growth process

It is ironic to me that when I walked into this class last week we were assigned to write a blog. I am a bit technophobic and for me writing a blog is like diving into a quarry full of dark water. I don’t know where I am going or what I am doing because I have limited experience with it. But here goes hopefully I won’t have as much trouble with this as I did posting in Angel when I first started grad school.

Reading Elbow’s book is something I wish I had done my first semester back in school after thirty years. The curriculum I am in is writing intensive which is exactly why I chose it because like Elbow says “everyone in the world wants to write” (xi).

I feel like he is describing my writing process when he said the problem for most people with writing is the editing that goes on “at the same time as producing” (5). My writing in grad school has been soooooo painful for me because of this and also because I try to follow a conventional process for writing. Start with an idea, write a thesis statement, create an outline and then stare at the computer for hours because I don’t know what to say to get started. Elbow makes a point about this when he says, “how can you write the beginning of something till you know what it’s the beginning of” (26)? Obviously the thesis statements and outlines have usually never helped me get started because I always end up rewriting them after I finally figure out what my message is conveying.

My kids laugh at me because once I do get started it takes me hours to write one paragraph. It’s true. After researching some topic to death you’d think I could at least write a couple of sentences that would lead to some profound thing I wanted to write about.

Not a chance because as I have discovered after reading Elbow my constant searching for the right words, the writing and rewriting of the same sentence over and over only to realize all I did was reorganize the words will never lead to “good writing” because there is no flow or fluency. (I know this is a big run on sentence but I am trying to practice Elbow’s theory of writing without stopping.)

I did discover this on my own. A few times I have actually written something that appeared to write itself and upon inspection actually seemed to make my point. I guess that is because I let that voice in my head run without any self-control. This must be why I feel like I should record my thoughts when I am jogging my daily route. The thoughts in my head seem so fluent, insightful, and creative when I am running because I can’t edit them. When I get home and try to write them down I can’t do it because I can’t stop editing and all I do is stop and start.

Elbow’s idea that writing is “growing as a developmental process” makes sense to me. It is like training runners. I have been a cross country and track coach and know that to train runners you have to develop them individually from where they are physically and mentally. I can’t expect a runner to run well or without hurting himself if I haven’t first provided steps needed to condition his body to handle the stress of each foot strike. I know the athlete has to develop by practicing. Often my athletes will ask me why they are doing certain drills or why I make them do a mile warm up when they are only going to sprint 100 meters. Even though it makes no sense to them they have to give up their control and trust me that it will make them a better runner. After the season we sit down and brainstorm about what training they think was effective and what wasn’t.

As a coach I know my athletes can’t skip over any parts of the training or they will get hurt or not perform well. I can see from the reading that a writer goes through a similar conditioning process and to skip any part of the “growing” by jumping ahead to editing (before there is actually something to edit) is really a setback like an injury would be to an athlete.





So even though for this blog entry I didn’t do a very good job of practicing Elbow’s theory, I hope to train myself as I would my athletes because I really would like to see if his method works. It sure would beat starring at a blank computer screen for hours.