Write Before Writing

One thing that I am realizing more and more is the way Murray carved out or enacted a particular identity, used that identity, cultivated that identity as a way to construct authority in his writing--and how that identity may, over time, have become the thing that undermined him. The identity is embodied in any number of words or phrases: "When publishing writers..." "Newspapermen..." etc. Murray was a work-a-day writer's writer publishing in scholarly venues. The more I read, the more I realize this.

I'm also drawn to the way Murray connects with the down-and-out student--because he was one. He is annoyed by professors and students. I think these terms get under his skin. Try on this passage:

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.

When publishing writers visit such classrooms, however, they are astonished at students who can write on command, ejaculating correct little essays without thought, for writers have to write before writing.

The writers were the students who dawdled, stared out the windows, and, more often than we like to admit, didn't do well in English--or in school. (28)

I'm really struck by this sentence. I LOVE the phrase "ejaculating correct little essays"--terrific. So there is this kind of alignment, the writers and the "bad" students and the "professors" and their pontificating ("Children--and some professors--think out loud; but for most of us our speech is socially suppressed, done silently" "Writing as Process" p. 13) and the "good" students "ejaculating correct little essays without thought." There may be a connection here to his late essay "All Writing is Autobiography." For him, it certainly seemed to be.

I'm struck by Murray's eminently USEFUL and PRACTICAL and COMMON SENSE advice:

Writing teachers, however, should give careful attention to what happens between the moment the writer receives an idea or an assignments and the moment the first completed draft is begun. (28)

This is right up there with the notion, discussed in this post, that how a writer got to a finished piece of writing cannot be inferred from just looking at the piece of finished writing.

One thing that strikes me that I don't know if I've written much about is Murray's penchant for taxonomizing. In an earlier post, I called him a manifesto writer. He is also a taxonomist. And I'm feeling like I need to look into this a bit more--I'm thinking of all those 19th century "scientists" cataloguing things, making lists, creating categories. And why is he doing this? Because he is interested in the writing process, in how it works, and because no one else has studied it (yet)--or, people are just beginning to study it. So, Murray turns to his two sources of evidence: his own experience and the words of published writers (usually creative). As to taxonomies, for example, in this article, Murray offers us:

• the "one principal negative force which keeps the writer from writing and four positive forces which help the writer move forward to a completed draft" (29).
• "eight principal signals to which writers respond" during the "rehearsal" process (33).

I'm also struck by what appears to me to be the sort of haphazard organization of some of these essays. How would I outline the parts of this essay?

1. Introduction
2. Resistance to Writing/Forces of Writing
3. Rehearsal (nod to Don Graves)
4. Signals Which Say Write

In another post, I comment on Murray's use of sources and in this piece, he does draw on Graves' work again. And now, I note two things that Murray appears to have rethought as a result of his own reading and conversation.

1. You can hear Murray's enthusiasm for Graves' notion of rehearsal (as opposed to pre-writing, which was Murray's preferred term) in the following passage: "What the writer does under the pressure not to write and the four countervailing pressures to write is best described by the word rehearsal, which I first heard used by Dr. Donald Graves of the University of New Hampshire to describe what he saw young children doing as they began to write. He watched them draw what they would write and heard them, as we all have, speaking aloud what they might say on the page before they wrote. If you walk through editorial offices or a newspaper city room you will see lips moving and hear expert professionals muttering and whispering to themselves as they write. Rehearsal is a normal part of the writing process, but it took a trained observer such as Dr. Graves, to identify its significance" (31).
2. In the book chapter "Writing as Process," Murray writes: "I had always thought of this process in rather large terms--a rehearsing, a period of drafting, and a period of revising. But the significant work of Sondra Perl...has made me reconsider the time in which this process works" (10). This is interesting--so Murray thought the process was, perhaps more linear than it is? Further down, he writes: "Perl's work enabled me to see an instantaneous moving back and forth during the writing process. Minute by minute, perhaps second by second--or less at certain stages of the process--the writer may be rehearsing, drafting, and revising, looking back and looking forward, and acting upon what is seen adn heard during the backward sensing and forward sending" (10).

It's interesting to think about Murray coming on the scene in the late 1960s and realizing how little we know about how writers actually write (his primary concern, I believe). And then to realize that he stays in the scene through his career, as others begin taking up his questions and other questions and then, to what extent does he incorporate this knowledge into this own thinking and yet, simultaneously, remain on the "outside" because he is not, like Don Graves, a "trained observer."

So, then we see Murray sort of working with Graves ideas, taking them in, learning from them, testing them against what he knows intuitively--and THIS IS THE KEY POINT. In the passage in which Murray lays out Graves' notion of rehearsing, he later devolves to the kind of writing we are are much more familiar with and he is much more comfortable with: "What the writer hears in his or head..." Of course, this construction of "the writer" is problematic, but to Murray, that's his primary mode of working. What is the alternative? When he uses the phrase "the writer" or "the published writer" or "the experienced writer," what he's really saying is "I"--but, of course, he feels he cannot say "I".

In this article, I'm also struck by Murray's two calls for research, the way in which he opens up opportunities for others' investigations.

1. He is citing the work of Susan Sowers, who did a study with graduate students to try to understand whether they make their discoveries during pre-writing or writing and revisions stages (hard to separate these different stages, it seems). He writes: "This concept deserves more investigation. We need to know about both the reflective and reactive prewriting mode. We need to see if there are developmental changes in students, if they move from one mode to another as they mature, and we need to see if one mode is more important in certain writing tasks than others. We must, in every way possible, explore the significant writing stage of rehearsal which has rarely been described in the literature on the writing process (32).
2. We have interviews with imaginative writers about the writing process, but rarely interviews with science writers, business writers, political writers, journalists, ghost writers, legal writers, medical writers--examples of effective writers who use language to inform and persuade. I am convinced that such research would reveal that they also see patterns or gestalts which carry them from idea to draft. (37)

A key FRAMING quote: We know far too little about the writing process. (38)

Again, I think that the problem we sometimes face is the quickness with which Murray moves from his "speculations" to the "implications for the teaching of writing." Can one make this move as frequently as Murray does? I'm somehow comfortable with his use of the word "speculations" but uncomfortable with the move to practice, which it seems to me he makes too quickly or too easily, or without legitimacy? What is it?

We end with Murray's sympathy for the dawdlers and daydreamers:

We may need, for example, to reconsider our attitude toward those who delay writing. We may, in fact, need to force many of our glib, hair-trigger student writers to slow down, to daydream, to waste time, but not to avoid a reasonable deadline. (38)

Students who are not writing, or not writing well, may have a second chance if they are able to experience the writers' counsel to write before writing. (38)

Always the little zing at the end where he nails the last line or section with his title, central idea. Feels like the editorial writer in him coming out.

Added 2/3/14:

Also, something to think about, the things I disagree with Murray about or the things we have since learned he was wrong about:

During the rehearsal process, the experienced writer sees signals which tell the writer how to control the subject and produce a working first draft. (377)

The problematic term here, of course, is "experienced writer"--but at that time, others were writing and speaking this way as well.