More on Things About Which I am Dissatisfied with A UNH Writing Class

The passage comes from Murray:

Yesterday a student asked me in conference, “What are you doing?” It was a fair question. I was dressed in what passes for University of New Hampshire faculty style—L. L. Bean shirt and Dunham boots—leaning back in my chair, feet on my desk, chatting about old cars and how he felt about them. It might not seem that I was doing anything, and he was paying for the course out of his own pocket.

“I'm following your piece of writing.”

He looked puzzled.

“To see where it may take you.”

“But I'm kind of tired of it. I don't know if I want to write about that old Volvo any more.”

“Fine. No need to. I'm just kind of interested in that guy who is so involved in that car he can describe it in hundreds of details. I can see the car now, in this draft, but I'm getting more interested in the guy who saw a vision of a fine car in that rusty hunk of junk. It might be a story.”

We sit quietly for a couple of minutes. 

“But I can't write a story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well I don't know exactly what I want to say. I haven't got any themes. I mean writing fiction, you have to know so much.” He draws a huge map in the air, “Like Tolstoy. A whole world. How everything fits in.”

We chat about how writers discover what they have to say, how little they know, how essential is my ignorance of what happens in the next chapter of the novel I am drafting. I point out that he may discover an article on rebuilding junk cars, on mechanics who gouge the unsuspecting, on how to save money repairing a car. We even discuss the possibility of a girl who waves to the fellow working on the car which makes him write a story in which there is no Volvo at all. Our fifteen minutes is up. He turns at the door, “What do you want me to do?”

“Write.”

“Well, what? What do you expect me to do?”

“Whatever you want. I want to be surprised. You don't know what you're going to write, how can I know? It wouldn't be any fun if I did.”

---

The problem here for me comes from the passage in red. Here is the familiar idea that writers discover what they have to say through the act of writing. I still believe this to be true--in virtually every kind of writing. It's often not until we are knee-deep in the act of composing that we figure out where we are going and what we want to say.

Where I begin to have trouble is with the passage which begins "I point out..." Here, Murray provides the student with a list of writerly options--an article on rebuilding junk cars, on mechanics who gouge unsuspecting customers, on how to save money repairing a car...even on the possibility of a girl who waves to the writer and leads his words in another direction entirely.

On the one hand, I believe that any of these topics might emerge from what the student has written. And Murray is hugely generous in trying to model how non-fiction writers of the kind he once was discover things to write about. During the years leading up to his arrival at UNH, Murray was a freelance journalist and a magazine writer, publishing countless pieces in the most popular magazines and journals of his day. What he is showing this student writer is a way of thinking about how writing works and where it begins that he, himself, learned and practiced and honed over many years as a freelancer. He is right to believe that sometimes, writing works in the way he describes it.

But not always. 

In representing the writing/discovery process in this way, Murray fails to present it in a way that is, perhaps, more common in the world outside of journalism (which is to say the world that most of us inhabit). Murray locates the locus of the writing within the writer. He will decide whether to write about rebuilding junk cars or customer-gouging mechanics. And if he becomes a journalist or a magazine writer, as Murray did, he will be well-prepared. 

But if he ends up like the vast majority of people out there, he will write not out of the storehouse of topics he might discover but, instead, out of the myriad rhetorical situations he will find himself in--at work, in school, in his community. What does this mean and how is it different from Murray's vision of discovery?

What it means is this: most of us spend most of our time engaged in types of writing that might be categorized, per Doug Hesse, as "obliged"--meaning, writing for school, for work, or for our own advocacy in our communities. The obliged sort of writing doesn't necessarily emerge from the writer and her desires. It often originates outside of the writer, in what Keith Grant Davie refers to as a rhetorical situation. As Grant Davie argues, usually there is an exigence for the writing, a need, something in the world that calls forth its existence (e.g. a need to explain to an admissions committee why one is qualified for admittance to college X). There is a primary audience for the writing (the admissions committee), and possibly secondary or tertiary audiences (the admissions committees of colleges Y or Z). There is a writer or a rhetor who is rooted in a place and time, playing any one of an infinite number of roles as he or she writes (a college student playing the role of a well-rounded and civically-minded young person who is the very kind of individual that college X is looking for). And there are a set of constraints within which the writer operates--things the writer perhaps has going for her (all that community service she has done, or a parent who has already helped several children through the process of writing the college essay) and/or going against her (a lack of familiarity with who sits on a college admissions committee, an unclear understanding of college X's mission). In sum, for most of us, most of the time, we don't so much discover our topics as they discover us. Writing is a social act, shaped by the social settings in which people travel and the various communicative needs, tasks or activities within those settings. For most of us, most of the time, writing is not an act of choosing in the way that Murray seems to present it. It is an act of navigating, an act of negotiating within a given set of parameters that have preceded us or been defined for us.