on writing

So I am certainly no Stephen King, but since I am a writing teacher and am married to a writer, I think I know a thing or two about writing. Plus, Stephen King, wonderful as he is, doesn't own that title, right? :)

I am sitting here at midnight. I am taking a break from work in order to blog. You may ask why I am up at midnight working. It is not because I am such a devoted writing teacher; the truth is, I am up at midnight working because I am married to a writer. So my husband is behind me at his desk, working diligently on a poem. It was an amazing poem in its original incarnation, but he is now working to make it "scan." For those of you who don't know, this means the lines have to follow a certain pattern of stresses and unstresses.

I anxiously await the "reading" I assume I will get when he has the last two stanzas he is working on now complete. This is how things generally work, so I am unable to go to bed until I get to hear what he has been working on. I have grown tired of working on the composition handbook and grown tired of e-bay, Facebook, and even the University of Pennsylvania list calls for papers. So here I sit. Blogging about writing. And yes, I know that last sentence was a fragment.

I studied writing, rhetoric (the philosophy of writing), and the teaching of writing for a good ten years to get my PhD, but I am pretty sure being married to a writer has taught me just about as much about the writing process and about how the mind works during that process.

Just as Composition researchers feared--or maybe as I feared--, there is not much order to the way the mind works, or not that I can tell. There seems to be that kind of "cooking of the soup" that Peter Elbow wrote about. I remember reading Elbow and his talk about the magical concoctions in the mind when ideas are developing, and I had serious doubts. I doubt Peter Elbow no more.

My husband has a gifted mind in many ways, but he is especially gifted when it comes to language and the manipulation of language. I guess that is why he writes such wonderful poetry. I like to study him. I wonder where this gift comes from. Is it something he was born with? Is it something he developed? I am sure it is both. He read so much as a child. That had to do wonders for his little mind.

I like to watch his process. It is much as Donald Murray and Peter Elbow describe. He gets ideas, and then he lets them "simmer." The funny thing is that sometimes things "cook up" quickly; other times, things must "simmer" a long while.

Either way, I notice that he is the kind of writer who gets through many drafts in his head. This is a lot like me. When things finally go to print, they have gone through many drafts in my head. Some writers put down much rougher ideas and then go through a lengthy revision process. My husband still revises, but things seem to have be worked over quite a bit before he writes them down.

I wonder how this applies to my teaching of writing, and I think this. I think I have to understand that some of my students will not have as much process as others, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. I think, sometimes, writing teachers get so caught up in measuring the process. We certainly need to do this. We have to have something to work with. However, I think we also have to be more understanding of the fact that there are things going on in the minds of writers that we will NEVER be able to teach or measure or assess. That is a tough thing to write, but here at now 12:22 in the A.M., this seems like truth to me.

OK, I think that is it for my first post. I hear him whispering some words. I am hoping I am about to get my "reading."