Writing 200 Blog Post 10 - Sharing

Prompt: Write about your experiences of sharing your written work with others. Have you been in a writing group before? Would you deem that experience a success—or not? Under what conditions is sharing your writing with others a positive experience? When has sharing your writing with others proved to be miserable—and what made it so?

I've never been in a writing group before, and I haven't shared my work with many people. However, I have had a few experiences in this realm that left me neither miserable nor dying to get my work out into the world. As I've said in a few previous blog posts for this class, I write mostly as a creative outlet for myself, not to share my work with others.

I have submitted a few pieces I thought were great to magazines and contests—I did that a few times in high school, I should say. Looking back on what I thought was my best work, it's clear to me why the work was rejected. They're serviceable, for the most part, but nothing as special as I thought they were. Especially looking back on the poetry I wrote as a freshman in high school, I'm part embarrassed and part amused. That experience may have made me a bit more cautious about sharing my work in that way, but I was never very inclined to anyways. It's certainly made me more critical of my own writing, or at least more skeptical when I think I've got something profound down on paper—I know that in a few years. might look back on it and cringe.

That said, I have had some positive experiences sharing my work with family or close friends, and I always enjoy receiving peer editing on my academic work. It's sometimes difficult for me to accept the flaws in my writing, but that's something I've worked on a lot over the years and I think I've gotten much better at taking constructive criticism. One reason is that I've come to understand the importance of the rhetorical situation, particularly the role of the audience. I can have an amazing idea and amazing writing, but if that idea isn't conveyed to real people through the writing, neither of them is doing much good.

Overall, I'm happy keeping my writing to myself. In a way, it proves to me that I can create something I enjoy without seeking praise for it. But when I do choose to share it (or when I'm required to), it's usually a positive experience that makes me understand how to make myself more clearly understood.

Writing 200 Blog Post 9 - Life

Note: This was dashed off without the intent of being a blog post, but I thought—in keeping with the prompt for this week—that I could step out of my comfort zone and share it anyway. I'm still in the honeymoon phase in which I think this is brilliant and beautiful, so if it's incoherent I apologize.

I am the all-consuming well of life. I am the chasm waiting to swallow the innocent and destroy them. I am empty, cold, unfeeling. I am ravenous and I am infinitely patient.

You are the child stumbling around, ready to fall in at any moment and be swallowed up to fall for years and years, the light growing dimmer as time passes in a rush. You will forget the faces of your parents, the name of your dog, the sun. You will forget all this and scrape at the passing walls, clawing off chunks of mortar and trying to fit them together, demented into believing they are a puzzle for you to solve, that they can provide some meaning. You will learn to live this life wholeheartedly, bumping into people along the way, spending some time with them before you drift apart. You’ll distract yourself with them and with your jagged puzzle pieces, never quite realizing what you’re missing. And then you will hit the water.

Suddenly you’ll be drowning, drawing water through your lungs, experiencing the suffocating grasp of its slender arms. But in that moment of clarity and dread, you won’t long for the life you know. The chunks of stone will fall from your hands, a life’s work scattered and irreplaceable, and you’ll feel nothing. You’ll remember, suddenly, the smell of the grass, the feeling of the warm sunlight on your back. And as your vision fades to black your last sight will be that infinitesimal speck at the top, growing once again until it encompasses your field of view and swallows you whole. You’ll feel like you’re flying, reversing that sinking sensation that’s stuck with you since the fateful fall. 

And you’ll be home again. You’ll hear your parents’ voices asking if you’re okay, asking what happened. “I fell down,” you’ll say. Maybe you’ll start to cry. They’ll comfort you, find a bandage for your skinned knee and your cut palms, and carry you back inside. You’ve already started to forget that dreamlike time when you were falling through the darkness. The scars from clinging so tight to those sharp, cold rocks remain in your hands, but you’re home. You’re safe. You are a child in the arms of a mother. Your whole life, warm and full and bright, lies ahead. And right now it’s time for dinner.

Writing 200 Blog Post 8 - Process

Blog Reflection: Think about the process you personally use to accomplish something: eating breakfast, driving home, doing laundry, or making cookies. Write a defense of that process as the best, most logical approach. What are the implications of using this particular process?

When I drive the 70-odd miles to my home in Corvallis, I always take Highway 99. I-5 is the first option that pops up when I input my address into my navigation app—it's about 2 minutes shorter—but interstates are a blight on the earth. Even here, where they rarely expand beyond four lanes, the flat, straight, boring strips of asphalt studded with exits and truck stops never fail to strike a note of depression into my soul—or to almost lull me to sleep behind the wheel.

Highway 99, on the other hand, is a beautiful road in almost any condition. It cuts through farmland and orchards, through small towns (where the speed limit drops to 25, a minor and worthwhile annoyance.) And it never expands beyond the same two lanes—also an annoyance when I'm stuck behind a slow-moving car, but not a deal-breaker.

What's more, my route back home via 99 is actually simpler than taking the interstate. It involves fewer turns—I can count the number on my fingers—and I can almost drive it without navigation now. 

This process means that I get home about 2 minutes later, the few times a year that I drive there. It means I see a little more beauty in my day. But beyond these aspects of the commute, the simple act of driving the same route every time means that there's a ritual associated with the trip. When I drive that route, I know I'm coming home— and in a way, both directions feel like coming home now. This familiarity has become an important part of the drive, and it means that this process is more than just an avoidance of the evil freeway—it's also seeking out the positive experience of driving on 99.

Writing 200 Blog Post 7 - Being a Writer

I am a recovering writer.

For years I thought of myself as a writer, destined for that life, and framed my current life through that lens. And because I didn't really write all that much, that lens made me see myself as inadequate—how can one be a writer without writing? I couldn't, and now I'm realizing that's okay. 

There's a sentiment that's common (and controversial) in the running community, which I found in writing as well with a Google search, that all it takes to be a runner (or a writer) is to run (or write). Though I have neither the desire nor the energy to tell other people what they are or aren't, this definition simply doesn't work for me. "Runner" and "writer" are nouns, not verbs. They're statements of who I am, not statements of what I do. I think of myself as a runner because  I have committed to running to a high degree and for a long period. Barring schoolwork, it occupies the longest part of my day. I also bike occasionally, but that doesn't make me a cyclist. I sleep and eat every day without defining myself as an eater or a sleeper. Nor does scribbling the occasional short story or poem—in my estimation—make me a writer.

In his famous speech, Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre said that "In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait." This relates to the existentialist idea that the actual existence of anything—including human beings—precedes and defines its "essence." That is to say, my actions and character don't follow from "human nature," but my actions define my nature. This line of thinking results in a radical understanding of responsibility, as people are at their core choosing at every moment what to do and therefore who to be. From this point of view, defining oneself based on feelings—like the feeling that I could be a writer, or that I'm predisposed to be one—is dishonest if those feelings aren't backed up by action.

And not only is drawing identity from an interest that's held so loosely inauthentic, but it also leads to a self that is split in far too many directions. "We are what we repeatedly do," as the saying goes, but if every action I take becomes an identity then I am no one in particular, my being spread too thin between everything I want to be, imagine I could be, or think I ought to be. If I can't discard the chaff and define who I am, my existence is lost in a homogeneous mixture of every action, wonderful and mundane.

I'm not going to stop writing completely, though as I transition to a Kinesiology major I do anticipate doing it less. However, I'm going to let go of the burden of disparity between my misplaced self-definition and my actions. In doing so, maybe I'll find more frequently the freedom to write for no one and for nothing.

Writing 200 Blog Post 6 - Drive

What do I want to do with my life?

This is a question everyone is expected to think about, and to some degree answer. I've certainly spent my share of time on it while trying to decide where to go to college and what to study, as well as in the year I've been in college—during which I've changed majors twice. But I never seem to find or even really approach an answer.

I admire people who are here for a reason, maybe one they've known for years. Whether they're my fellow English majors last year who seemed far more driven to find a spot in the field than me, or our sworn enemies the STEM majors, who typically have a far more direct path from college to career. I wish I had this mentality, but I've never experienced it.

Nevertheless, I've always had the sense that somehow I'll find my way after college. It's wavered from time to time, but never dissipated. I can't say whether this is misplaced ego or a healthy level of self-confidence. Either way, it helps my mental state. Maybe that's okay.

Or maybe it's not. Should college—and life—be evaluated on a cost-benefit basis? There's merit to the idea, though my gut tells me no. Even if my priorities aren't related to the things money can buy directly (I've never been one to fantasize about having seven cars or a house too big for a dozen people), there's something to be said for the security and the time that it allows for indirectly. If I had a million dollars right now, I don't know that I'd be happier, but I'd be under less stress. 

Then again, a person can have a career direction without being hyper-focused on money; the aforementioned English majors, for example, especially those who still want to be novelists and playwrights and journalists. The world needs those people, and I respect their drive. 

I suppose what I want to know is if having these enormous overarching life goals will actually increase my quality of life. If I attain them, will I be content? And if so, is that contentment better than what I have now? Is this contentment or settling?

Maybe I'll figure it out someday.

Writing 200 Blog Post 5 - Success

How do you define success in terms of writing? When you finish a writing assignment and call it good? When you are evaluated in a positive way by a reader? When you are published? When the writing goes smoothly, painlessly, even though no one else has ever read what you’ve written?

 It's interesting to encounter this question in this class since my cross country team was also recently discussing it. I don't think I've ever really defined success in writing, as I've never attached goals to it (other than performance in a writing class.) This has made my writing process remarkably stress-free, as I can't fail if I have no goal, but it's also meant that I have little motivation to write a lot of the time.

Nevertheless, I enjoy it when I write something I like to read. If anything, my standard for success, to the degree it exists, is simply whether I consider my own writing good. The complete subjectivity (and biased judge) probably wouldn't be the best for someone with real aspirations in the writing world, but since I don't have those it works for me.

Looking at this answer, I'm also struck by how similar it is to my response in the running context. Perhaps this says something about me as a person, that I have the tendency to make snap judgments about myself and take them as gospel. It likely isn't the most healthy way to define success, but it feels like something engrained in who I am. Perhaps I need to set more goals and work towards them, but the prospect of failing objectively rather than just in my own eyes is rather daunting.

Success is such an ephemeral thing anyways, with each successive win being overshadowed by the next big thing—does it matter if I define it with numbers or words or just with an intangible feeling? I don't think it does for my writing life, at least; I'm content not to be read or published, and the way I do things now has worked so far. If my personality and my priorities change drastically, perhaps I'll take another look at it. But for now, I'm happy to delete my work if I hate it and look back on it fondly every once in a while if I don't.

Writing 200 Blog Post 4 - Incoherence

Note: Just messing around with stream of consciousness / free writing. Don't take anything too seriously.

Dangling real estate, molly-coddled mouths

An insipid insinuation, birth and death of a nation

Integumentary, integral, grating ears like tin-roof timber howls

Fingers pointing, missing the point, sharpened to a point

Raise the stakes and thrust them through the hearts

Of the vampires you imagined so long ago

Who every so often creep from your sleeping brain

And leap the stain on the wall to crawl over the ceiling, 

Feeling the real world, fingers unfurled and pointing

Disjointing

Eenie, meenie, minie, moe

Shall the world forever go

Traipsing in a festal gown

Round a lawn that's turning brown

Running faster every minute

Never pausing, for infinit

y?

No.

In the moss-green automobiles we choke, the smoke surrounds us

Bounds us

Gives us eyes to see our doom, impending through the smoggy gloom and 

Drowns us

In inescapable, insoluble,

Incoherence.

A game of checkers, ham and cheese, the answer

Must lie somewhere in this pile of discarded microwaves 

Mattresses, mufflers, milk-cartons, mittens

Somewhere in this infinite library of babbling Babel

Is a phrase in a language no one reads

Knit by chance into the heel of a sock, worn, discarded, forgotten

Longing but unable to scream "STOP" and halt the world 

For just a second in her frenzied dances

And explicate the circumstances

But. That's just a theory, after all.

And if the frogs end their ponderous battle in the creek

Perhaps I'll test it, burn it, let it rest

Perhaps I'll lie down and look for answers in the clouds and the trees

They're as likely there, after all,

As in every word the human hand ever wrote

And maybe we've written enoug

Writing 200 Blog Post 3 - Audience

You’ve read several writers who are exploring the role of the audience in writing. What do you think? In your own writing, what considerations have you made for the audience and how has that shaped what you’ve written? Feel free to provide specific examples from your writing, as well as relying on the essays you’ve read this week.

This week of readings has been interesting for me because, though I've obviously heard about how writers should consider our audience, I've never put much thought into it. For me, writing is much more a work of poesis, as Elbow writes, than an act of communication. I certainly shape that poesis to the constraints of an assignment or a professor's stylistic preferences in an academic setting, but in my other writing—even journalism, which on reflection should involve a decent amount of audience analysis—I've never intentionally bent my content or even my style to anything more than a general reader (for example, editing for clarity and to define terms people may not know.)

This week will definitely make me reconsider this gap in my writing process. The perspective I like the most of those we've read is Steinbeck's advice to write for an audience of one person who shares the characteristics of those you want to reach. It seems to me that this practice could add another layer of individuality to the writing and deepen the connection to readers by being personal, not shaped to the whims of a generic audience. I know that one element of strong writing I lack is a distinctive voice—I think so, at least—so this way of thinking about audience could remedy that somewhat. And whatever advice Steinbeck is giving, I'll listen to—he's written some of the most striking words I've ever read.

If I do incorporate any level of audience analysis, though, I want to be sure that it doesn't take over my writing, I do still see writing primarily as an outlet of creative and communicative energies that should reflect the individual writer more than anyone else. And frankly, I don't write for an audience the majority of the time (in long-form writing, that is, not counting emails and other written communication.) I want to keep the benefits and advantages of treating writing as an act of creation first and foremost, and then consider how I can relay that creation to readers.

Writing 200 Blog Post 2 - Memory

Prompt: Write about your first memories as a writer. Was there a particular moment you remember when you knew you could write? Or that you wanted to be a writer?

The first memory I have of wanting to be a writer was when I was about 10 years old and decided I wanted to write a novel. Being the sheltered, homeschooled Christian child that I was, I of course settled on a crime noir featuring a chain-smoking, day-drinking detective whose crime-fighting laboratory needed no scientific explanation—it just worked. I think I got about 12 pages in, albeit 12 pages of large handwriting that was most likely double spaced. I have only the faintest memory of plot, to the extent that it even existed—one detail that stands out in my memory is the protagonist's connection to his dog, likely related to my family's recent adoption of one.

Though I know I wrote quite a bit before this, being an early bloomer in literacy, there are a few reasons this might stand out. First is that I don't recall taking on any major creative writing projects on my own initiative before this. I certainly wrote for school, though my style back then was cringe-inducing, loaded to the brim with words I barely understood, taken from vocab lists I'd been given in class. 

I haven't ever become much of a consistent writer, preferring to operate in fits of inspiration that die out and let half-finished first drafts be buried in the avalanche of Google Docs. This first experience, which illustrates a similar level of dedication, was nevertheless formative. In a similar way that the process of learning to talk unlocks the capacity to communicate about the actual world, it seems to me that the process of writing fiction unlocked my capacity for self-motivated creativity.