Regifting

Trevor Smith, on of my close friends shared this gold nugget of inspiration with me not too long ago and I thought I'd pass it along to some people who might appreciate it.  Occasionally, if the mood of a story allows, I'll listen to this: Rainy Mood.  For an even more interesting musical experience, combine with: Godot - The Fragrance of Dark Coffee.  The Result is: --->

Writing Aloud

It's not uncommon to encounter someone talking to themselves and when they realize they've been noticed, offer the explanation, "I was just thinking out loud."  The readings for this week got me thinking about how this practice of thinking aloud is so common and acceptable while taking a similar approach with writing is so rare.
I consider myself a practiced writer, fully able to succeed at the college level, but I'm also somewhat of a result of the product focused approach to teaching writing.  In the entirety of my high school career, I can't recall ever being told to learn as I write, or to focus on my own writing process.  I was frequently told to examine the writing of others, pull out themes, symbols, and images, but there wasn't any time left for concentrating on the act of writing.
Somehow, I survived this instruction and ended up with the writing process I have now, a writing process that is both recursive and filled with discovery.  This discovery is present in all my writing, but seems easiest to find in fiction.  With a creative writing piece, I start typing with an empty page and only a vague awareness of what comes next, I am more in pursuit of a feeling, a sense of rightness, than any specific plot or series of events.  As I proceed with the piece, I find myself surprised at where I end up, nudged in new directions by my own characters.  For me, this act crystallizes the idea of learning through writing.
Because of my own experience, I feel confident about encouraging others to practice this "writing aloud" method in their own writing.

Writing or Writing

As I continue to work on my writing memory, I can feel myself changing gears and the way I understand and interact with this piece.  Originally, it was just an in class exercise, similar to countless other in class exercises I've done, a scribbled down account of some dusty memory, jumbled up and only half remembered.  While talking through what I'd written, new details oozed out of cranial crevices (stickers of crazy bloody shot eyes, twist ties, Cat's Eye).  As I went back and typed up the memory, expanded it out and then edited it back, I could feel the shapeless cloud of the original memory solidify into a mass of details and feelings.  It became a mass crafted and given form by the words set onto the page.

My writing process.

Now, I had a sense of white this piece was, what it would turn out to be.  It was just an account of something that happened to me.  I'd been writing stuff like this since Mrs. Powers's first grade class.  When we went back to these drafts in pairs, I got my draft back with comments like, "show don't tell," "love this image," and "be more specific."  I was surprised, not because I was unfamiliar with that kind of feedback, but because I was so accustomed to seeing those exact phrases on my fiction pieces.  Something clicked.  After that, I thought about the draft differently.  It jumped the gap between my Teaching/English Literature classes and my Creative Writing classes, landing squarely in the land of creative non-fiction.