I used to be really bad at allowing myself to write
poorly long enough to keep a steady journal or diary. Writing down thoughts and emotions used to be such a chore
taking up time and brainpower. But then I started journaling every night and my
inner critic started chiming in less and less until it became completely
quiet. Now I have to dig it up and
shake it awake to write academic papers and newsletters for work. It’s rusty now and can make writing for
public audiences whiplashing, crashing to a stop every five words. It’s the
scholarly work that’s harder now. I’m good at penning my emotions. Even though
it used to be the other way around.
So I enjoyed the in-class writing exercises last
week remembering an old room and getting creative with a starter sentence. Being
told to write poorly also made it exciting. It immediately made the activity more enjoyable. Leaving that sentence fragmented and
that comma misplaced allowed me to focus on the more important task of arranging
my thoughts into words.
Admittedly, though, this can lead to very
disjointed thoughts. When I reread
some of my old journal entries, I often get annoyed with myself because I can
no loner understand what I was trying to say in that moment. Maybe that’s an important point. Writing poorly in order to empty your
brain of those thoughts as quickly as possible is therapeutic, yes, but it
serves the present not the future.
Maybe in order for written work to serve the future, an inner critic
must speak and the writing must falter and the thoughts must be reread,
rethought, changed, and rearranged. Troy was not built in a day, and I’m guessing neither the
Lord of the Ring series nor the Chronicles of Narnia were either.
I agree, Rebecca. We need our internal critics to help us make sense out of the "bad" writing, to see if there's anything worth shaping into something for an audience. Another way to think about it is that there is writer-based prose and reader-based prose. Writer-based prose is primarily written for you. It tends to short-circuit the need to spell things out for a reader, and in doing so you get to focus on where the writing leads you. Reader-based prose, obviously, is written with another in mind; it must be easy to follow in ways the writer-based prose isn't--it must have a sense of purpose and direction, and it must not assume that the reader knows what the writer knows. Some stuff needs to be explained. Why not just skip to the reader-based prose? Because you deal away the ace in your hand: the way writing, if you let it, will lead you past your first thoughts into new ideas, fresh ways of seeing things. That's why I love writing.
ReplyDelete