Don't Bother Me. I'm Processing.

One of the most difficult things for me to do as a writer is write. The process of producing an essay or article or any narrative is quite stressful. After reading several pieces for this class and Discourse Analysis, I realize that I’ve never really thought of writing as a process made up of several stages. For the most part, I’ve viewed writing as sitting down, writing a piece, and turning it in. No pre-writing, no drafting, no revising. I regularly edit while I’m writing, and it drives me crazy. When Weathers listed all those stages he goes through to produce a piece, I gawked at his neuroticism. And my jaw nearly hit the floor when he said, “In draft writing, I try not to think; rather I let my mind, unimpeded by too much conscious decision-making, do the work” (26). So his draft is a free write? That would mean that he would need to write several more drafts to untangle the first. !!

I tried free writing as my first draft for this blog post. I set my timer for ten minutes and let my fingers loose across the keyboard. Then I quickly began my old habit of editing: delete, retype, delete, retype. The timer was counting down, and my blood pressure was counting up. I rotated my head so that I couldn’t see the computer screen. My face reflected a painful wince as I kept telling myself to keep going; don’t look at the screen. Finally, when my alarm erupted in the sound of fire truck siren, I looked at the screen to assess the casualties. Bloody, squiggly lines were everywhere. Upon closer investigation, I realized why. Here is a sample of what I wrote:

s mpt am ossie/ Bit tje doscl[;ome tp wrote everudau os oam ossie/ jpw O cam toe om ,u ptjer ;ass wotj tjos/ O tjml tje [rpb;e, jas beem tjat O mever rea;;u voewed wrotomg as a [reacess/ O pm;u voew3d as a pme to,e sjpt lomd pf tjomg/ :ole wjem O wpm tje cpmtest om kirmopr jogj scjpp; O wpm wotj pme draft/ Tjat was ot/ amd fdrp, tjem pm tje [resssdire was tp wrote eaward woommomg ,ateroa; pm tje fsors5 sjpt @pw/  rea;oze tjat imto; mpw/ Bit Orf e,brace wroromt ats a [rcess tp p ;oberate ,ua cpmscopis amd tp a,ele lee[ gpomg/ Tp ,ale ,e fee; ,pre fpfmfodemt. tjem wdrotmomg cam amd wo;; be a ga,e cjamgomger  fpr  ,e fpr ,e/ P,ogpsj/ O lmpw o

My fingers weren’t even on the keyboard properly. Ugh.

One idea of Weathers that I totally dig is jotting down ideas and thoughts on index cards before you begin to formally write your paper. I like to think of this as composing on the go. If from the minute am I assigned a paper, I begin to note ideas and then organize them before I sit down to write, this might reduce my stress. Weather’s view is echoed in the Wyche piece when she says that the problem with waiting until the last minute to write is that ideas don’t usually magically appear at the last the minute. “Instead, they come when listening to others, while reading or dreaming, or in the middle of other activities” (44). I guess I just found myself a new ritual.