In order to understand my thoughts and reactions to Goodman’s article, “Calming the Inner Critic and Getting to Work,” I feel that I must share a bit about my background as a writer. My imagination has spent the past two years in all-out war with my inner critic.
My junior and senior year of high school I took two advanced placement english classes, one focused on language and the other on literature, respectively. My teachers for those classes are two of the most brilliant people I have ever known, but vastly different. My junior year teacher is the most one of the most strong willed, intelligent and argumentative women I have met. She spent the year drilling us on arguing a point and analyzing writing to its death. I learned about rhetoric and how to read deeply into things and then use that to demolish someone else’s argument.
So naturally, I spent that year with my inner critic on full blast, picking out every little mistake I made in my writing and hating it. This made the next year a bit of a shock when my teacher demanded that I shut it off and read literature just for the love of literature and write what I truly thought and felt about it. He treated each piece of writing as if it were a mystery to be solved, not something to be argued with.
That year I learned to understand writing better than I ever had before and so reading Goodman’s article reminded me that at the core, writing isn’t about doing something that’s never been done before or making something that others will marvel at long after you’re dead. It’s about organizing all the jumbled thoughts in your head, creating new characters and stories out of the parts of life you are trying to understand. Goodman talks about when a writer loses herself in her writing and forgets about the world and, though I may not be a world class writer, some of my best personal growth and best writing has come from when I forgot the world and the audience and just wrote in a desperate rush to put my racing thoughts on paper.
There’s just something about not caring about the outcome and only focusing on the process that makes writing into something beautiful, instead of something forced and academic.
I'm commenting as I read, Sophie, and as I read your very first line about your all out war between imagination and your inner critic, I have to admit that I too am a soldier in that war.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate hearing about your background in writing, and I think the skills both of your teachers helped you create will be useful in your writing future. It is a challenge to use two ends of an extreme spectrum, right? We can talk more about that. I truly look forward to hearing more from you, especially when we get into the rhetoric parts, because it's really helpful to have more perspectives than my own when we're talking in class about such a complex subject. Also, you'll probably find that I have a very different take on rhetoric than others.
As I sign off, I'm pondering your point about the value of forgettign audience and just writing from an inner drive. Again with the complexity--we need both a blindness to audience and consciousness of them. I tend to think to balance those out by writing in shifts: first draft for me, second draft with an audience in mind (except I do more like 10 drafts so it's more like 5 and 10 that are different).
Looking forward to learning together!
--Mallory out