While I was a teaching assistant in an English Composition II course, the professor encouraged his students with the adage, “Writing is RE-writing.” He scaffolded the students’ final research paper assignment and responded to their low stakes writing assignments with comments. Altogether, his transparency reminded the class that he was expecting their best efforts and brainstormed ideas, not polished gems of writing, and he shared his own struggles writing and rewriting chapters of dissertation with them as they experienced the writing process for the first time.
It struck me then and still strikes me now how simple but kind this approach to writing is. The students I work with do tend to be steeped in the myth that professionals, teachers, and people like me who hold weird, interstitial academic positions write perfect drafts on the first try. Very willing to demystify the writing process as a messy cycle of working and reworking, I identify as an overwriter.
Plenty of my first drafts look, to me, like entanglements of too many details of “the situation” and over-indulgence in “the story.” One core idea branches into territory of qualifiers and tangents that feel like I’ve created an uroboros of maybe one “decent” idea that hasn’t found its start or exit points. When I revise, I often use the method of imagining my toughest reader; I try to read the piece as that third person, creating some critical distance between myself as the subject and myself as the writer. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it makes me doubt whether or not the story answers a the larger question of “why” – What are my motives for story-telling? When making decisions about the writing, which are for truth-telling and aesthetic? Where do these concerns meet and where are they opposed? These questions are usually the source of my writing “angst”…
