Hello all, I'd like to apologize for the lateness of my post last week, as I am churning it out exactly a week after I should have had it completed. Things have been awfully hectic, and this post just had to get pushed onto the back burner until I had a little more time to complete it (although I am not sure 2 in the morning is really "more time to complete the post" but hey, what can you do, right?)
So, I am going to take this post and respond to last week's reading and this week's reading all at once. I am going to attempt to say everything that I want/need to say in a fairly concise and not ridiculously long post, but I make no guarantees.
So I really enjoyed the "Nitty Gritty" chapter in Ideas into Words. I think the reason I like this chapter so much was because it spelled out a lot of the weird things that I do when I write and made them feel a little more normal by including them as an actual part of the writing process. The chapter talks about the questions that writers should be asking themselves, little tricks that we often use to get us back on track, or little quirks that we have to remind us to look back at something we really like or dislike so that we can go back and elaborate on it or change it. Mostly the chapter is great because it brings my back to the basics, and reminds me of things I should already by doing as a writer.
As for the seventh chapter of this same novel, well that's where we get to address my least favorite thing in the whole world--writer's block. Part of me loved this chapter, and another part of me really disliked it. I liked subject headings (for lack of a better title for them) and how they posed questions to me that could get me thinking about how to get out of whatever writing hole I'd dug for myself. Yet, at the same time, I know that if I am truly stuck in my writing, even those things are not going to dig me out of the hole that is writer's block. I know that it is going to take some random burst of inspiration to get me to bring life back into my writing, and I usually just have to wait for it to happen. I can tweak the piece again and again, addressing all of the questions within the chapter, and all it could have served to do was sink me further into the hole I was trying to dig myself out of. Like I said, it's not that I dislike the chapter or the ideas it poses, it's just that I know myself as a writer, and that those things usually won't actually get me anywhere (which really freaking sucks).
I found the chapter in A Field Guide to be particularly intriguing, mostly because it was about something familiar--essays. We've been writing essays (even teeny tiny ones) since we were probably around 10 years old. We have spent years and years of our lives developing and expanding our understanding of what an essay is and what it is comprised of. In fact, I would say that in my 20's I feel like a bit of an expert on essays (although I am sure I am far from it!) I would like to think that I've got a pretty solid understanding of these suckers. And a struggle I have been having throughout this semester, in this class, is that a lot of the time I feel like I am going into a project a bit blind because it falls within a genre that I have little to no experience writing in. But this chapter, brought me back to my faithful friend the essay. This chapter basically told me to look at everything as an essay of sorts. A magazine article is probably a human interest essay. The introduction to a novel, actually an essay. A literature review, an essay. This chapter put into perspective for me that if I look at these genres as if they are essays addressing different things, then I really do know what I am doing even if I have never written within that genre before. And that was really enlightening for me.
