Writing and Teaching for Surprise

NOTE: This was the lead article for the College English edition in which it appeared.

My students become writers at that moment when they first write what they do not expect to write. They experience the moment of surprise that motivates writers to haul themselves to their writing desks year after year. Writers value the gun that does not hit the target at which it is aimed.

Before they experience surprise students find writing drudgery, something that has to be done after the thinkingis over-the dishes that have to be washed afterthe guests have left. But writing is the banquet itself. As Louise Nevelson said, "My work is a feast for myself."

Writers seek what they do not expect to find. Writers are, like all artists, rationalizers of accident. They find out what they are doing afterthey have done it.

Students should share in this purposeful unknowing, for writing is not the reporting of what was discovered, but the act of exploration itself. (1)

Here is yet another moment where Murray explains what he's up to...I am intrigued by the "take you backstage"...

Let me try to take you backstage, no, not even backstage, but far beyond that into that almost always private moment when the writer is alone with language and the words escape intention. (1)

So, basically, in this piece, Murray is laying out a simple structure...he is trying to identify what he sees as "six elements that help us achieve surprise" (3). Here is a fuller explanation/context for his purpose:

The experienced writer always has the problem of the excess of surprise and must learn how to decide which mermaid is real. These are problems for experience and craft, but first there must be the possibility of surprise. That is the starting point for the effective writer and the effective teacher, and it seems to me there are six elements that help us achieve surprise. (3)

So, I'm thinking what's got Murray's attention here is that he knows how to cultivate surprise and understands its usefulness--he senses that inexperienced writers, however, may not know how to cultivate or recognize it or understand its usefulness. So, he's going to lay out the things that they need to learn and we need to teach them.

Again, I note Murray's penchant for taxonomy. In this article:

• Six elements that help us achieve surprise
• Eleven types of surprise "the writer experiences" (p. 5)

I think this is something to explore in further detail in my article--the parallel between what Murray was doing and what all those 19th century early Ph.D.s and scientists were doing. I don't know that he intended to engage a similar process as they went through, but he ended up doing so. I think there is a powerful metaphor here for thinking about Murray's work--to understand the parallel between his work and what they were doing back in the 19th century, when fields were just being created, is, I think, an important way to understand him.

So, what are the six elements?

• Expectation: The wonderful thing about surprise is that the more you experience surprise the easier it becomes to experience it. Surprise breeds surprise. (3)
• Habit: I will be surprisedby what I write if I'm in the habit of putting words on paper even if I do not have the time to write. (4)
• Ease: I used to force writing, to try to make mashed potatoes pass through a keyhole. But it didn't work. If I am prepared then the writing will flow. (4)
• Recognition: One of the nice things about surprise is that after you've had one or two or three surprises happen then you become a veteran of surprise and will begin to recognize it. (5)
• Pounceability: The writer, surprised by what is appearing on the page, must cultivate the craft to take advantage of it. The word, the pattern, the fragment, the sentence appears, and the writer must learn how to follow the clue towards meaning. (6)
• Acceptance: Surprise, though exciting, may be a discomforting gift. When we are surprised we often do not like what we discover. (6)

As someone who has been asking students to talk about the things that surprise them when they write, I really appreciated Don's elaboration of the kinds of surprises we might expect/experience as writers (see p. 5):

1. There is the surprise of perception that I experience when the character in my novel saw no color.
2. There was the surprise of recollection when I heard that terrible cough left over from a previous war.
3. There is the surprise of connection when I related my surprise in writing and my students' surprise to their development as writers.
4. There is the surprise of resolution when we see the solution to a problem we
5. have been circling in our writing.
6. There is the surprise of celebration when we recreate something--a moment, an event, a person, a scene--and can stand back from it.
7. There is the surprise of implication, the surprise of understanding, the surprise of caring when we feel more than we expect to feel...
8. ...and the surprise of pattern when a whole complex of connections click into place on the page.
9. And there are those especially significant surprises: the surprise of authority--I know what others need to know
10. ...and the surprise of voice--I can hear myself on the page.

I'm struck--and this is new, I've not written about this yet--by the way that Murray teaches not just how to be better writers, but also how to be better readers of others writing:

And, in writing this, I realize my habit includes the stimulation I receive from those with whom I can share my early drafts. These people change by circumstance and, to some degree, by the genre in which I'm writing. But they have two elements in common; they write themselves and can accept the draft as a draft, and they make me want to write when I leave them. These are very special colleagues, these test readers. They can be tough, they can be supportive, they can attack and comfort, often at the same time. They are important because they allow me to stand back from my work and gain distance on it, and because, through their faith that I have something worth saying, they can draw me back to my work. (4)

Should this go under my For Teacher's Ears section? I think so, particularly the part about "they make me want to write when I leave them." I don't think that many teachers think about this kind of orientation/attitude, modeled so well for me by TRN.

Murray's ONE TRUE THING:

We do not write to repeat what others have written, but to discover our own surprises, what we have to say and how we can say it. (7)

The problem with schooling/education...where does this fall? Student-centered, I think:

If acceptance is hard for the writer, it is harder still for the teacher, for education is geared up for sameness. We want our students to perform to the standards of other students, to study what we plan for them to study, and to learn from it what we or our teachers learned.

Yet our students learn, at least in writing, if they experience difference. The curriculum calls for sameness, and we unleash them into an activity that produces difference.

...We must learn to accept and delight in the difference we find in our students, for surprise is the most significant element in writing. (7)