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| Transforming the Pressures Against Authentic Writing |
| The pressure of school, work, or profession often forces us to hold our common sense and experience in abeyance. We know better, but we don't have the time or the confidence to struggle for authentic writing. Part of the skill in applying QUICK WRITING PROCESS is to overcome those pressures within each situation that make good writing on time so difficult. Some of these pressures against writing are internalized. We think that we don't have anything to say, or that someone else can say it better, or that it really doesn't matter because no one is listening. Other pressures, imposed by an environment, result not from wisdom about communication, but from unexamined habits, false analogies, or illusions about efficiency. Every writer needs to acknowledge these pressures in order to transform them. By analyzing them from a writer's standpoint we provide a strong foundation for improving writing. Writing courses may make improvements possible through a structured environment and constructive criticism. But once a course is over, the intensity diminishes unless something has caught the individual writer on his or her deepest level of motivation. (That is why I encourage students to form subgroups during a term and ongoing groups at the end of a semester, as one way to ensure that the struggle to write well continues in a supportive environment.) If a student wrote one hundred pages in a semester, without attending a class, he or she would learn something useful about writing. But the solitary writer misses a public perspective on his or her writing, and loses the benefit and inspiration of exchanging views with others engaged in the same struggle. The discipline of writing three pages every day for three months would be instructive; but not many people can systematically improve their writing on their own. Books about writing usually gather rules and conventions. A few may even inspire a new attitude toward writing. But there are thousands of such books, and most disappear before anyone makes much use of them. Part of the trouble is our stance toward the whole process of learning to write. Writing is a frustrating business. It is also one of those skills we want everyone else to have, instantly. Teachers, supervisors, and colleagues all want better writing from their students, subordinates, and peers. But once we conceive of good writing as good thinking made public, and as a claim on our reader's thinking, we pull back, scaling down our expectations: "No one should be allowed to graduate until he or she can write a good cover letter"; or "Tell them what they want to hear"; or "Just get them to spell correctly." Yet writing is not learned in increments, and thinking clearly is not simply a matter of good intentions or hard work. That is why handbooks, courses, and workshops have not been widely successful in improving writing. Some people can learn that way, but even so, the question remains of whether they will continue to struggle to write well once the workshop, course, or book is finished. In writing classes, I ask people to read the chapters on the internal structure of an essay in Sheridan Baker The Practical Stylist. It is hard-edged in an old-fashioned sort of way, and seems to me a good summary of what the best handbooks have had to say. But I also ask people to read about freewriting (a timed, nonstop exercise to circumvent self-censorship), sharing, and the two different kinds of responses to writing ("reader-based," and "criterion-based") which Peter Elbow describes in Writing with Power. His focus on the struggle to write well, beyond the conventional (and more "teachable") issues of grammar and patterns of organization, invites the writer to take control of his or her own process. Writing is much more difficult to teach and to learn than most people realize because it represents so much that is personal about the individual writer: not only the capacity to share, but the many different reasons we might have for not wanting to make our thoughts and feelings clear. Writing Under Pressure is not a handbook for reference, but a system for application to familiar writing assignments. As the writer makes the system his or her own, it becomes an instinctive approach to process and product. Experience in using QUICK WRITING PROCESS makes it a personal skill, and that is why it can help where courses, workshops, or handbooks may not: the emphasis is on becoming an independent writer. There are, of course, other applications for QUICK WRITING PROCESS than those I will consider in the next several chapters. Speechwriting, for example, is vulnerable to the same pressures that complicate writing in organizations: there is the same pressure of audience, the same need for compression in form and content, and the same intention to elicit an immediate response. QUICK WRITING PROCESS can prepare and focus the speechwriter's efforts appropriately. Group writing projects, in gathering and integrating material efficiently, need to make the most of the differences among the people involved. The QUICK WRITING PROCESS timetable and agenda can organize such projects effectively. The basic system, as demonstrated in the first part of this book and applied in this second part, can be adapted to any kind of writing project. But before moving on to applications, there is a less visible, yet equally important benefit: by using QUICK WRITING PROCESS in your own writing you transform the way you read. |
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