Thinking about some of the things Jeff wrote recently about writing practice. His primary observation concerns how writing occurs within a network (my word) of media and perceptions. When we think about the challenges of writing, whether it is situated in a basic writing class or FYC or a professional writing course or elsewhere, we have been trained to think of “process,” but that notion of process is strangely separated from the materials that would be the requisite site on which any process could be enacted.

However, when we consider our own, specific writing process (i.e. the actual activities in which we engage and not the abstractions of invention, organization, revision, etc.), we cannot ignore the material. I think about my own writing practice. (And I should note here that obviously there is writing and then there is writing. That is, there are the perfunctory writing tasks of e-mails, memos, and so on; then there is writing that involves pushing the limits of thought, straining to understand, to see what one is trying to say…hence, to theorize.)

Clearly, I am discussing the latter. I would articulate writing as the unraveling of an instinct, impulse, sensibility, hunch–something like that: an un-apprehended thought. The first task for me as a writer is to catch wind of this thought. (BTW, I wouldn’t call it “inspiration,” as it strikes me that inspiration suggests a thought that one discovers (or one is gifted) wholly formed; what I am trying to described is more animalistic, more embodied.) This task is interminable, and the appearance of this non-thought is always untimely. While that’s an abstraction, the near-ritualistic hunt is not. Neither is it particularly romantic. Much like Jeff describes, my process is one of multiple media and sensory inputs. Stacks of books, articles, mostly illegible notes and marginalia, scrawled diagrams, websites, blogs, databases. Music on. Music off. Food, drink, walk around the block. Then comes that moment that Ulmer dispatches students in search of in Internet Invention: the moment when everything flows.

Then it passes. And the process begins again. But somewhere in the back of the mind is that instinct/hunch that what I’m searching for can be found/made…composed.

I assume that most college writing instruction is really about that other, perfunctory kind of writing. The kind of writing everyone does; the kind you do when you’re not a “writer.” To be a perfunctory writer, you need control. You need to be able to order pre-fabricated thoughts, almost always somebody else’s thoughts…this is the new company policy…this is what happened at the meeting…it was a pleasure meeting you. I hope you become my client…etc.

The other kind of writing is much more difficult to teach. Thinking about the material terms of such a writing, you realize that to be a “writer” means a commitment to a way of life. Not that you have to write the way I do. Obviously. But it strikes me that writing requires time, space, and material investment. This should be a no-brainer. However, somehow we continue to imagine we can simply “teach” students how to be writers. Even if this were the goal of composition (and I think we at least talk about composition as if this were its goal), I find it difficult to imagine how a single course (or two) could enact this becoming in any systematic way…especially since many people simply have no interest in becoming writers. Why should they? It’s not like it pays well.

On the other hand, a professional writing program is hinged on transforming its majors into writers. It is a transformation that is both mental and physical. One not only needs to learn to think rhetorically, to understand the requirements of various genres, to adopt a way of talking about writing, to learn the art of revising, etc. etc. One also must transform physically/materially. What one does with one’s body. How one spends one’s time, and even one’s money.

Again, I don’t mean to suggest there’s one writer’s life; this isn’t a religion. Instead, I mean that one’s commitment to writing practice will manifest itself materially. Hence, infused throughout a professional writing curriculum must be the opportunity for students to develop this material practice. Perhaps, at first, a professional writing major writes in response to the prompting of a class. Most of the writing a student does is writing for a class. Ultimately, though, a reversal must take place: the demands of the classroom become part of a larger writing practice. One subsumes those demands to one’s writing practice.

Of course perfunctory writing always remains, but the principle is to use the context of the curriculum as a launch point. To discover writing as a mode of inhabitation, a haunting, a material-embodied practice.

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