How do I know if I'm getting any better?

       

The past month of challenges -- write 750 words a day, create a poem a day -- has energized my writing and brought into it and my own soul a sense of the daring and reckless. I feel inspired and refreshed. Yet, I also have questions. I know this is raw material and I am passing it off as such. But, should I be posting what is so raw so publicly? What will I need to do best to make my writing get better? How I can self-improve?

As I ponder these questions, I realize that they echo questions that students ask, as they pump me for feedback. What can they do to become better writers? What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? How can I help steer them in a direction that makes it all right?

The questions plague me like the feeling of "Stage-Fright" that my first contribution to this blog spoke of. To be honest, they scare me because one of the simplest responses is, "How do I know? Who am I to know?" Those responses, I realize, probably don't do much to ease the anxiety of a student who has learned to trust teachers as sources of answers, as authorities, as coaches, as experts, as people who can provide the solutions to the problems that vex us most.

The confrontation of student expectation with instructor stage-fright came to a climax in my mind recently as I encouraged students in my digital-storytelling course to see storytelling as a creative process that relies upon community input. There is no one right way or wrong way to tell a story, I said. Only suggestions and ideas, based on one's own personal idiosyncrasies and insights. Furthermore, the way in which a story is going to be told will vary, depending on the community for whom the story is being put forth.

I had written those words in an online course bulletin board as a way of encouraging and empowering students to take seriously the peer advice they were receiving from one another, advice that, for the most part, was supportive and helpful. There was a layer of guilt added to the words, in that I was late in delivering my own feedback, probably in part due to Stage-Fright. But seriously as I thought of peer review, I really wanted the students to understand themselves to be a part of a community of learners in which authority was not hierarchical despite the indisputable fact that the course did have instructors (who would eventually become grade givers). Furthermore, I had seen the effects of too much instructor input: good ideas that didn't have a chance to develop were stifled; a style that was coming out in a cautious, playful, exploratory way would be prematurely critiqued. These experiences have been helping me understand that the best advice that students could receive would be to listen to themselves and to learners in similar positions as them.

But peer review doesn't create self-review in and of itself. It doesn't help any of us cut to the question of how to make our own writing better. It doesn't really help us understand what to do with those freshly-pressed, very raw and precocious first drafts.

So I have decided to embark on an experiment in teaching myself self-review. I will do my best to document this experiment through two tried and true tools: the practice of writing at 750words.com every day for a month (the month of May), and the practice of what I called self-assessment for students and Julia Cameron refers to in one of her best primers on writing, The Right to Write, as the evening check-in.

Here's how I hope the experiment will work: May is National Short Story Writing Month -- or so I've been told. It is much less structured than the well-known National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November and the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) in April. Some searching for sources over the past couple of weeks have told me that some organizations consider March to be National Short Story Writing Month, and some mark the heralded month as April. Others consider May to be a worthy month for reading, rather than writing, short stories. And some just want you to write a story and post it somewhere to share.

While I have written short stories in fictional format, non-fiction remains my genre. So the fact that my quest to find a storytelling community to help me through National Short Story Writing Month turned fruitless provoked some anxiety.

What I decided is this: In May, I will read one short story a day. And I will assess it by answering the following four questions:
1. What was the story I read? Title, author, place where it was published, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis should be provided.
2. What were three strengths and/or insights that I gained about storytelling and writing from this particular story?
3. How do the strengths/insights I gained support my own efforts to improve my writing?
4. Have I read anything else by the story's author? How does this particular story fit or not fit with the author's general body of work, as I understand it?

I also will write one story a day. And I will assess that story, with these four questions:
1. What was the story I wrote today? Title, word count, and a 1-2 sentence synopsis will be provided.
2. Where did the idea for this story originate?
3. How did the story develop?
4. What might I do to this story later to strengthen it?
If you're an educator, you might recognize a few traces of Bloom's Taxonomy in these questions. I have been using the levels of learning established in that matrix -- memorizing, understanding, applying, assessing/analyzing, evaluating, and creating -- for the past several years to create learning activities for students, including questions of self-assessment. While I feel that the process is a bit mechanical, I feel that it works in the sense that it allows students and their instructors to create a dialogue on the student's learning that is less hierarchical and more collaborative. I continue to study and work with the method. My hope is that others might join me in this May experiment, and perhaps report to me on their learning.
(On the image: It comes from a blog on online college courses, and offers a more structured and deeper understanding of self-assessment and its value to students than I can offer here. Visit the blog at http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2011/11/21/self-assessment-charting-your-own-progress/

What's raw is not all bad

I wasn't sure I would be writing anything at all today because I was scheduled to have my last two wisdom teeth extracted. However, I signed myself on for two April challenges, one of which is to contribute a minimum of 750 words a day for every day in April to a site called 750words.com and the other of which is to write a poem a day in honor of National Poetry Writing Month and to make the poem public, which I'm doing at the blog linked to this site at http://guptacarlsonnapowrimo2013.blogspot.com. I couldn't bear the "agony of defeat" and even considered waking up at 5 a.m. to do the writing in case I didn't make it, post-surgery!

Well, the alarm went off at 5 a.m., and the snooze button was hit. Happily, the surgery went well and by about 7 p.m., I felt well enough to sit up in what my husband describes as my "blanket pod" on the sofa, with my laptop. I have been using 750words.com to work on my book manuscript and two book chapters for other projects that I need to finish revisions on. What I wrote today had more to do with writing practice, however, so I thought I would share it here. There is a small amount of repetition in what I've placed in previous posts, but I think the general idea of "what's raw" is not bad comes through.

I started doing morning pages in October 1998, and read the Artist's Way by Julia Cameron a couple of months later. Initially, Cameron's depiction of morning pages didn't sit well with me, and I stopped doing them or did them at best sporadically for several months. My initial impression of the theory behind the pages was that I could use them to process work-in-progress: things I was reading, ideas I was having to synthesize the readings, thoughts that would emerge from the numerous conferences, lectures, book readings, and my work with tai chi and yoga at the time.

Years and years later, this is how I use morning pages: to process thoughts, ideas, projects, ongoing work. Some days, they are mental dumping -- I need to rant about my lack of money; I need to vent suppressed anger about something; I need to write out about something that is anything but the project breathing down my neck at the moment. I also realize that I think this is what Cameron has in mind with morning pages. I have gone through the Artist's Way several times, and even incorporate parts of it into my teaching. I also have worked through Walking in this World, The Right to Write, and The Sound of Paper. So clearly I find value in Cameron's work, and also appreciate that her approach doesn't sit well with everyone.

One challenge that morning pages does present is the act of longhand writing. I believe in it. Deeply. There's something about the audience of self, page, pen, and Great Creator that is special, intimate, and not requiring edit impulses. A lot gets done because it's free-writing, and it's something I can later transfer to a computer file -- giving it the edit impulses (fix the typo, rephrase the sentence, move the paragraphs around) that word processing makes possible in a way that longhand can't. The challenges are making the time to move it to the computer file, and then trying to determine the next step for the work that lies in the computer file. Three pages of longhand, or the rough equivalent of 750 words, does not usually make a full article, book chapter, or essay so using the process of morning pages to get sustained projects done means dealing with overlap, inconsistency, and sometimes complete ruptures or breaks in thought. In addition, time is one of our most valuable commodities. Many days, I write morning pages successfully, have my breakfast, take my shower, and roll into work and am immediately confronted with demanding tasks beyond my immediate control. By the time I think I have a minute to transfer my morning pages to a computer file I'm too pumped up with distractions, breathlessness, and a sense that I need to hurry, hurry, hurry to engage with the edit impulses in a way that I would like. I end up thinking "it's all bad" when the reality is that "it's all raw". It needs the patience of simmer time to gel together.

I was introduced to 750words.com last summer by a colleague, Michele Forte. She was using the site to begin jump-starting her own thoughts on writings she could initiate as a professor in a position finally to realize long-belated aspirations to scholarship. Like morning pages, I started it in fits and starts, and started immediately hitting the delete button on my e-mail notification from "Buster" saying that he thought I should write 750 words today. I thought about unsubscribing, but I also knew enough about my experiences with morning pages that when the time was write, I would commit.

So April is the month of commitment. I am participating in Napowrimo (the National Poetry Writing Month) and have committed to a poem a day. And I am not a poet by training or passion. I just like doing it once awhile. I plan to participate in National Short Story Writing Month in May, and hope to invent some other "national" genre-writing months (no fantasy or sci fi, though) all the way through the famous November National Novel Writing Month, which I joined three times and failed twice. With these commitments, I also decided that I was going to commit to writing 750 words a day in April. And that if it worked, I would continue into May, June, July, August, and eternity. I thought I would use 750 words as a way to convert my longhand morning pages (because I honestly cannot imagine going without them any longer) to that first electronic file, where editable impulses are allowed.

A lot of my friends laugh at my obsession with challenges. Besides writing challenges, I participate in things like "Complete a Marathon in a Week," "Do an Ironman in a Month," and month-long "Squat-a-thons". I also initiate things like six-week challenges to get more fit, exhorted my friends on Facebook every day in 2011 to move their bodies, and am currently training for an Olympic Distance Triathlon in August and what will hopefully be my tenth marathon in September. I feel a little guilty myself that I lean so heavily on challenges, and feel a little out of it when there is no challenge beckoning me on the horizon.

So why do I them do?

One simple answer is this: Because they're fun. For me, they keep me motivated, and they remind me that with the frantically crazy work hours I keep, 11:59 p.m. and 12:01 a.m., the bookends of a day approach quickly. My hope for the ideal life is write in the morning, work and work out until about 7 p.m., have a good dinner and downtime with my spouse, and write at the end of the day. The challenges force me to remember that end-of-day commitment.

(A note on the photo: I found the image via a Google Images search for "writing raw". The page to which it links is a useful site on writing tips and strategies, one of which is "Free Write Fridays." The image accompanies an interview with Rebecca Tsaros Dickson and has some helpful thoughts on the values of writing in the way that the challenges I describe in this post present. You can access the link at http://kellieelmore.com/2012/11/09/fwf-free-write-friday-writing-raw-with-author-rebecca-tsaros-dickson/.

Art and craft

I had the opportunity today to meet up with a former journalism colleague and friend, Michael Fancher. Fancher was the executive editor of the Seattle Times when I worked there as a staff writer from 1988-96, and continued to serve at The Times before retiring as editor-at-large in 2008. Since his retirement, he has been teaching journalism ethics and considering ways to re-imagine the practice of journalism for the 21st century. He was in Saratoga Springs for a New York Press Association conference, and when I noticed his status update on Facebook attesting to this point, I e-mailed him to see if he might have time for coffee. I was delighted when my cell phone rang a few minutes later.

I was interested in talking with Mike (whom we called Fanch) because I, too, have been interested in how mainstream journalism might evolve away from its often corporate-controlled and rather elitist tradition of disseminating "news" to readers from the top down and more toward a  democratic partnership of sorts in which the defining and creation of news is more of a collaborative act. New communicative media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and shared documents via a variety of Google sites have clearly been redefining how people get information and what (and who) might constitute expertise. These are deep issues of a philosophic nature, in my mind. And, at the risk of being accused of "burying my lede" (a journalistic way of saying get to the point, for god's sake), I am going to state now that those issues are not what I'm going to write about in this blog post, though I think they do influence what I am about to say indirectly. What I want to talk about is how my conversation with Mike made me think anew about how one might learn to be a writer.

The simple answer: There is no way to learn how to write. One learns simply by writing, writing a lot of words.

So, a little bit of back story: A few weeks ago, I described how the fact that some people would be praised for having a "god given gift for writing" used to unnerve me, at least partly because no one made that claim about me. To answer the question of why I was writing if I didn't have "the gift," I created two categories of writers: Those who did it as an art, and those who did it as a craft.

Now the difference between writer = artist and writer = craftsperson is loaded, politically and socially. It evokes comparisons between what is often regarded in an elitist sense as "high art" (the stuff you find in places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art) and what is condescendingly referred to as "low art" (graffiti on a subway train, a mural on a public wall, decorative masks, costumery, embroidered handbags, and pretty much anything one might create to brighten up a day or display a flair for the original). I found it somewhat comforting to be not the "artiste" but the craftsperson. Claiming the latter moniker, I felt, allowed me the right to make mistakes, write some really bad stories that would need extensive editing, and devote some time and energy to working on my craft, honing my skills, trying to become better. I could learn to write, in short, by writing. Not by claiming myself as already perfect, as artiste.

Fanch spoke of a journalists creed that was written by Walter Williams at the well-regarded University of Missouri School of Journalism in the early years of the 20th century. The statement, which can be accessed at http://www.rjionline.org/news/walter-williamss-journalists-creed, briefly describes journalism as an occupation of the public trust. Fanch has dissected and disseminated thoughts on the creed extensively since his retirement from The Seattle Times, in an effort to work toward development of a creed for the 21st century, and shares his thoughts periodically via his own blog at http://mikefancher.wordpress.com. What he had to say about the 20th century creed was this: A fair amount of the creed deals with the skills a journalist might hope to acquire; the remainder is about things that we don't talk a lot about. Those things include an understanding of the society in which one lives; a commitment to engagement in a particular way about that society; and a sense of ethics in terms of how one might engage appropriately.

As Fanch spoke, I started thinking about how I write and how I teach. I started to wonder if perhaps there were different levels of teaching associated with the art of writing. Notice, please, my use of the word "art". It is deliberate. There is the teaching of the skills: crafting a sentence, organizing a story, developing characters, creating dramatic tension and conflict to advance a plot, writing dialogue, constructing scenes, and so on and so forth. Tons of books on how to master writing skills have been published. Most of them ultimately highlight the need for practice. Along these lines, the art of writing ultimately is about craft. You can study stories written by others, masterpieces of the past. But to learn how to write such stories, you must write them yourself. That realization is often frightening for those who think of the art of writing as an art, in the "artiste" sense alluded to earlier. It's much less intimidating if you think of writing as a craft, as something where you're allowed to make mistakes, write really badly, get your work all marked up, and see each new story that you craft as a step toward getting a little better.

But what is the other level associated with the art of writing? Is there more to learn than skill? Fanch's interpretation of the journalists' creed suggests there is, and that other level might be the art of the art, in a more relaxed, more humbling way than the artiste level might indicate. To restate the creed, to write well, one must connect with readers. One does this partly by understanding the society in which one lives. One also does this by making a commitment to engage with that society in ways that are socially appropriate to one's own sense of self and that self's relation to one's place in the world.

To put it more simply, one of the ways that I often engage with the world is by speaking up. But when I'm in a space that feels new or unfamiliar, I am happiest if I can simply skulk in a corner and hang out. This might seem like disengagement, but the reality is that it's not. It's a form of listening and watching -- both of which are information-gathering practices in their own right. These acts of engagement and studies into the society with which one interacts are ultimately journeys of the self into spaces of discomfort that might lead to discoveries and transformation. That, in a way, is what the art of writing is about.

Can you get to the art without the skills? Can you master the skills but never find the art? On the first question, I am fairly convinced that the answer is no. As I write about the art, I feel I am writing about it as an abstraction. It's something that is understood more and more as one's skills develop. Regarding the second question, I find it difficult to believe that focus only on skills will never lead to art. But, to be honest, I am not sure what the answer is. If it were yes, my original belief that you could separate writers into those who did it as an art and those who did it as a craft would be affirmed. But, if it were not, we might need a different understanding of what art is altogether.

To return to journalism, that sense of a need for a different understanding of what defines the journalist and the work of journalism is what seems to intrigue Mike Fancher. It intrigues me, as well, perhaps for different reasons. What would happen if all embarked on a mission to practice and refine our skills while simultaneously entering into a pact to immerse ourselves fully and actively with the worlds in which we live?

(A brief note on the image: I found the image at the top of this post via a Google Images search. In trying to secure an appropriate credit, I discovered that the photo comes from an arts supplies store. It appeared in the Google search after being used on a blog about making money in what is called the Variety Arts. The particular post that it illustrated speaks in some ways to the questions I raise here. Check out the post at http://www.bradweston.com/wordpress/what_is_art/.)