Loose Heuristics

A heuristic is a mental shortcut, or what Rose calls "a rule of thumb." It's a concept I for some reason struggle to fully grasp, at least when it comes to writing. This is likely because my early writing education was not built on rules of thumb, or maleable concepts. What teacher said was fact, and what was fact was unchangeable. The idea of writing 'against' the rules is still new to me. Blogging is new to me. Writing for me is new. I have always written with purpose, and never my own. I am not a journaler, a blogger, or even much of a free writer. I write all the time, but at some one else's request. At work I write to 'clients'-- prospective parents looking at me as the gatekeeper to their child's education. (Which I am). At home I write to my husband to fill him in on things--this too actually happens at work, we both keep gmail chat open all day and write all throughout the day about office gossip, shopping reminders, cute internet nonsense etc. But even these situations have rules.

I am the type of person that carefully edits every text I send because I think autocorrected words and lame language are embarrassing...even when sent to my husband. -- Who will text me while he knows I am editing a text to make fun of me for editing. I am not talking punctuation necessarily, but spelling and tense. I don't criticize others for 'text talk' but I hate receiving an email that is written in shorthand. I am not a teacher or a grammar nut, I just like for their to be some order, some rules that all follow in certain situations.

So while I identify most with 'Mike' from Rose's essay, I have never thought of myself as a writer with a "block" problem. My main problem with my writing really happens in the prewriting phase: once I pick and idea I stand by it...to the death. Even if it is tedious, even if I spend three extra hours just trying to make sense of a nonsensical first paragraph and thesis, even if the idea sucks. Fortunately, I learned this about my own writing early enough on that I took steps to abate it. So while I still struggle and carry on with a topic that is ultimately not a perfect picture of my thoughts on a given subject, I at least can recognize that fact and make tweaks to things to find a "back door" for my set thesis statement. I look at what I decided I wanted to say, try 50 different ways of saying it and then finally find some sliver or semblance of acceptable truth in that statement and then start over from scratch. I will have 10 pages written, but each page has 20 separate "paragraphs" that is really the same thesis just written in a slightly better or much worse way than my original thought. I am a Mike, but I do not have a block...