Waiting for the Nibble and Expecting it Will Come

"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say," writes the poet William Stafford, "as he (sic) is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them." For me, this eloquently describes the philosophy of the  "write to learn" school of writing to which I belong.  My membership began when in the early eighties when good fortune brought me to the University of New Hampshire for a graduate writing degree, and I signed up for Donald Murray's nonfiction workshop.  At the time, Don had just given a talk to a conference on the pedagogy of sentence-combining (yes, there was a conference on such an arcane subject because sentence combining was a new--and short-lived--religion among some writer teachers back then)--and the title of his talk was "Write Badly to Write Well."  I had come to school to write well, and it never occurred to me that writing badly had anything to do with it. Don gave us a copy of his speech, which I read with the dawning sense that this would change my writing life.  It did. But it also changed my teaching life, too.  After that, one of the first things I would often ask my writing students after an in-class freewrite, or an essay assignment was this:  "What surprised you? What did you say that you didn't expect to say?"

In the many years since then, I've preached  "write to learn" to generations of students, but naturally there's resistance.  There are conditions that make discovery possible in writing: a willingness to write badly, to withhold judgment, and to "write before you write," or generate material before drafting.  School culture, with is focus on product over process and endless waves of assignment deadlines, privileges efficiency over exploration. Students often don't have the luxury of withholding judgement and writing badly.  They have to turn in one paper and move onto the next.   It's also true that some writing situations don't lend themselves to discovery.  When you already know what you think about something, then why not just get it down?

In the fifty or so years that Donald Murray, Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, Donald Graves and others promoted write to learn, the philosophy has been absorbed into writing studies.  Textbooks encourage freewriting and discovery drafts and suggest that a thesis is always tentative, but I sense the heart isn't really in it.  Now we teach reflection instead of invention ("how did you develop this draft, and how might you have done it differently?"); meta-cognitive writing  is surely important given what we know now about transfer of knowledge, but with its focus on how a thing was made it often sidesteps the motive for making it. For some of us, the seductive power of writing--the thing that makes us work through all the problems it presents--is the belief that we will discover what we didn't know we knew.  This experience is what makes turns many composition students into English majors or at least people who are drawn to writing rather than repelled by it.

 There are ways to navigate around the obstacles to teaching write to learn, including giving students time to write, demonstrating how exploratory writing can be used to think something through at anytime during the writing process, and withholding evaluation (grades) on work in progress. But maybe it begins by simply cultivating the expectation that committing words to screen or paper is not nailing things down but opening them up.  This is what Stafford calls "receptivity."  When we write we are like fishers, always waiting "for the nibble," and full expecting it will come.