Friday, September 27, 2013

"A Work in Progress" by Hiram McDaniels

“No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just
enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.”
― Karl Popper

I have a history of being a particularly mobile writer. In my earliest days as a self-proclaimed “novelist to-be,” I remember lying in the bathtub, holding a notepad over the water and scratching away at my latest idea; I remember writing at the kitchen table, shuffling my journal away when it was time for dinner; writing in bed after everyone else had gone to sleep, writing sprawled on the floor, writing on the bumpy bus ride to school, writing in the margins of my homework, writing on my arms when I had no other option and a writing mood struck. I never figured out how to write in the shower, but I was well on my way to a solution when I made the transition to the more stationary process of typing out my plans instead of scrawling them on every available surface. Despite this change, one thing that has remained constant is that I never

"Bacon and Writing" by Victoria Lemmings

“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

"Ivy League School" by Monica Cody

When I was a young child, I knew that I wanted to go to Harvard. To study what, I don’t know. I barely knew what Harvard was, other than th...