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I have experienced the occasional moment of revelation since I decided to take writing seriously. The first was when I discovered freewriting. It was astonishing for me to see how writing exercises beginning with freewriting freed up my first drafts and rendered the draft less “precious” to me. Another revelation was when I read a description of how to write a scene. I hadn’t frankly considered that there were distinct stages/strategies/components to writing. Wasn’t it all just writing? It is helpful to think about three key components in a memoir or story, outlined in chapter 4 of WT: scene (or action), summary and reflection. (Of course there are many more components but I tend to think of these as the building blocks): Scene (or action)- story told in real time (showing, not telling) Summary- real time condensed, filling in the backstory, etc. Reflection- author or character thinking about events and the consequences of events. The more conscious we are about these aspects of the writing process, the more our work takes shape.
I found the section on “riffing” very interesting too. The activity of composing is at least as interesting as the activity of revising, but much writing pedagogy, instructional orientation, and classroom work seems to be concerned mainly with revision and proofreading. By riffing we can improvise and apply new methods to the discovery of the ideas in our writing. Instead of simply evaluating writing once it’s been written, it seems to me we should explore the way we discover and uncover ideas and narratives in our writing. How this might relate to the transfer to digital environments, I am still trying to figure out. Surely it depends on precisely which digital environment; platforms such as Twitter and Facebook lend themselves to the riff more than posting on a blog, right?
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