remains must stand for a lot of thinking and some writing that is no longer visible in the final draft. But the paper has a substantial feel to it, representing more than it actually states as information or opinion. QUICK WRITING PROCESS's organic process enabled me to select for the best material, and to strip away excesses and inconsistencies in tone, style, and meaning. I see the main argument clearly, and it is expressed with some of the passion that I feel about it. It is also a paper I've worked hard over, and that gives me a sense of satisfaction as well. Any piece of writing can be improved, and most of all the one the writer has just finished. That's part of the writing blues. Years ago, a writer told me there was nothing worse than coming to the end of a book. She had never experienced writing blocks (certainly not the kind that John Steinbeck described with such anguish in Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters). But whenever she came to the end of a project, she suffered the writing blues. For some people, the intensity and involvement of writing makes finishing unbearable. Having devoted so much energy to the challenges, compromises, and struggles, the writer can't let go, even when other projects call for attention. It's not surprising that some people finish the job, turn in their paper or memo, or send off their manuscript, and then experience an awful restlessness that the writing could have been better. Writing is never "finished." Every generation "rewrites" the Bible to make it more "readable." We've seen with fascination the original version of Eliot Waste Land before Pound's editing. And there are classic examples of the writing blues: Kafka, Dickinson, and Hopkins repudiated or hoarded their writing, work we might never have known except for the intervention of the people involved in complicated relationships with them. Readers add, truncate, and interpret from one generation to the next, and then that accumulation of wisdom and folly is mixed into subsequent readings of those works as well. Can a writer know his or her intentions fully? Can intentions be imparted to readers, or is writing a kind of Rorschach test in which readers see only what they are prepared to see? What were the unfulfilled possibilities in the draft of Melville unfinished Billy Budd? As readers, we are grateful for what we have. As writers we can take some measure of reassurance from the fact that writing is one of the few good ways we have of finding out what we think, and of informing (or learning from) others. Writing doesn't give us a final answer; but it helps both writers and readers think, and so it is worth the imperfect effort, again and again. Finishing a piece of writing we have worked hard over and intend to present to an audience of one reader or many is scary. We may not want to do it. We may put it off; we may hope to make it better, first. But for certain kinds of writing--writing under pressure--it is necessary to finish and let go, in order to begin again with increased knowledge and skill, and higher expectations for both the process and the product. You can never do enough. Having finished my position paper on time, I wish now that I had transformed the opening paragraph to read more simply, more directly--something like this: "Although we can improve our students' writing skills if we use our resources wisely, an English competency exam would be destructive and self-defeating. . . ." This would immediately give the paper a positive, practical tone, rather than the slightly defensive tone it takes. I would also want to think about changing some of the questions in the second paragraph into statements, or at least explanations. I would make more room to explain my conviction that we must teach writing as a lifelong skill rather than a school-bound "competency." I would want to draw out the distinction between a neat, dull piece of writing, and a powerful ungrammatical one. (Is that clear? How many people can understand that point without having taught writing?) How can I hope to convince inveterate testers that there is another, perhaps better way to educate people? And who can I reasonably expect to agree with me that writing well is worth the extra effort and commitment, not only for each individual student, or for the papers in all our courses at Shakespeare College, but for all of us, as we try together to make our lives less disconnected, clearer, more empathic, more powerful? Too late. The paper is on the dean's desk. As I walk toward my office, I see some ways it might have been better. Perhaps it is only because it is done that I can see these possibilities. But it is as good as it could be under the circumstances. And what I've learned from writing it will help make my next piece of writing better. These writing blues are inevitable, but they diminish as your writing experience grows. One alternative was not to do the paper at all. There are people who have left projects unfinished, or abandoned finished ones not because of flaws in their reasoning, or weaknesses in their skill, but because they have made too much of what is really the natural recoil, the vulnerability following intense, personal effort. I prefer the example of Trollope: if he finished one novel in the middle of his daily writing session he began another. |
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