The Struggle to Get it All Straight

The Struggle to Get it All Straight

I.

I first began writing--really writing--sometime around my sophomore year of high school. Since then, I have consistently received high marks and flattering compliments for my work. But I still suffer this insecurity which Judith Guest describes perfectly. She says that after achieving great success in her writing she found that she was "still telling [herself] that [she] wasn't really a writer, but a trickster" (xii). Ah, yes. I know that feeling. Every paper I am asked to write, I fear will be my undoing--that it will be the assignment which proves that I haven't been able to write the whole time, that I'm nothing but crafty.

My undergraduate degree carries with it an emphasis in creative writing; for four years I wrote mostly poetry. I didn't know it, but the poetry courses gave me my first introduction to Rhetorical Theory. There I met the generative techniques of Peter Elbow and Natalie Goldberg which make so much sense to me. I appreciated these exercises, which, as Guest notes, "[give] people permission to think the thoughts that come, and to write them down, and make sense of them in any way they wish" (xii). Between the covers of my journal, I took on the premise of Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones :

Learning to write is not a linear process.

There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life. (3)

Because I understood the idea without understanding the possibilities, these courses didn't change my life--instead they were a reprieve from "real" life, a reprieve from the the standards of "real" academics. Although I enjoyed other English courses, I never felt the freedom that those writing courses offered me--the opportunity to create my own understanding from a personal perspective. Instead I wrote the essays about subject matter, and in the kind of language, I thought those teachers wanted to hear. This contradiction between these two types of English courses was something I accepted without question.

Two years ago the issue really opened itself up for me. I had been out of school for a few years and was a little nervous about returning to the world of academic writing. That spring quarter I had three writing courses and an American Literature course.