Love of etymologies and dictionaries

"I love the dictionary. Perhaps a love that only English majors can fully appreciate. When I was teaching, I always made my students carry little dictionaries, and we would often spend an entire class period trying to figure out what things like 'existentialism', 'modernism', and 'caucasian,' actually meant."

I found the above statement somewhere online, written by a woman who understands what it is to love words, and their meanings. To go back to a word's original source, its earliest recorded usage, is to connect with something more important than the quotidian use we've assigned it. I feel like I better understand not only the word itself, but the people and the time the word derives from. I have also told students, when they're resistant to this process of looking up words in the dictionary, that if they do not understand where a word comes from, the language is using them, they're not using the language. 

To become more consciously aware of the language we're using, it is crucial to look up the origins of words. To know that a word comes from Old English, for example, is to begin to trace its development over time, and to see how it has changed, how meaning and social values have changed too. There are also people who enjoy looking up phrases, to see where and how its vernacular usage began (when, for example, we began to call a low-hanging orange-hued moon a "harvest moon").

If you ever try to explain a phrase you're accustomed to, to someone from another culture, you begin to see the insularity of a phrase; how it didn't travel to someone else's country, how instead it stayed home, and might, in fact, be something only said in your "neck of the woods." It isn't until you begin thinking about the language from someone else's perspective that you're most likely to really, truly question each individual word. Those who are not familiar with your words might be the very people who spur you to try to understand where the word 'furze,' an Old English word of "uncertain origin" according to the Oxford American Dictionary, comes from.

I remember trying to explain to someone once what "trimming the verge," a line from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, meant. Having someone question a word, and not only when playing Scrabble, is a valuable occurrence. It makes you think much more about the language you'd otherwise use unthinkingly. You also discover what the word refers to, what it alludes to, what metaphor it's relying on. If you're used to thinking of the word 'verge' as 'on the edge of' something, you might not know that for the English, it refers to a herbacious border, a piece of vegetation that gets trimmed with cutting shears. However, once you know all the ways in which the word 'verge' can be used, it adds dimension and depth to your comprehension of one simple word. 

Once you begin to question the origin of words, you run into a bit of a sticky wicket, in that you then have to determine if your source is reliable. Since there are so many dictionaries now, I tend to only buy those that are capable of giving their readers the most accurate etymologies. I eschew (related to 'shy,' a word deriving from  Old English scēoh [(of a horse) easily frightened,] of Germanic origin; related to German scheuen ‘shun,’ scheuchen ‘scare’; compare with eschew. The verb dates from the mid 17th century) dictionaries that cannot tell me where a word comes from, its perambulations from place to place, its visits through time, the ways it has changed, the new clothes it wears each time someone decides to use it differently than they did before. 

I think to want to know where a word comes from is a lot like wanting to understand one's genealogy. It is genealogical research for word-lovers. Think of a word you'd like to know better, and go look it up!

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Basic skills to prepare students for college

As an educational consultant, parents and volunteer organizations for foster children have asked me what they should be thinking about as they help teenagers prepare for academia. These are the basic skills that students should have in place to help ensure academic success:



A) Critical Thinking Skills:

Reading: The more you can encourage reading, the easier the student will have it when they get to college. Reading skills are the most complicated critical thinking skill to teach. How to read, especially when you're in college, is a huge issue. Most students don't know what to read for, so they underline everything in a textbook. Help them find the major issue in a piece of reading. What is the piece about? Who is it written for? What is the piece trying to get you to believe? Do you believe the credibility of the writer? These are crucial places to begin in college reading for any class, any discipline.

Categorizing: Ability to sort information hierarchically, logically, in order of importance. The ability to summarize, to express the gist of something. First-years will often give a blow-by-blow and think it is a summary; it’s not.

Vocabulary: Students often believe that ‘fancy’ words make them sound pretentious, and they need encouragement to use one longer word instead of three short ones. Therefore it's ideal to start with words they think they already know the meaning of, or words they think are funny-sounding. If you can get them to underline words they're not familiar with, and then look each word up in the dictionary, it's a great start toward building their vocabulary.

Argumentation skills/Providing evidence: Students must learn how to rely on sources when writing term papers. College writing will require students to use evidence to support their assertions and arguments from primary and secondary source material. To be taken seriously, they must get used to this convention, especially the reality of providing more than one source to support or contravene an argument.

Essay-writing: Usually based on argumentation skills. Ability to locate the argument/topoi, and to argue for and against.  Tell student about Blue books (remember those?). Students generally haven’t heard of them, nor are they familiar with essay-writing conventions. Usually they know the five paragraph theme from high school, but its conventions and rules will not help them in college. In fact, it will hinder them.


B) Practical Skills:

Note-taking: When to take notes during a lecture; what to take notes on (when you went to college, how did you know what was important and what to listen for?). Most first-year classes in big schools are lecture courses, so note-taking is crucial to surviving the first year. Students often believe that the information they’ll need on a test is in their textbook, and are dismayed to find that issues covered in class show up on the test.

Computer skills: Familiarity with computers, finding websites, online resources, and Microsoft Word, plus any other programs that will get the student through their first year. Microsoft Word is the standard, expected word processing program.

Internet Use: It is really helpful if students are not just familiar with computers before they get to school, but are actually fairly fluent. One of the best ways of familiarizing the student with the colleges they’re interested in is by having them search online for the colleges, departments, and courses they think they might want to take.

Library: Find a book and follow through with the entire process of looking it up in an online catalog locating it on the shelf, and taking it out.  It's important for the student to have some familiarity with journals and magazines in a specific area of interest. Professional journals are frequently overlooked by students as a source of information.

2) More complicated issues that will need your help:

Taking responsibility for their own learning: Students don’t ask enough questions for fear of looking stupid. Scared students from a difficult background are most at risk for not going to the teacher to ask questions, preferring to disappear into the woodwork rather than look as though they need help.

Writing Across the Curriculum: This curriculur change is fairly standard now for most larger schools, and smaller schools are catching on to it as well. Essentially, what it means is that students will be writing in all their classes, not just English Composition. Writing skills are central to success at college. Anything you can do to promote and support their ability to write rhetorically in any given situation (to make an argument regarding an issue, support it, show the opposition’s point of view, and what the writer intends to do about the problem they’ve discussed) will help the student’s chances of success in college.

Being able to work in a community of learners: The educational process is less and less about the individual and more about collaboration and group work. This can present a challenge for students who don't expect to have to listen to their peers more than to the teacher, whose authority is increasingly questioned. Authority issues have become a subtext of most college classrooms.

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The first three pages of my book "The Mythologized Writer"

In an effort to be brave and get the publication process started, I'm posting this, if only to get used to seeing my words in print:

Introduction

 What I Once Thought I Knew About Teaching Writing

“How we teach is shaped by whom and what we teach. To some extent we also define how we behave as teachers in light of our previous experiences as students. We emulate teachers whose classrooms we enjoyed and avoid the habits of those who most displeased us. By continually planning, executing, and revising our teaching performance, we eventually develop a style that best expresses our teaching self” (253).

--Erika Lindemann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers

            

My “teaching self,” complicated by convictions and prejudices I was unaware of, developed years before I entered my first classroom. Revising my ideas about what I thought I knew about writing has proved to be fairly difficult; what I have learned has taken years to integrate, understand, and write about. What I learned was that everything I thought I knew about writing was wrong. I also discovered that long before anyone who wants to teach writing enters her first classroom, she has already formed complex beliefs about the act of writing. She may believe that writing involves inspiration, talent, even genius. She may have been told that the authors she has read were eccentric because of their solitude and isolation from society; that the act of writing itself isolates and secludes.

She may have been told that only certain people should be considered writers, and that only certain Authors (with a capital ‘A’) are worthy of her attention, those who elucidate ‘universal’ themes ‘all people’ identify with and understand. Long before a writing teacher discusses the subject of writing with her students, her writing will have been judged by someone in authority, someone who knows what ‘good’ writing is. Early in her education, she will be told whether she has talent, and whether she might one day become ‘successful’—a publishable writer. 

            Writing teachers educated during the process movement in composition studies will also have been told that writing is collaborative, recursive, revisionary (cf. Flowers and Hayes, N. Sommers, S. Perl). The workplace writer, she is assured, works in a group, and revises according to her readers’ demands (cf. Nancy Sommers, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers”; and Flower and Hayes on reader-based prose). She is told that the key to success is perfecting her craft. She will be able to sell her writing skills anywhere, for she is a marketable commodity. This potential composition teacher has been trained, as have most people educated in the Western tradition, to believe some combination of two reductionist concepts about writing: one, that writing ability relies on solitary inspiration, talent, and genius; and two, that writing ability relies on learning-by-doing, and by continually revising modeled skills.

            As I will show, the former belief is based on a philosophical, Platonic epistemology, and the latter represents Isocrates’ workbench pedagogical style. As I will illustrate, these differing perspectives represent the ancient debate between Plato and Isocrates regarding the meaning and definition of discourse and whether, or indeed if, writing could or should be taught. A full understanding of the import of this unresolved struggle is crucial because at its core lies a fundamental disagreement about the function of logos [i] and who is permitted access to the power of discourse. This debate has never been resolved for composition and rhetoric because the argument between Isocrates and Plato regarding the purpose of an education and discourse’s role in that education is renegotiated with each new generation of educators who must come to terms with these issues.

            Unfortunately, the inheritance of their debate includes elitist attitudes toward the power of writing, and how access to logos must be limited to exclude the masses. The material outcome of these attitudes is seen at the moment of assessment and judgement, when grades are given. Ultimately, teachers judge and assess students according to the beliefs they have about the subject of writing, and it is inevitable that students will feel confused by comments and behavior that reveal dissonant values.

            The issues of the debate remain; what changes are the social, historical, and political contexts within which the issues are debated. I will show that a Platonic, philosophical, and exclusive view of education is incompatible with a Sophistic, practical, technical, and communal view of education; that both models coexist within the educational system, and that they serve to infuse each subsequent generation of teachers with discordant information about writing, discourse and the meaning of logos. It is my contention that since this ancient debate has never been resolved, it has been inherited by English studies, and in fact underlies the pedagogical inconsistencies teachers and students experience in the composition classroom.

---

[i] In The Sophistic Movement, G. B. Kerferd discusses the three ideas contained for the Greeks in the word logos: 1) “speech, discourse, description”; 2) “thought and mental processes . . . thinking, reasoning”; and 3) the world, that about which we are able to speak and think, hence structural principles, formulae, natural laws, and so on.” The “underlying meaning [of logos] usually, perhaps always, involves some degree of reference to the other two areas as well” (83-84). Logos then has a “range of applications,” although Kerferd does not mention that, according to Samuel Ijsseling in Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict, it has also been used to mean ‘fate,’ making logos a multivalent word indeed. The multiplicity of meanings possible in any given Greek word not only makes absolute translations difficult at times, but it also can lead to misreadings and misunderstandings based on the biases or stance of the translator.   

In Pursuit of the Unattainable: The Quest for Perfection

Having been deeply absorbed in the spurious pursuit of the unattainable these past few weeks, I have been reminded how entirely obnoxious people are when they focus on individual trees rather than the entire forest. Okay, you're thinking, where is this going? I understand. Where this is going, of course, given the tone, is in the general tilt of a rant. I get into ranting moods when I am confronted by situations that do not permit me to express a sense of humour about things I don't think are terribly important. When my sarcasm has to be contained, it leads to rants.

Correction, editing, and sentence-level grammar are of very little intrinsic interest to me. These tasks are considered, rightly, the final stage of the writing process. Think of it as the clean-up phase that comes long after inspiration, invention, creation, production, etc. In other words, only appropriate when the words you're mostly happy with have already been created. Too many writers, however, focus on this step in the writing process, which has the effect of truncating their thoughts. Now, thoughts, from my perspective, are precious commodities. They are the hardest part to come up with. Invention of a new thought is one of those things I take very seriously, and adamantly resist any force that comes close to interfering with it.

The clean-up phase requires a fair amount of attention to detail, but it also attracts obsessives and perfectionists. There is a mentality that focuses on error that is positively annoying, but it's also dangerous for some students, especially those who are marginalized. Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations deals with this subject. The politics of error correction has the effect of limiting what students are allowed to say, and how they are allowed to say it. There are not-so-subtle social expectations that there is one "right" way to say something, and when we force this on writers (and students, especially) we squash their creativity and tell them they are deficient the way they are. We tend to shut down their communicative abilities, as we attempt to reform them in "our" image.

Correcting error is a tricky path to walk. It is extremely difficult to correct someone without employing criticism, or implying the other is a flawed being. Very few people are so self-confident that they have learned how to ignore the psychological and emotional affect of having been corrected. Most people feel it very keenly, and if the act of criticism is handled badly by the person in power who is authorized to do the correcting, the person who is being corrected might shut down completely and stop writing entirely. There is no error that makes taking this risk with a student's creativity worthwhile.

How right does the error-corrector need to be? Writers need to know when they've made a mistake, yes. However, there are people who correct writing who carry this need to convey wrongness to extremes. Think about the effect your need to be right will have on your student, or on the basic writer—or even on the published writer who is, nonetheless, insecure. The quest for perfection, and forcing correctness on others (especially students who cannot defend themselves, due to the inherent power imbalance in the student-teacher relationship) is redolent of the Victorian era, when the English dominated the planet and were allowed to tell everyone, in judgemental tones, how to conduct their business. I keep wondering when students will rebel against this treatment.

The Political Nature of Grammar

Grammar is typically taught very much as a form of "inside the box" thinking. In other words, there are rules, they're packaged and sold as being fairly linear; follow them, and your writing will improve. However, the deeper truth about grammar is that it's actually extremely complicated, and accurate use (an arguably impossible task) depends very much on who you're reading and why they wrote their grammar guide. Scariest of all, there are actually multiple grammars.

Let me start with my strangest-sounding proposition first, the notion that there are, in reality, multiple grammars. This statement flies in the face of what we grow up being taught, that there is "one" grammar, one way of doing something, and one true way to write. In fact, grammar use is highly political, it's fluid, and it changes with the prevailing values of the dominant culture. You are forgetting, even as I write this, the grammar you learned to set in cement when you were a child.

The reason you're forgetting is because you do not use the grammar you learned as a child. You don't realise it most of the time, but it's true. A great deal of what you learned when you were young is probably still valid, but there are once-important bits and pieces that no longer matter, that no one cares about, and that few people, except perhaps die-hard grammarians and linguists, think are important. In other words, the grammar you were taught to cling to as a life raft on the sea of errant words has been over-written by more recent information, and that newer information was written when you weren't paying all that much attention.

So the concept of multiple grammars starts with the simple fact that there are acceptable ways of saying something and unacceptable ways of saying something. The second aspect to the concept of multiple grammars lies with the inherent politicization of the use of language when a grammar is applied to it; the grammar forms and restrictions determine 'correctness' at the cost of meaning, but if you're representing the dominant voice in society, do you honestly care if a group's meaning is erased by the power of your grammar? No, you do not. Your concern is to make the group learn 'the correct way' to say something.

Unfortunately for those you dominate with your grammar rules, they had their own forms, methods, and ways of saying something, now in the process of being erased by your need to 'correct' them. Grammars then become a method of controlling what people are allowed to say, how they are allowed to say it, and who, ultimately, will be heard. In this way, the deep structure of language is controlled by the very few in charge who are authorised by society to make the decision to approve or disapprove language use.

You begin to see the inherent risk of making it necessary to say something in any one way, when you start to realise how rigid, limiting, and controlling the concept of grammar can be. Grammar is never a value-neutral activity; it always carries with it the danger of oppressing the writer's unique voice, creativity, and style, and replacing it with what you approve of, what the dominant voice in society approves of—this is what makes grammars political. Yet, control constantly slips through the hands of those who seek to manage the unmanageable. The very fluidity of language makes it an impossible quest for lost verb forms to try to tell someone to use the language the way it was used in your Aunt Sally's era.

Further, the disparity between the grammar that is approved by those 'in charge,' and the grammar that is actually used, reveals the divergence between someone's reality and someone's ideal, and that territory belongs to philosophy. Grammar exists in that space very uneasily, and should come with a warning label: danger, you're entering heavily politicized ground! User beware! Just remember that correcting someone carries with it a tremendous responsibility. Who and what are you turning them into, precisely, when you correct their language use? You? Perhaps they'd like to be themselves instead.

Let our pen be at first slow, provided that it be accurate...

"We must write, therefore, as carefully and as much as we can, for as the ground, by being dug to a great depth, becomes more fitted for fructifying and nourishing seeds, so improvement of the mind, acquired from more than mere superficial cultivation, pours forth the fruits of study in richer abundance and retains them with greater fidelity. For without this precaution, the very faculty of speaking extempore will but furnish us with empty loquacity and words born on the lips. In writing are the roots, in writing are the foundations of eloquence. By writing, resources are stored up, as it were, in a sacred repository, from where they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies or as circumstances require. Let us above all things get strength, which may suffice for the labor of our contests and may not be exhausted by use. Nature has herself appointed that nothing great is to be accomplished quickly and has ordained that difficulty should precede every work of excellence. She has even made it a law, with regard to gestation, that the larger animals are retained longer in the womb of the parent...."



—Quintilian, Book 10, Chapter 3, Institutio Oratorio. 

The Bravest Act a Writer Can Perform...

In Victoria Nelson's On Writer's Block, writers are encouraged to come face-to-face with their inner fears, resistance, and blocks about the act of writing. From personal experience, I know this is harder than it sounds. I am not sure that I agree with her fundamental premise, that a resistant writer's first task is to find self-love, although maybe she's right. I'm not sure resistant writers throughout history have necessarily found the "peace" of self-love before they forced out yet another manuscript. I think plenty of writing goes on whether the writer feels self-love or not. 


However, I do agree with her that resistance stems from some fairly deep places within the psyche. I'd say it's probably more accurate to start, not from a lack of self-love, but from the overwhelming and subsuming lack of confidence that probably cripples most resistant writers. I'd say, from personal experience, and from talking to most writers who have not yet determined that what they want to say is important enough, lack of self-confidence eats away at one's desire to be a writer. 


Nelson counters emotion with some simple, but entirely reasonable, logic. It is not logical, she says, to claim you have a novel in you that you hope to get published "some day," if you're not also willing to put in the time practicing to write that novel. She's not saying practice to get published. She's saying write as an activity, practice how to write—this reduces your stress, because instead of thinking of writing a novel and getting it published, you think in more reasonable terms. Her analogy is that a long distance runner doesn't just suddenly leap up one day, prone from years on the couch, expecting to run the Boston Marathon. It requires practice—daily practice, in fact—to hone your abilities to do any long-term task as large as writing a novel (or running a marathon).


However, the resistant writer baulks at the notion of 'practice.' What seems logical and simple on the surface gets tangled in the strands of cloying, destructive inner nay-saying. So Nelson's point is, you're sitting there, a writer-wannabe, in front of the piece of paper (nowadays more likely to be the computer screen) and your mind is filled with thoughts far too grand and complex to translate adequately to the page. And she isn't wrong. Every word I write is a negotiation with what it should have been, if only I'd been a "better" writer, one who has a better command of structure, intention, plot, character, etc. Even now, writing this blog, a low-risk endeavor, there are so many better ways I could have chosen to say what I'd like to say. There were better choices of topic, or more elegant methods of expression. Yet here I go, writing anyway, ignoring (as much as I can) the negative voices saying "this sounds stupid," or "do you really need this sentence? can't you find a better way to say this?"


Nelson's contention is that the bravest act a writer can perform is to simply put one word down, and then the next, and the next. One mundane, inelegant word after another. Each word will be inadequate, and won't say precisely what's in your mind. All the wonderful, Xanadu-like structures your imagination has created won't be expressed in precisely the way you think they should: "The bravest act a writer can perform is to take that tiny step forward, put down the wretched little word that pricks the balloon of inflated fantasies with its very mundanity, and then put down another word directly after it. This act marks the decision to be a writer" (11). Perhaps then the hardest part is not a lack of self-love, but the puncturing of one's inflated ego? But that question is for another blog entry.  

The Writer's Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland

There is a lovely little museum along the Royal Mile just below the Castle in Edinburgh containing exhibits, pictures, writings, and a little bit of multi-media presentation of the lives of Robert Burns (1759-1796), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). Tucked in to Lady Stair's House, built in 1622 for an Edinburgh merchant, one has to search a bit to find this tiny resource. It is a bookstore, gift shop, and educational center, all at once.

The house's structure is charming, and exactly what writers love; it is 'romantic' in the sense that there is a narrow circular stone staircase connecting the three floors, which is low enough that you will have to watch your head as you go up and down. On the main floor, you walk through a number of rooms with the personal effects of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott on display. The bottom floor contains photographs and writings of my personal favorite Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson, whose "Land of Counterpane" written when he was a sickly young man, forced to stay in bed due to his ongoing ill health, has always charmed me. Take a look at A Child's Garden of Verses. I spent many, many hours reading those poems.

When I was quite young, I read Scott's "Lorna Doone," a classic novel about daring and adventure in the moors of Scotland: Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor (Oxford World's Classics). I have long loved Robert Burns' poetry; he is renowned for writing the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne, amongst many others. See The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns if you have any interest in his writings.

On display are many items, including the swordstick used by Robert Burns while working as an Excise Officer, and the writing desk from his house. Also on display are Scott's chess set, a rocking horse he played with as a boy, and his dining table from 39 Castle Street. The printing press upon which Scott's "Waverley" novels were printed is included, as is Robert Louis Stevenson's fishing rod, pipe, riding boots and hat he wore while living in Samoa.

Outside the museum is Maker's Court, celebrating the achievements of a few Scottish writers you might otherwise never have heard of through quotes from these writers.  Here is my favorite of the stones set into the pavement outside the museum:

Try to imagine a world in which writing is not difficult...

... and is not characterized by the metaphor of agonism. To say "writing is a struggle" or "writing is difficult" implies that writing is, of necessity, something we fight with. Writing is something we pursue, rather than something we allow to come to us. When we write, then, we are active; not writing feels wrong, and we judge ourselves as being "bad," or not being writers at all if we're not  applying pen to the proverbial paper. In other words, it's not okay, in a paradigm of action, to wait, to sit, to think, to let the thought percolate to the surface.

If instead we could revision writing as organic, where the impetus to write wells up from within, as a more gentle response to inspiration, I think a few things would change. For one thing, we would not experience writer's block as it is currently thought of. I have taught seminars where the question I asked students is, "how does this block serve you? what is the writing block trying to tell you?" because usually, there are very good reasons why you're not writing. Writer's block is not what we think it is a lot of the time; in fact, it's often our mind's way of protecting us against going into a subject we're not ready to handle. Writer's block might also be a response to pain, fear, boredom, loss of interest in the subject... any number of things stimulate writer's block. However, most people get frustrated, because they're not "supposed" to experience a block. It's not how writing is "supposed" to work.

Everyone who wants to write, also wants the writing to flow smoothly, but that is unrealistic. We often feel forced or compelled to write when we really don't feel like it--sometimes for a deadline, but too often because we believe that's what's expected of us as writers. It somehow feels like failure to sit, thinking, doodling, or daydreaming. We feel like we're getting nothing done. In a different paradigm, however, this would be allowed. It would be all part of the organic flow of writing, to stare off into space, if that was what would clear your mind to allow the next new thought to emerge.

There is research that indicates that allowing the brain to rest, instead of aggressively pursuing the next thought or the next sentence, increases access to creativity. However, the most important place to begin is not with neurological research, but with acceptance that when we approach writing, we have learned to think of our relationship to writing and creativity as something we should expect will not be easy. We believe it will be difficult, and unfortunately, our adherence to that belief system is part of why it is difficult--because we see words as something we must struggle with to "get right." If instead we saw the word coming to us, and allowed words to permeate our consciousness, we could let the words gather and build momentum, until we had enough to start writing.

It's a different way of thinking about writing, and it's certainly a less invasive or painful approach. I liken it to the Japanese water catchers you see in traditional gardens; rainwater is allowed to collect at one end of a bamboo pole, in a hole or cup carved for this purpose. When enough rainwater gathers, it tips the pole down, until the rainwater falls into a stone bowl. Only when the rainwater is heavy enough can the pole tip; so too should we wait for enough thoughts, words, and inspiration to collect before we write.

I prefer this metaphor. It's a much gentler way to treat yourself when you're writing. You'll notice that the rainwater never struggles to collect; it's a natural process. No one says to the bamboo "you haven't collected enough rainwater." No one accuses the rainwater of slacking off. No one says to the rain clouds "you're not working hard enough to fill up that fountain." This way of thinking about an organic process would sound absurd, because you accept that nature works in its own time. Then why can't we, when we write? Learning how to wait for the right time is the essence of this approach.

The Myth of the Lone Genius

Think about this as it relates to what you believe is true about writing:

If interpersonal skills and sensitivity to others is valued in some cultures, in America, the individual’s ability to overcome adversity on one’s own and emerge successful against competitors is considered a virtue. Combine this idealized image with the “modern view of creativity [which] has venerated the artist or genius as a cultural hero,” and it is understandable “why the popular image of the lone genius or solitary artist is romanticized” (1). The creative individual is worshiped when she has “forged something new and original by struggling against and rising above the limiting, stultifying forces of the conforming masses” (2). Most importantly, the achievement of this struggle represents a mythic role for the individual, a role that is ‘larger than life,’ which further separates the Self from the Other, especially when the Self is exalted and the Other is made up of ‘the conforming masses.’ Creativity becomes “hyper-individualistic” in this model, which, as researchers Montuori and Purser discuss, must be understood within a sociohistorical context of creativity studies that delineate the development, over time, of the exaltation of the supreme agency of the individual, and the rise of the notion of Authorship. The Author might be dead in theory, but in practice he is very much alive, as I will discuss.

Montuori and Purser trace the historical development of concepts of creativity and who is therefore sanctioned to be considered an Author. Central to constructions of creativity are definitions of self and world; the concept of an autonomous self, for example, does not become part of the definition of creativity until quite recently. Stating that “[c]reativity is, among other things, the function of a judgment made by people, and these judgments are influenced by trends, traditions, and the social, political, economic, and aesthetic perspectives of their time and place,” (3) the researchers contextualize individual creative expression in the West. During the ‘mimetic’ or theocentric phase when early medieval artists did not often sign their work, the self was subsumed and sacrificed to the “greater whole or God”; the mimetic period is associated today with collectivist societies “where art serves as propaganda and the state takes the role of deity” (4). In contrast, creativity as poiesis—to make anew—is a recent Western cultural invention. It is during this Modern period that the self emerges as an autonomous, creative individual. The notion of originality also emerges during this period, when “artistic creation is idealized as the paradigm for the achievement of self-discovery, self-expression, and self-definition” (5). A perceived need for originality and innovation requires the creative person to “disengage him- or herself from the environment. The resulting psychic isolation, along with what are perceived to be the “deviant” “schizoid” behaviors of the creative person, is romanticized or even seen as being synonymous with genius” (6).

In America, the ‘cult of the individual’ is threatened by collaboration, and is even more threatened, ironically, by the dissension found in the postmodern notion of the group ‘mind,’ whose agency seems amorphous and chaotic. Collaboration subsumes the supremacy of the individual, which threatens the individual’s idealized subject position of authority and autonomy. In America, a society in which the “self is socially constructed to believe it is not socially constructed,” (7) the individual is always at risk of being demythologized. Even when the romantic myth of the lone genius is resisted by those who believe that writing is an act of social construction, the society referred to has been enculturated to believe that ‘real’ writers do not rely on one another for inspiration, and that ‘real’ writing takes place in isolation. A correlative of this belief is that writers can be studied in a laboratory setting, a belief that further reifies the isolation from society the writer inherits. Further, to say a piece of writing is created as a process of dynamic verbal, intellectual and emotional exchange amongst one’s peers or classmates does not remove the writer from the influence of myth. The power of myth lies in human willingness to acknowledge its illogic and to believe it anyway, because the myth reinforces a value system so deeply embedded as to be unmoved by mere logic or persuasive research.

The myth of the isolated writer is seductive, even in the face of experience. Professor of English Linda Brodkey, for example, who acknowledges that her life as a writer functions because she is overtly connected to others, still finds it necessary to “exorcise the image of the writer-writes alone” which she identifies as a modernist construct “where the metaphor of solitude is reiterated as the themes of alienation in modern art and atomism in modern science” (8). The modernist ‘scene of writing’ is a narrative of inescapable isolation and alienation, “the “fact” of life that modern novels set out to articulate” (9). In this scene of writing, the writer functions solely as an amaneuensis: “in such a freeze frame, the writer is a writing machine, as effectively cut off from writing as from society” (10). Brodkey questions the “unexamined assumption that this and only this moment counts as writing” (11). And yet, the romantic contradiction at war with the logical outcome of extreme alienation, nihilism, reinscribes the individualism of the writer. At the same time that the writer is alone, he is fully an individual, observing, not participating. Romanticism will not permit the writer’s nihilism to erase the writer’s identity, which is fundamentally exploratory, revolutionary, masculine in expression, especially when it reifies the agonism of ancient Athens.

Quotes 1-7: Montuori, Alfonso, and Purser, Ronald E. “Deconstructing the Lone Genius Myth: Toward a Contextual View of Creativity,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 35:3, Summer 1995. 69-112.
Quotes 8-11: Brodkey, Linda. “Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing,” College English, 49:4, 396-418.

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Significant Others: Creativity & Intimate Partnership

Significant Others speaks to my previous post about writers who find a partner and work together collaboratively. Now, it has to be said that the focus of this book is on what were often tumultuous working and personal relationships between two artists or writers, who nonetheless inspired each other throughout the course of their lives. Ideally, the creative partnership will not be quite so tumultuous, but this book focuses on partners who were also intimately, physically involved, a reality that often makes a true mess of what would otherwise have been a good working relationship.

Some of these partnerships were so famous that movies have been made about them: Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, whose complicated on-again/off-again love affair spanned decades, and lasted until "Dash" died; Anais Nin and Henry Miller, another tempestuous romantic relationship that caused each of them tremendous anguish, even as it prodded them to works of searingly personal self-analysis; Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, whose relationship was turned into a movie not that long ago, called, simply, "Pollock." Another famous, and famously analysed relationship, was the love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Vita thought of Virginia as the first person who had shown her writing any attention, and it was in this relationship, of friendship, camaraderie, and passion, that Vita's writing blossomed.

This is not to say that the only viable writing partnership is one that has sex as a prerequisite. The authors of this collection of essays have chosen to focus on this particular kind of relationship to illuminate the inherent sexism of the expectation most creative couples have, or had at the time, that the woman would inhabit the role of "muse," and that the man would benefit from her influence. The underlying truth about these relationships, however, is that they broke through the often demeaning mythologies about the role, purpose, and relative unimportance of women's work. In this way, this collection of essays is very much a feminist discussion of class and gender roles, in that it analyses myths and realities about creative women who often initially sacrificed their own abilities so that their male counterparts could create freely, and only later in life learned to value their own work more highly.

This book has a moral to it, it seems to me, for it encourages women to produce their own work, take themselves seriously, and turn to others not for approval, but for reinforcement that the desire to create is not only socially acceptable, but also worthwhile and necessary. Women often think we live 'post' feminism, but the desire to create still often seems selfish. We question our need for self-expression and creativity, and stop ourselves from producing the very artistic endeavor that would make us happy and fulfill us. The women discussed in these creative partnerships might have lived in the previous century, but many of the boundaries and restrictions they lived with, we continue to impose on ourselves, and it's time to break out of those self-imposed limitations.

The Collaborative Writer: My new website, under development

My entire career, I have focused on teaching the benefits of writing collaboratively. For one thing, it breaks us out of the mold of thinking that we must write alone; this is an image of the writer forced on us by myths told about writers, and it's one that contradicts the reality of how writers actually work. Writers throughout history have written collaboratively, usually in small groups, some of which have later become famous. These include the Inklings of Oxford, which counted among its members two famous children's and fantasy writers, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien; the Bloomsbury group, comprised of writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey; painters Duncan Grant and Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, married to the critic Clive Bell, who was also a member. On the continent, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and other expatriate American writers flocked to Gertrude Stein's Paris salon to discuss politics, writing, and their various love affairs.

Lest you think that only fiction writers and artists seek out each other's company for inspiration, Rene Descartes regularly joined his fellow mathematicians and scientists for philosophical discussions in which he did something important for his writing process: he brainstormed ideas with like-minded thinkers of his era. What the collaborative writing group has in common is that they approach their own individual writing tasks in one of a few ways, any one of which is highly productive for the individual as well as the group. One way is to create a group dedicated to following rules of membership, with a specific agenda, like the Inklings did. Each member was expected to bring a piece of writing to the group, and read from it. This way the members could discuss the piece, critique it, and learn from the others' writing. The second way a collaborative group operates, generally, is that they inspire discussion and thought, not necessarily by focusing on the person's writing, but simply by discussing whatever is current. Inspiration for the writing is fed through a kind of 'cross-pollination,' where, for example with the Bloomsbury group, or Gertrude Stein's salon, many different types of people fed each other's creativity and inspiration through discussion.

The key to success in the collaborative writing experience is that each writer eventually found a partner to work with. For some, this person became their "muse," as happened with Anais Nin and Henry Miller, who fought and parted repeatedly, as did Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had a productive relationship, albeit a competitive one, but it can easily be argued that Hemingway's relationships were always competitive if the subject was writing. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were friends and a constant source of inspiration, competition, and irritation to one another. However, in each case, the relationship was strengthened through their ongoing reliance on the other to provide fodder for thought, the prodding that another person can bring, the sense of healthy, or even occasionally excessive competitiveness, and the knowledge that, no matter what, someone cares about your writing.

It is in this spirit that I am developing an online resource for writers, with the hopes of helping writers find a like-minded partner with whom to work, share, and inspire one another. Unlike critique groups, your partner is intended to provide you with support, interest, and sharing of your goals and hopes for your writing. Critique groups can be unnecessarily harsh and non-supportive. Instead, the goal here is to find someone to work with--ideally, a friend who is also a writer. This idea is under development, and since it's only just begun, it is in the early tinkering stages.

More about Collaborativewriter.com as the concept gels. The domain name is paid for, and the initial designs for the site are being created; concepts are fomenting in my brain. I am looking for online resources to link to and advertise with. If you come across this post, and you're at all interested in knowing more about this idea, please let me know at collaborativewriter@gmail.com. My hope, ultimately, is to create a website that helps writers find one another for support, inspiration, and friendship. If you're currently writing alone in your proverbial garret, or you're in a snarky critique group that isn't giving you the support you'd hoped for, collaborativewriter.com is being created as a place to go on the net where you can connect with a writing partner.

In real life, I work with a writing partner. We throw ideas back and forth, we brainstorm, we talk about different methods of approach to a writing problem; I read him my stuff, he reads me his stuff... it's not a critique session, and that's the point. We're not in competition and we're not looking for a quick fix like many critique groups are, when they're focused on what's wrong with your writing. Instead, we inspire each other and give each other ideas. I would like all writers, from beginning to multiply-published, to have access to that kind of interaction. Writer's groups, whether you are a seasoned professional or are brand new, are often difficult to get to on your schedule, and you might find yourself intimidated or annoyed for a lot of reasons. If you aren't writing as fast as others, you end up reading more than writing; sometimes, people in your group are distracting or irritating. Many people are just simply uncomfortable in a group. That's not what you're looking for, is it? You're looking for that one person, maybe two, with whom you can have an inspiring discussion about your writing, and you can help them with theirs in turn. That's the experience collaborativewriter.com is going to aim for.

Jane Austen fans: Take this quiz

In the midst of being serious and writing exclusively about serious subjects, I have come across this charming website, and I thought, well, there have to be Jane Austen enthusiasts who would like to see this:

http://www.strangegirl.com/emma/quiz.php

Please don't take this too seriously, of course, and have fun with it!

Metaphors We Live By, Part One: Writing as Agonism

Aside from being a seminal work, Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980), and its core concept, that we create beliefs about ourselves from the language we use, informs the central argument I am trying to convey about writing. We have inherited the trope of agonism from the Western Philosophical tradition; this one underlying belief controls how we think about writing. Before I explain further, let me point out the one metaphor we have typically been taught to believe about writing: that it is a "struggle." This is how writing is almost invariably characterised. Conversely, other cultures, notably Chinese and Japanese, use different, less violent metaphors, to describe acts of creativity. I will discuss these differences further, but for the moment, I want to focus on the ways in which we create our own reality about writing via the language we use to characterise our experience of it.

For many, metaphor is a poetic device, but in rhetorical analysis, metaphor is a linguistic tool, used to convey analogy. When we deconstruct that analogy, we find a less well-understood 'hidden' realm of meaning. This in no way implies that the meaning is conveyed 'unconsciously,' in the psychological sense, but that it is not used overtly, and is therefore not transparent. Meaning that is not transparent goes undiscussed, and because of that, typically contains tremendous emotive power over the reader, because you are being, in effect, manipulated by the underlying social values a word connotes.

In the case of the history of writing, our inheritance about writing is based on Ancient Greek sociocultural and sociopolitical values. We in the West have long believed in the Greek principle of democracy and the notion that the culture of pre-Hellenistic Greeks represents a Golden Era of philosophical and political accomplishment, and so we tend to see the Greeks as inherently good and noble people. However, we forget too much when we elide Ancient Greek cultural values with their divergent, and much more blood-thirsty, political values. In truth, theirs was a culture undergirded, and undermined, in my opinion, by their insistence on agonism as the arbiter of any outcome. For every philosopher who valued 'sophrosune,' the way of temperance, there was the man who lived a life in almost constant contest with his fellow Athenians. If you read the Greeks, especially in the original and not in translation, you find that these were a people almost obsessed with besting their opponent.

Agonism, therefore, informed their political ethos. Winning an argument became a paramount goal; writing the best speech, based on its quality, was insufficient. What was important was persuading the demos to do what you said. Agonism lay at the heart of the political instability and volatility of Greek city-states, which is why they were constantly at war with one another. Their Olympic games were intended to impress surrounding areas in Greece with the power and strength of its athletes, a fitting analogy for the assumed power and strength of Greek warriors, who were expected to be braver and stronger than mere mortals could reasonably attain.

Within the ethos the Greeks left to us lies the seed of what we think we know about writing, which is based on their belief in the importance of besting an opponent, as well as the importance of being better than anyone else. This elitism lay at the core of what it meant to be an Athenian. Athenian philosophers such as Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle all discussed what made a piece of writing "good," and in prior posts, I mentioned the essentialised notion that a piece of writing is only good if it is divinely inspired.

These philosophers all believed, to a greater or lesser extent, that it was not possible for 'mere' humans to write well without divine assistance. We have inherited the belief that labor is insufficient to make writing 'good'; that writing is difficult because we are always struggling against human limitation, and that only through outside help can we hope to overcome these difficulties. There is a fundamental flaw in this way of thinking, of course, and I intend to discuss the limitations of perceiving writing as a struggle.