Feeling good

Word Works has published plenty about writing as thinking, about the cognitive dimension of writing, and will do more. We haven't said much, though, about the affective dimension: how writers feel about their writing. It's just as important. How we feel about what we're writing can motivate us as strongly as what we think about the subject. It can have a lot to do with whether we finish what we start, and how our writing affects readers. One reason we haven't discussed feelings is that they're hard to write about. Another is, OK, you've identified feelings; now what do you do about them?

It's not surprising, I guess, that you don't find much in the professional literature about feelings. What there is is mostly about the negative side: writer's block, writing anxiety. Much good work has been done to find the causes of anxiety and block, and to help writers overcome these obstacles. BSU writing teachers, especially in the basic writing (E 010) classes, take extra care to help students build confidence in their ability to write, to enjoy writing.

Writer's block and writing anxiety would be a worthy subject for a future Word Works. This issue, though, will look at the other side, the positive feelings, and attempt to make something productive out what little is known.

Two things I've read recently draw me to this subject, a book and an article. The book is Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The article is "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment" by Peter Elbow. Flow and liking: they complement each other. Flow is about the writer's feelings during writing; liking is about the writer's feelings after writing. Together they fuel the writing and revising processes. One doesn't write with thought alone.

Flow

Writer's flow is sort of the flip side of writer's block. It's based on the psychological phenomenon of "flow." Csikszentmihalyi doesn't provide a neat one-sentence definition, but I'll attempt one: flow is a heightened sense of awareness and enjoyment in an activity we do well. Csikszentmihalyi identifies eight "elements of flow." Most of them fit the optimal experiences we occasionally feel while writing. I've boiled them down to five and adapted them to show how they apply to writing.

Engagement in a challenging activity that requires skill.

The merging of action and awareness; deep but effortless involvement; forgetting of self-consciousness and of outside worries and frustrations. Sense of "losing oneself" in the writing.

Sense of clear goals: either a vision of the piece as a whole, or of the goal of a particular section, or the development of a particular idea. Sense of the writing "taking on a life of its own."

Immediate feedback; sense of control over actions; sense that the writing is "going well" while it is going on.

Altered sense of duration of time, or sense of being taken out of time.

I have surveyed some of my classes and Writing Center staff members about their optimal writing experiences. Their replies seem to jibe with the elements of flow. Here is what some of them reported.

"Ideas come freely. Transitions seem natural. I didn't struggle over word choice, descriptions."

"It was like the pieces of a jigsaw suddenly fell into place. I saw connections I'd never noticed. I almost couldn't type fast enough to get all my thoughts down before I lost them. I was excited."

"It felt like I was playing a good piece of music on the piano. The words were like notes of music that I could hear in my head. I felt very happy and full of energy."

Whatever goal we may be after in what we are trying to write, the act writing becomes a goal in itself, an autotelic experience. Csikszentmihalyi notes: "The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing; you don't conquer anything except things in yourself. . . . The act of writing justifies poetry."

Poetry . . . yes . . . if the three quotations above make you a little uncomfortable, it may be because these writers were talking about writing a short story, an essay, and a poem, in that order. But I've surveyed students in technical writing classes, too, and they also report experiences identifiable as flow while writing technical documents. There's a common belief that technical writing is not "creative" and is therefore boring and tedious to write.

But tech writers indeed have to bring as much imagination and creativity to bear as so- called creative writers. All writing involves creating order out of disorder, inventing meaningful connections, and constantly struggling and playing with words. The tech writer must make words precisely unabiguous; the poet tries to make words precisely ambiguous, but precision is the norm in both cases. When order, connections, and words click, flow happens. It can happen no matter what we are writing.

The only really problematical item in the list of elements is the first, because it involves skill. Writing teachers talk among themselves about skilled and unskilled writers, an example of unfortunate labeling. Really, nearly everyone is skilled in some ways, even basic writing students. A person may be skilled at writing essays and personal letters but not fiction, at poetry and technical reports but not journalism. If you look at it this way, then asking writers about their flow experiences might help them discover they have skills they never thought about -- strengths to build on. Asking them where, in a draft, they felt good about what they were doing, or found the writing easy, or were surprised by a new turn of thought, might help them identify strong places in the writing. These are often starting places for rewriting and revision; they can lead to rewrites that come out a cut or two above the original draft.

Sure, writing's sometimes a struggle for most of us. We get frustrated and fear we'll never get it right, never get the words to say what we really mean -- or even know what we really mean. I'm not trying to say that we could eliminate the suffering, or even should. Frustration can be a powerful motivator, too. But if we acknowledge the flow experience in ourselves and other writers, and learn to pick up on these experiences and look at the writing that gets done under those conditions, things might open up for us a little bit.

In the Writing Center we're looking for ways to use writers' flow experiences. For instance, if a Writing Assistant and a client are discussing a draft, the WA can ask, "What did you enjoy about writing this draft? Was there any place where the writing seemed about to take off or where the piece seemed almost to write itself?" With questions like this, the two of them can home in on the real source of energy in the draft, the "center of gravity." Often the source of energy is one sentence buried somewhere in the middle or at the end, one the writer considered just a maverick thought and might even have wanted to get rid of, because it messed up the smooth seamlessness of the rest.

Sometimes, on the other hand, the real source of energy lurks somewhere around the edge of the draft, unwritten. Sometimes in the Writing Center we'll have an exciting session where the writer, having brought in a ho-hum draft, suddenly gets excited talking about the topic and finds a whole new way to approach it, one that will bring the writing to life.

Liking

The other source of these thoughts on feeling good is the Peter Elbow article. Elbow mainly discusses the teacher's job of evaluating writing, but at the end he takes up a fresh, new way of assessment, liking. He begins this section with a story:

I was in a workshop and we were going around the circle with everyone telling a piece of good news about their writing in the last six months. It got to Wendy Bishop . . . and she said, "In the last six months, I've learned to like everything I write." Our jaws dropped; we were startled -- in a way scandalized. . . . her words . . . have led me into a retelling of the story of how people learn to write better.

The old story goes like this: We write something. We read it over and we say, "This is terrible. I hate it. I've got to work on it and improve it." And we do and it gets better, and this happens again and again, and before long we have become a wonderful writer. But that's not really what happens. Yes, we vow to work on it -- but we don't. And next time we have the impulse to write, we're just a bit less likely to start.

What really happens when people learn to write better is more like this: We write something. We read it over and we say, "This is terrible. . . . But I like it. Damn it, I'm going to get it good enough so that others will like it too." And this time. . . we actually work hard on it.

Such a simple idea, but it hit me like a revelation. Of course I have to like a draft, if I'm going to feel committed enough to make it good. And, as Elbow says, I look for other people who will like it -- not just to get suggestions from them, but to get support and encouragement to work on it some more. This was a revelation because, all these years, I'd neglected to consider how my students felt about their writing. Now I ask all the time. "Do you like it? What do you like about it? Why?" In the Writing Center, we ask clients the same questions.

The results are rewarding. If the writer is working on an open-ended assignment, then probing for what the writer likes about the draft can help uncover what the writer really wants to say, what the paper really wants to be about. Just as when we ask about flow experiences, the most promising things about a draft may be hidden from the writer, who has gotten lost in a thicket of words and conflicting ideas. Asking about liking can lever change and improvement.

Things can get complicated, of course. I'll ask a student what he likes and he will say, "I like the whole thing," and I sit there in dismay, because the draft seems to me very weak or wrong-headed. And I can tell he really does like it. I can't say I didn't like it; I could immediately lose that student, as a productive learner, for the rest of the term. I haven't found an easy way out of this bind. What I try to do is get the writer talking about the draft, how he went about writing it, why what he's saying is important to him, what parts of the draft say best what he's trying to say. This way, and with some bumbling around, we can sometimes arrive at an understanding of the potential of the draft and why it hasn't yet reached that potential, and what to do about it. If all goes well, the student goes away still liking the draft but knowing that with some work, he'll like it a lot better. And knowing that I at least like some of it, or like what it can be.

Elbow hints at another possibility in the same article. We can't, he points out, get people to have a skill simply by telling them they should have it: "It's disorganized. Organize it!" "It's unclear. Make it clear!" Instead, he suggests, we should look for hints of organization or clarity in the writing and say something like this (I've added the italics): "Look here at this little organizational move you made in this sentence. Read it out loud and try to feel how it pulls together this stuff here and distinguishes it from that stuff there. Try to remember what it felt like writing that sentence - - creating that piece of organization. Do it some more." The strategy is to engage not only the writer's thinking but also the writer's feelings in order to discover strengths in the writing and then build on them.

Another complication, at least for us in the Writing Center, is that writers will not always be frank about liking or not liking their drafts. In a class this is not a problem, because the teacher has time to establish the understanding that everyone will be totally honest about how they feel about their writing. But in the Writing Center it's different. A WA doesn't have that pre-established understanding with a client. A couple of things can happen.

1. The writer likes the draft but says she doesn't, or has no feeling one way or the other, because she doesn't want to lose face if the draft is found faulty.

2. The writer does not really like the draft but says she does. This can mean she likes the fact that it's done, she's past that hurdle; or she may just be saying what she thinks the WA wants to hear.

Either way, this lack of frankness sets up a barrier to a productive tutoring session, because WA and client will be working at cross purposes. In the first case, the WA may waste time and energy trying to bolster the writer's confidence in the writing when the writer doesn't need it. Or the WA may try to steer the client into major changes the draft doesn't need.

In the second case, the WA may think the tutoring session has helped the writer make great progress toward re-seeing and revising the draft - - but really the writer is going away with no intention of doing any of the revising they've discussed. They've worked at cross purposes the whole time. Worse, the session may have accomplished nothing toward the ideal priority of any tutoring session, which is to change the writer primarily, the piece of writing secondarily (see Word Works #67).

So it's important to pay attention to times when we feel good about our writing. They are mong the most telling clues to the strengths we can build on.

RL