Freewrite from Wednesday Morning
I'm always more ambitious the day after...maybe the goals set in, maybe I feel more in control.
Ira Glass...teaching storytelling is a different ballgame. I wonder how it fits into avoiding assignments and aiming for teaching.
The building blocks are using an anecdote and sequential story and then raising a question or reflection. What is the bigger meaning? The traditional formula limits students to the guidelines and they worry about meeting their requirements...is this my topic sentence? 5 paragraphs to support? Storytelling is a narrative...a natural, magnetizing, intriguing story has suspense and a deeper thread connecting its parts. Thought goes into it. It is primal...it is so fascinating to me that telling a great story is still a necessary, valued, challenge that we attempt to master even in 2012.
What struck me when hearing Ira Glass speak about storytelling was the ruthlessness. I loved his honesty and curtness--he gives us a nugget of truth by telling us to "abandon crap." Loved it. We have to be tough on ourselves, and if we're not struggling most of the time, there's something wrong. If it came easily, I would feel like a great writer, but I would be oblivious to the fact that I don't have ambition or that I'm not pushing the limits.
So teaching failure is essential. It's OK to flop. Really! Non graded assignments and a lot of support will help build student's confidence and willingness to try all the time.
Figure out what's not working, that's the core of it. Be "ruthless to make something better live."
Starting with the action and providing suspense -- how do we teach this? Do we start with an image? Do we listen to great stories? Share great stories? Write and freewrite and repeat? I know we must avoid the typical format of the paper, but I'm not exactly sure where to go next.
They can't get stuck in the hows, but in the whys. And practice. Choosing the topic should take a long, frustrating amount of time. Setting up questions in the stories should take thought. Working on those questions...
Part of me thinks that for Glass, this is an innate talent. But I know he also crafted his work tremendously. Which makes it feel more powerful and makes me feel better that there is a lot that goes into writing--for everyone. So how do I...I...who struggles with authenticity during a freewrite...get over this fear and dive into the murky waters?
Confessions of a perfectionist writer
This is going to read more like a diary entry, but it needed to be written at the time. I needed to work through some of my issues with writing, so here they are--my personal thoughts. There's your disclaimer...hopefully the next post will be a bit more professional and coherent.
Writing. All pretenses aside, capturing my thoughts on paper and, more often, online has been one scary, unpredictable horror movie for me in the past. One that is too realistic with ups and downs. Sometimes I don't know the scary part (or the happy part) when I see it. Which makes it all the more unreasonable that I majored in writing. But I think--I know--I can leverage my transforming writing process to use in the classroom, and share my triumphs and failures to help my future students. I've been rereading The Reading/Writing Connection in the Secondary Classroom and I have found some inherent truths that leapt from the page and screamed, "This is you, Allison!" The keys to a successful and efficient reader/writer (which are emblematic of the troubled, fearful writer) boil down to confidence, rereading, and questioning. But confidence in particular has been something I struggle with daily in every form of my own writing, namely within my voice.
I write and feel relief, but just know that it is poor writing. So I put the writing away without looking--I can't look at something that I know could be better. So, really, I have a terrible issue with perfectionism and the fallible language I use to write with (or maybe my ignorance of the words). I do feel like I have it in me to write well, but it takes so much time and stressing and head-clutching that I shy away from any form of heavy writing. Though I may have captured a thought, it has to be in the correct words--not close, but correct. And when it's not good enough (and most of the time, it's not for me) I feel inauthentic and dishonest. As in the words of my grandma's favorite mantra, "when she was good, she was really, really good and when she was bad she was hor-rid."
My actions become irrational when I am writing something I think is accurate. My husband will come over to say kind words but I make him leave (and sometimes bark at him like a Marine) because I have to finish the thought or I will feel terribly incomplete for the rest of the hour. I usually lose the thought unless I hurriedly scrawl it down immediately.
I was considering my writing process the other night as I wrote a poetry analysis paper, because it was causing me unduly amounts of anguish. Reflection caused me to realize how many times I have written a line that was copied word for word from my thoughts, reread it, and realized it did not capture the thought. A sentence can use the exact, formulaic combination and selection of words for the job (at least to the best of my knowledge), but the thought is still just not quite captured.
But writing something and getting it almost perfect is extremely gratifying, which is why I keep coming back for more. I write to inform, to discover, to communicate, and to offer myself catharsis. And I think those are reasons enough to keep trying to get it right. Communication is vastly important in every profession, and I feel this urge to keep working at it and keep feeling that sigh of relief when I come close to conveying a particularly complex idea.
