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Lose your Ties

It makes a lot of sense.

The business of the English department is to teach English, and one facet of that is to the ability to effectively communicate ideas. Since the class is English, not oratory or sketching, this is usually done through the written word. And in a class, curriculum, school, district, state, country with an incredibly varied and diverse spectrum of students, the only feasible way to do this is in a very structured, stepwise manner.

What does that mean? It means that when your teacher guides you through the process of writing an essay, a story, a report or an epic, their method of doing so will be to advise the age-old military adage: “Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.”

Before you ever set a pen to paper in the course of actually writing the piece, you will be assigned and instructed in the slow building and mapping of the skeletal backbone of the material, the structure and the progression, the beginning, the middle, and the end with everything in between. You will then begin to flesh it out, like pouring muscle and vital ligaments around the rigid core, branching off from the central ideas as sideroads from an interstate. Finally, almost without realizing it, you will have completed the assignment, joyless and uncaring.

Dramatizing? I confess. But the basic idea is consistent, no matter how elaborately (or less so) the specific teacher may follow it.

I’m not complaining, not really. Well, in a manner of speaking. Hell, I always complain. But really, this manner of teaching and of writing has good use, mainly as a stable common denominator; anyone can do it, and while the result may not be revolutionary, it will be reliable and correct.

But there are other ways.

When I sit down to write an essay — or a story — or an article — or a post on this site — I don’t spend an hour sketching out the structure beforehand. I don’t outline the main ideas or describe the flow of the argument, think up my topic sentences, or write my introduction and conclusion. In the course of subliminally thinking about the writing, I may have come up with a few tentative ideas that I wanted to include, a random grab-bag of points (an argument or two I’d like to throw in, a situation I want to place a character into, or whatnot), but I have no grasp beforehand of what’s going to happen.

It’s a little bit odd.

Really, I don’t write the composition. It writes itself. I am the medium, and I sit, fascinated, as I watch the words flow together, telling me my opinions, describing what fates will befall my characters, creating worlds I could scarely imagine. Oftentimes, upon finishing a piece, I read over it, utterly entranced by what I have written myself into.

Does it ever descend into unstructured chaos? Occasionally. Of course, I’m the type that constantly revises as I write (on the minor scale, each sentence or paragraph, not macro “editing” of entire pages or sections). However, sometimes the entire thing will just go crazy, and require major revision.

But not often.

Usually, the effect is elegant, comfortable writing free of tight comformity and rote writing-by-numbers. (At least, more so than it would be; I leave it to the reader to judge whether my writing is in fact any of those things by an objective standard.)

I understand fully that this method is not for everybody. For many writers, it simply doesn’t work; they are unable to produce any kind of effective prose without a solid pre-made framework to build it from. This is not in any way indicative of their skill as a writer; many, perhaps most of the best writers write this way.

However, if you’d like to see how it works for you, try skimping on the preliminaries a little next time, and give it a whirl. You might be surprised.

— Brandon