“i never think
at all when i write
nobody can do
two things at the same time
and do them
both well”
-Don Marquis, Archy’s Life of Mehitabel, 1993
Before taking Advanced Composition
in my sophomore year I primarily looked at writing through an academic lens. I
was very focused on organization, paragraphing, analysis, and all the other
necessary elements of formal writing. The extent of my creative writing was
slim to nonexistent. If I ever did creative writing, it was always for a school
assignment that I considered dumb at the time. Writing was fun for me because I
succeeded at it, but I never wrote out of class sorely for my own pleasure.
When I started Advanced Comp and I saw all the non-academic pieces we would
have to compose, I remember groaning inside. I hardly considered myself
creative, so the task of having to create four personal pieces a quarter plus
short fiction, poems, and newspaper articles seemed daunting and chore-like.
Back then, my writing process was formulaic, precise, and quite frankly boring.
I would always have trouble writing enough because I would overthink what I
wanted to say before I had even written it out. The sentences I wrote were
always perfected before they even arrived on my paper. I overthought about
nearly everything I wrote. I would still edit a lot out at the end, but that
was more taking out ideas and chunks than actually changing the structure and
bones of my writing.
However, the more and more we wrote
creatively in Advanced Comp, the more fun I had and the less structured I was
while writing. Slowly, I gained confidence creatively as I realized that
writing personal pieces was like telling a story in my head and just writing it
down on paper play by play. As Marquis said, “i never think at all when i
write/ nobody can do two things at the same time/ and do them both well.” I
really began to relate to this quote after we wrote our first personal pieces,
in particular my piece using imagery to describe my favorite place, the pool. In
class we had talked about the madman, the architect, the carpenter, and judge.
I unleashed my inner madman for the first time during my pool piece. I didn’t
think when I wrote, I just poured everything out. Like never before, I had no
filter with what I wrote. I felt the pool; I was basking in the sun and I was
feeling the cold rush of the water on my burnt skin. My words just came onto my
page like word vomit. I felt like a sink faucet that couldn’t be turned off, my
ideas spitting out like flowing water. Now I find that my best ideas are the
ones my brain just dumps out without my thinking, like Marquis says. If I tried
to slow myself down and compose these craftily beautiful sentences, my ideas
wouldn’t be as
