I. Writing Processes
Since at least the sixties, it’s been commonplace in writing studies to distinguish between the process of writing and the product. Until that time, compositionists argued, much writing instruction just described the text that students were supposed to produce, but gave little or no instruction on the process(es) writers might use to attain such a product. When scholars looked at how productive writers wrote, they expected to find considerable knowledge about the final product, and instead discovered that such writers engage in more “pre-writing” than student writers. In addition, this “pre-writing” involved trying to imagine various ways of approaching the problem (instead of, as students still tend to do, immediately beginning to write a first draft). This basic insight concerning the importance of process has been modified in a variety of important ways—the term “pre-writing” is misleading because much brainstorming happens during the course of writing, writing processes aren’t linear but recursive, some writers under some circumstances engage in very little revision, knowledge of generic conventions is useful, and the “process/product” distinction implies there is a single process. But aspects of that insight remain useful: although being aware of generic conventions is useful, simply knowing what the final product is supposed to look like does not enable one to create such a product. In the previous chapter, I argued that there are many products; in this one, I’ll try to give a similarly pluralistic sense about processes.
I have a hard time writing about writing process, though, as any advice about processes authors might use seems inevitably to turn into dictates about what single procedure writers must follow. For instance, when various scholars of composition started promoting the idea of “mental mapping” (a spatial diagram of the things a writer sees connected), many teachers took to requiring and grading such maps. Since mental mapping doesn’t work for all kinds of writers, students who had written a perfectly fine paper without having first done a mental map would then back-write the map, thereby obviating the whole purpose in requiring and grading the map. My son backwrites his drafts, as he can write a two or three page paper without first writing a draft or outline, but his teacher (with the perfectly legitimate goal of teaching students a more recursive writing process) requires them.[1]
Some writers can create and hold most of their argument in their heads, and therefore do all the drafting they need to do mentally. Such writers tend not to revise very substantially, more or less entirely skipping what most of us who do have a highly recursive process would identify as a true “first draft.” When I was an undergraduate, a woman who lived on my floor in the dorm would sit around the lounge watching people play bridge or hang out while she thought about her 10-12 page paper. Then, suddenly, she would get up and go type out her breath-takingly perfect final version. Requiring her to write a draft would have been silly. On the other hand, I later found out that she went on to graduate school, and had a tremendously difficult time when the paper assignments were much longer than what she had been writing in college—it was as though her mind could only hold a paper of a certain length. In her first year of graduate school, she had to learn an entirely different writing process, one that did involve writing things down before she was ready. To say that her writing process during undergraduate years was ineffective seems incoherent to me, but it seems eminently sensible to say that it stopped working for her.
While my writing process tends to be highly recursive, with my adding, deleting, moving, rewriting, or otherwise substantially changing large chunks of material until the last possible minute, I have written some things in very nearly one sitting. There are texts—reports, emails, paper comments—that have to be written quickly, with no time for multiple versions. So, while I acknowledge that there are times and situations in which one can and should try to create a product that will require little revision, I am, on the whole, deeply skeptical of the “know exactly what you want to say before you start writing” process. While many people swear by it, it seems to me to correlate strongly to being unable to finish book projects. It seems to work extremely well for texts under 5000 words; as the texts get longer it seems to get riskier. It also seems to correlate to “binge” writing (discussed below). Certainly, writing before one really knows exactly what one wants to say means that one will write a lot of stuff that turns out to be irrelevant, incoherent, and possibly outright worthless, but that simply means that a writer who uses a process heavily dependent on revision has to feel comfortable editing. S/he also has to be comfortable writing things that are obviously flawed, and some people can’t give themselves permission to do so.
If one is tied to a “know what you’re going to say before you begin writing” (what many people call the “thesis-driven” approach) and it’s working, then it’s a useful process. If, however, it used to work, but it no longer is, then one should try a different one. That may seem so obvious an insight that it needn’t be said, let alone repeated, but this is the specific process to which I find a large number of scholars almost irrationally committed, not only continuing to advocate it although it isn’t working for them, but requiring it of all of their students. When I advocate being willing to engage in what compositionists have long called “writing to learn,” people committed to the thesis-driven method often insist that writing to learn is inefficient and wastes time. They have perfectly logical arguments as to why the thesis-driven method should be more efficient, and why writing to learn must be bad, but there is no actual evidence that a writing process heavily dependent on substantial revision correlates to a longer writing process, and certainly not to less output.[2] In fact, my experience is much like Douglas Powell, who says of the students with writing blocks with whom he works at a university mental health clinic: “Many of those afflicted by writing performance anxiety have no trouble putting together lengthy outlines of the thesis they are not writing” (803). And, of course, a recursive writing process that results in an article or chapter, even if to get that material one generated a lot of unused prose, is actually far more efficient than one that results in no prose at all.
In fact, sitting and thinking about exactly what one wants to say can be a subtle form of procrastination—that some of the people most adamant about this requirement are people for whom the strategy is not working just adds to my confusion. The important question about any writing process is not “has it ever worked?” or “should it work?” or “what, in the abstract, is the most efficient writing process?” but the much simpler question: is it working? If it’s working—if the thesis-driven process is enabling a person to be productive, then they should use it; if it isn’t, they should try something else.
People committed to the thesis-driven process, but for whom it clearly is not working, or who have students for whom it is not working, tend not to blame the process. Instead, they blame themselves for not making the process work. They seem singularly prone to attribute their failure to produce to their own moral failings: laziness, stupidity, sloth, or any of the other deadly sins that seem even remotely relevant. Sometimes this verbal self-flagellation works; but, unless that’s part of the fun, it seems to me that writing is painful enough, and one needn’t add self-name-calling to the process.
It sometimes seems to me that they stick with this writing process because they know no other; at other times it seems to be a kind of magical thinking. In the section on procrastination, I’ll talk more about what happens when our sense of self-worth is on the line each time we write (the short answer is that it isn’t good) but here I will say that good writers, in my experience, produce a lot of bad writing. Douglas Powell, who works at a university mental health clinic, comments that “Doctoral students who have writer’s block are convinced that what they see themselves producing is utterly inadequate, far below what they aspire to, even though their professors are perfectly happy with the work they see” (805); it may not be that the writing is really good when the student thinks it’s bad, but that the professor and student assess it differently because the professor sees it as “good enough.” It’s good enough for a first draft, or the beginning of a project, or even good enough for a dissertation.
Writers who won’t let themselves write crap just don’t write much. People who end up in academics, especially in the humanities, are often skilled writers, and that can be an important part of our self-image, so we don’t want to produce a bad draft. I’m a good writing teacher because I am a bad writer, and I always have been. But this means that I’ve learned the processes for getting drafts out and making bad writing better.
There is an ambiguity in what it means to be a good writer, and we are still infected with a sloppy kind of Romanticism—that good writing comes from a moment of divine inspiration. Thus, many people assume that “good” writers are people who have more of those moments of inspiration and, therefore, produce more good writing. And while that may be intermittently true—there have been a few pieces of writing that I wrote relatively quickly and with few substantial revisions, and I have heard of writers who seem to do that on a regular basis—for the most part “good” writers are people whose end products are good. Like good sausage, good writing can have a fairly ugly process.
Below are pages from relatively late drafts of the manuscript that turned into Fanatical Schemes. The arrows to the sides are color-coded—I use pink for sections that need rewriting for stylistics reasons, orange to mark areas with grammatical problems, green for sections that need additional research or citations, and blue for sections with significant flaws in my argument. I also try to color-code my marginal comments: I use pink, orange, or black for comments to myself about what’s wrong with what I have; red or black for revisions; green for comments about needing additional research or citation; blue or black for comments about what’s wrong with the argument. I print things up frequently, and start getting the paper bound when it’s over ten thousand words (so I don’t lose pages). Obviously, this system is far from perfect—if I find myself with time to edit, and the wrong color pens, I use whatever I have. Sometimes I start writing a comment that describes the problem and end up trying out prose to solve the problem (although, on the whole, I try to separate the critical and revision processes). Sometimes I have made so many changes to the beginning of the text that I don’t finish revising until I’ve created a new version.
This image is from the beginning of what was going to be the introduction to my previous book. Much of this material did end up in the book--even some of the sentences did--but not as the beginning of the text. Notice that I first went through and messed with it at the sentence level before I realized the issues were global. I moved it all to a file called "stuffcutfrom"--once I decided I did need some of it, I then moved it back, but not where it had been.
This was how I marked up the page in late October of 2007; the manuscript was supposed to go to the press in late December of that year or early January of the next, so I was still making substantial revisions at the level of organization (note that I was considering moving part of that argument to a different chapter), and had notes to myself about different ways I could take the argument (I didn’t).
Classical rhetoric describes five offices (or canons): invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery. Invention is, as the name implies, the process of coming up with one’s stance on the issue, as well as one’s general argument. Arrangement concerns the order and proportion of the parts of one’s argument. Style concerns level of diction (that is, how formal one’s tone is), how metaphorical, and generally sentence-level issues. Memory and delivery were (and are) important for oral delivery, but less so for written texts.
The canons used to be taught as a fairly linear process, and that’s perfectly sensible for an era when revising meant retyping or recopying a text from the beginning. When paper was expensive, writing to learn was a luxury. With word processing, it’s easier to make changes to an early part of a text, and so most writers seem more willing to do so. The thesis-driven writing process was a tremendous time-saver when it meant saving one’s self the time necessary to retype a paper, article, or book manuscript; newer technologies have relieved that pressure.
Since there is, in my experience working with students and colleagues, such a strong correlation between people who have writing blocks and who are committed to the thesis-driven process, much of my point in this section is to argue for being open to a recursive writing process, one that does not move neatly from invention to arrangement to style to delivery. Sometimes problems in arrangement or style can only be resolved by reinvention. For instance, deciding what proportion of one’s texts should be spent explaining basic terms is, implicitly, a decision about whether one is writing for an expert audience, and so the question of whether to expand a chapter may involve one in rethinking something conventionally described as part of invention. I have noticed that I (and my students) tend toward predication errors and excessive use of coordinating conjunctions when I am unclear on the causal relations among my various topics. Revising my sentences to be grammatically correct and more varied (a “style” concern) requires, therefore, that I reinvent my argument at the deepest level.
There are various ways of generating drafts, and also various ways to edit one’s writing in order to realize what (and how much) needs to reinvented or reorganized. What seems to me shared among those strategies is that they insist on separating the processes involved in generating from those involved in critiquing. And this separation seems consistently productive, in my experience both as a writer and a writing teacher. Basically, as you read through your own writing, you identify weaknesses—at the levels of argument, research, organization, clarity, correctness—and simply note them. You do not, during that reading, try to solve them. Sometimes I use different colored post-its or highlighters for different kinds of concerns, sometimes I write in different colors, sometimes I put the criticisms into footnotes, and sometimes I use the “comment” function (as you can see above, sometimes I do all of those things).
Then, I go back through and try to solve some of the problems—it seems to be more efficient to try to “batch” my work. That is, I will go through and try to work with a few places that require additional research, even if they are in different sections of the same chapter. I usually work on one chapter at a time, a strategy that gets complicated when I solve the structural problems in one chapter by throwing some material into another. Sometimes it looks like one of those cleaning methods that involves making one room neater by throwing all the mess into another, but it eventually works out.
On the grounds that there is no point in worrying about sentence-level issues when those sentences may get tossed, some people work from larger to smaller issues—that is, from issues of research and argument down to the sentence, leaving that level of revision till the very last. And every book I have written left my desk with problems still unsolved, some of which were noted by readers, but most of which were not. We are not always the best judges of the merits of our own work—not everyone will even notice the flaws that we think are outrageously obvious.
One can loosely categorize writing processes into three categories: binge, constant, and block. Binge writers have long periods of time between writing, and long periods of time while they write—sometimes days or weeks. It is a common image of the writer, and very Romantic: the frowsty person in a bathrobe in the middle of a stack of coffee cups, fast food containers, and crumpled paper, on the second or third day with little or no sleep. It’s a writing strategy that works perfectly well for many undergraduates, and even a large number of graduate students. Quite a few books were written that way. But this is specifically the writing process that doesn’t seem to correlate very well with long-term consistent scholarly production, and it’s rough on everyone.
The small number of studies that have been conducted on scholarly productivity come down clearly on the side of constant writing. Some people set aside a certain amount of time every weekday, as little as an hour or two, and reserve that time for their scholarship. People with families sometimes pick the hour or two before anyone else gets up (as early as 4 a.m.) or after everyone has gone to bed (starting to write at 10 p.m. or later), some people get to their offices early and work before the campus gets busy (such as 7-9 a.m.). They shut the door, don’t answer the phone, ignore email, and resist the call of social networking. The studies on this subject were mostly conducted on scholars in article fields; I rarely meet anyone in a book field who can make an hour or two a day work well for them as far as writing. People describe that it takes them about 45 minutes just to get back in to the groove; people working on books tell me (and this is my experience) that it’s difficult to be very productive with blocks of time less than three hours (the exception seems to be editing, which can be done in short bursts).
In block writing, one sets aside a block of time on a regular basis, with the difference that the amounts of time are longer and therefore necessarily more spread apart. As with the constant writing process, this time has to be protected, and it’s much harder to protect large blocks of time. The longer apart one sets the blocks of time, the longer it takes to get back up to speed; in a perfect world, one would set aside a three- to four-hour block of time twice a week. Being able to do that, however, requires various time management strategies (discussed later), and is simply impossible in some jobs (specifically ones in which there are heavy service commitments).
I will confess that I was a binge writer throughout graduate school, but that my most productive periods have been times when I have managed block writing. Given my propensity for time-intensive teaching practices, I am not good at protecting blocks of time during the semester, and have not been for years. Hence I generally do not get much writing done during the semesters, and I don’t expect to; instead, I try to get editing, reading, and brainstorming done during the semester (all of which can be done in small blocks of time). I reserve summers and “breaks” for writing—in other words, my writing process is a kind of bingey block, or blocky binge.[3]
[1] In addition, whenever I describe a particular process of writing, at least one person makes a point that they don’t use that process. While that can be a useful point if someone is presenting the single method that all of God’s children must use, it’s more or less orthogonal to what I am trying to say—of course not everyone uses every process. If the person’s point is that no one should use that process because s/he doesn’t (especially if it’s someone with a writing block), I find myself thoroughly muckled as to how to respond. If a writing process works for you, use it; if it doesn’t, don’t.
[2] Probably the most famous text advocating writing-to-learn is Peter Elbow’s still helpful Writing Without Teachers. Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day takes his basic insights and applies them to the dissertation process.
[3] As will be discussed in the section on time management, my writing process means that I must protect my summers. I have not taught summer school since graduate school.
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