Listening to Writing

I note, again, the importance of the word "speculate" in this piece, coming, as it does, in the first sentence:

In trying to write an essay which would speculate about how the writer discovers the draft which marks the watershed between prewriting and rewriting, I heard a poem. (55)

It's becoming increasingly apparent to me, that this was Murray's work and this term is a good one. To speculate. That's what he's up to, no doubt. He doesn't have the critical framework or education to move beyond speculation to scholarly investigation--so he cites people like Emig, Perl, Graves. But he can speculate on his own process and given his status as a professional, working, Pulitzer Prize winning writer, he feels legitimacy in doing so.

I think that one of the things that I appreciate from this article is the nuts and bolts that Murray shares about how he gets the work done. For example, the following passage:

Time is also important. I try to start each day with a few quiet moments when I listen for writing, listen to hear the words I watch my pen put on the page. I may hear--and capture--drafts, titles, lines, leads, details, lists, ideas, memories, scenes, notes for stories, textbooks, reportage, profiles, essays, poems, plays; whatever comes to my ear is captured on the page. The quiet moments when this happens have a religious quality for me. This quiet time is made possible by habit. I do not get up eager to write. I do not get up even eager to get up. But it is my habit to turn on the timer, open the notebook, uncap the pen, and listen.

Writing usually comes--100 words, 5, 152, 18, 249. No matter. I am simply waiting, listening.

If no words come that is fine. I suppress the panic I feel at silence. There will be another day; the writing will come if I wait, and I often do have to wait minutes which seem like hours. (56)

That is a terrific passage. I love the fact that he includes the number of words that he writes--odd numbers, true and real numbers that make this seem true and real. I feel like this is the sort of passage that students can benefit from reading. This is the "how to" of writing, how does the process work for one accomplished writer. I imagine that my students have NO IDEA that this is how writing happens. I want the students to hear the sentences: "If no words come that is fine. I suppress the panic I feel at silence" (56) to know that that, too, is part of the process.

More practical advice:

I have learned that writing evolving often stumbles, but what seem to be mistakes often turn out to be keys to meaning. (60)

We will write nothing but garbage if we do not practice critical thinking towards the end of the writing process, but it is dangerous to be too critical too early. The better educated the writer, the more important it is to suspend the critical element of that education in the early stages of the process. (61)

I must somehow, as a teacher, a husband, a son, a father, a friend, a colleague, a citizen, a professional, a busy-busy-busy man so proud of my busyness, find time to listen so I will hear what I have to say. If I am able to be quiet within myself something may appear on the page which may become writing and, when that happens, my job is to listen to the evolving writing. The piece of writing will, if I listen carefully, tell me how it needs to be written. it will develop its own shape and form, its own destination, its own voice, its own meaning, and it will finally detach itself from its maker and find readers who may hear things in it I never heard. (68)

Too often, when we teach writing, we give our students the misconception we plan writing, that we intend what will appear on the page. They are frustrated when they are not able to visualize before the first draft what will appear on their page. The students think they are dumb. We must be honest and let them know how much writing is unconscious or accidental. You do not think writing; you write writing.

Of course, even as I say that, I can think of exceptions. The elements of intention and planning vary depending on our experience, our purpose, our audience, our writing tasks, but the best writing is often unintended. We usually do not know what we want to say before we say it in non-fiction as well as poetry. (71)

I love this passage. I love the first part, but I may love the double-take more. I love the both/and, but, ultimately, the commitment to the unexpected.

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I think that one thing that I recognize in this piece, that I have not seen yet, and I'm not sure what this means, if anything, is the movement towards explicit use of the "I". In other essays and articles I've read, Murray will often refer to himself (well, sort of) in the third person--"the practicing writer," or "the published writer." It's like he was trying to put this distance between himself and his ideas, as if felt that he needed to construct his authority in a certain way in order to be taken seriously. In some ways, it's like he's the kid trying not to say "I" as the teacher told him.

The first sentence of "Listening to Writing," published in 1980, reads:

In trying to write an essay which would speculate about how the writer discovers the draft which marks the watershed between prewriting and rewriting, I heard a poem. (55)

That is a striking first line. Compare it to two other first sentences/passages from other articles:

We command our students to write and grow frustrated when our "bad" students hesitate, stare out the window, dawdle over blank paper, give up and say, "I can't write," while the "good" students smugly pass their papers in before the end of the period ("Writing Before Writing" p. 28 in Newkirk)

Here, Murray uses the collective "we," appealing to his audience of writing teachers and seeking identification with them.

Here's another one:

At the beginning of the composing process there is only blank paper. At the end of the process there is a piece of writing which has detached itself from the writer and found its own meaning, a meaning the writer probably did not intend ("Writing as Process" p. 6 in Newkirk).

Here we see Murray invoking "the writer"--a generalized term. I note that this chapter was also published in 1980.

All of this has got me wondering about Murray's decision to go to the first-person in "Listening to Writing" and wondering if this really was a change. I'm not sure now that I think about it (check "The Explorers of Inner Space").

But there are these other passages in "Listening" that strike me as important, moments when Murray, essentially, lays his cards on the table:

I had thought writing appeared on the page, surprising my eye. I intended to describe and probe that process in this article. But in using myself as my own experimental rat..." (63)

Yes, of course, this is what he is always doing, HAS always been doing. This is, I'm thinking, the first time that I have seen him actually comes out and admit this, though. Another passage follows just after this one:

As I examine what I usually do as I write... (63)

I wonder what caused him to say these things in this article, at this time (and I fear that I am making a mountain out of a mole-hill).

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I note this passage...where the "literary critics," perhaps take on the role of the school marm, of that schoolmaster ghost lurking in Murray's past:

Sometimes I fear my literary colleagues, whose business, after all, is critical thinking, want to know what criteria are used in accepting or rejecting a discovered thought as if the criteria were external to the piece of writing. When writers, rather than critics, talk of their own writing to each other and to themselves, they ask what works and what doesn't work...The writer avoids external standards--standards which evolved from other pieces of writing in other times by other writers for other readers--and works within the piece of writing. (64)

I'm drawn to this passage and push it away at the same time. I'm drawn to the distinction between writers and critics and I think that's an important distinction for me and for Murray. I'm drawn to the idea that you don't apply external standards to the piece to determine what is it. At the same time, I'm not sure the writer avoids external standards. But I may mean something he didn't mean here.

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A call to research: "and we need careful study of just how writers read drafts" (64).

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One of the questions I've been raising here has to do with the transferability of Murray's pedagogy to non-creative writing situations. So many of his sources are novelists and poets. here he is taking up this question himself:

This process of listening is more dramatic and easily apparent in poetry than in narrative or in non-fiction, but the process seems more similar in all the forms of writing than it is different--at least the way I write. (69)

I also go through a similar process in writing an article such as this. I may do more conscious research and structured thinking in preparation for the writing of non-fiction; I may be aware of a predetermined length or form, a specific audience, an external purpose in writing. Still, I have to listen to the writing as it evolves within those limitations--and if I have a strong piece of writing it may bend those limitations a bit... (69)

I am struck by Murray's rhetorical and genre awareness here. I am particularly struck by that final line about bending limitations--which signals that he understands the way rhetorical situations and genres do impose limitations upon the writer, but also wants to stand up for the fact that genres can and will be bent in certain instances to writers' desires.