Sunday, October 09, 2005
Danger Will Robinson! (Rant alert)
Making progress on the rake. In fact, I can now go back to keeping track of word count. I don't seem to be going backward. I'm not fighting the changes that pop up, I'm just going with it and that seems to be working.
Read some stuff about writing today. Here's the thing, I've taken Rhetorical Theory, which is a grad school requirement for those who wish to teach one day. Just about all of my lit classes so far have included a huge dose of literary theory. I realize, of course, that none of this makes me an expert in the theory of teaching writing. Still, I've had to read a lot of the experts in the teaching of English. I found that each of the theorists seem to have little bits that seemed valid. As I read the theorists and read (and listen to) what writers have to say about writing, I can't help but be struck by the overwhelming number who think they have the answer and that what works for them must necessarily work for everyone else.
Many of these experts, teacher or writer, slyly imply that anyone who doesn't do it this way will be a failure. After all, Writer A has published 25 books! His process must be right. Or, professor B is an expert in learning and has taught thousands of English 101 students. Her textbook must have all the right tools, use them and you too may win a pulitzer prize, just like the authors whose excerpts appear in her text!
I'll be honest and say that I give more weight to the working writers (and I think there's still a huge flaw in most of their statements and advice). By and large, the professional teachers seem to have a vested interest in selling the textbook they wrote. I can still recall sitting in Rhetoric 587 and listening to my fellow students give their in depth reports on the textbook they'd studied. I kept thinking, but wait, I am a writer. I have sucessfully written and sold (at that time) four novels, and I know that none of this would work for me. None of the textbooks we reviewed relayed even a sentence about how writers ended up at the finished product (because, of course, it would not be the process being sold in the text). Ask a writer about writing and you're likely to hear something like this, "Writing is hard work. Most of the time the words do NOT flow and I spend most of my time fixing the crap I just wrote."
Sorry, but it doesn't matter if Writer A succeeds by heavily outlining before he writes a word. It's nice to know that, and it means that if inexperienced and not already multi-published Writer X hasn't written with an outline before, she ought to try it. But it doesn't mean that if the outline doesn't help that Writer X is doomed to failure as a writer.
Nope, if you don't outline, you're not doomed, particularly if you tried it and wasted more time trying to write the outline than you would have just writing and throwing away chapters that didn't work. Now, you might be doomed if, in fact, you happen to be a writer who needs to outline but doesn't. To succeed, A writer must learn if he's the kind that needs an outline. But what really dooms a writer to failure is not thinking about her writing and how to improve it.
