My writing process is difficult for me to explain, because it seems unconventional and I have been told over and over again that the way I approach writing, especially academic writing, is a bad habit that I must break myself of. I write for my classes in one frenzied mess the night before it’s due, editing as I go along to try and make the writing more precise while getting my ideas all out on the screen (I rarely write by hand for academic pieces) in one long session. That’s not to say that I don’t put thought into my assignments beforehand. For weeks and sometimes months before there will be diagrams and quotes all over my walls and desk on note cards, scrap paper, the margins of books and once even on the inside of a booklet that came along with a music CD (I still regret destroying the liner notes booklet to my copy of Linkin Park’s Minutes to Midnight). Along with these notes are doodles and other little things that come to mind. My prewriting process is a mixture of all different forms of chaos, but I rarely actually look at it all while I’m writing, the simple act of writing them and looking at them for days and weeks on end is what helps me. For things that need a little more thought, like long research papers, I will write whole paragraphs on note cards and arrange and rearrange them to get a feeling for the order that works best before I’ve finished. I’m also a fact hoarder and a talker. Before the frenzied night of writing I will talk to anyone or anything that will listen to my long winded discussions of topics that nobody but me cares about, or I will complain about things that confuse me, or the assignment itself, until through my complaints an idea for one of my many crazy notes comes to mind. I think that’s where I would benefit from a coach the most when writing an academic piece, because they’d listen to my crazy ideas on a topic and help me evaluate them logically, without subjecting my mother or aunt to another three hour phone conversation on the life of Elizabeth Bathory and her connection to older vampire legends and my theories on how the truth gets twisted.
Creative writing pieces, especially long pieces of prose, get a lot more careful attention and thought in the actual composing and in the revision. I stew over creative stories for weeks, months, years at a time, carefully plotting things out and using that plot as a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene roadmap to the actual writing. After the plotting, I tend to write it as freely as I can while sticking to that map, not worrying about the on-the-nose dialogue or repetition until I’ve got multiple chapters done. This is because I know from experience that if I read back the work before I’ve got a giant chunk done, none of it will get done and the story will remain in my brain, unfinished. I don’t think that I would even allow a writing coach to see my creative pieces until I was ready for a workshop session, or someone to help me read through and fix dialogue, and that wouldn’t happen until the very end, when the piece is at least 90% written. I’m superstitious when it comes to my creative writing, and I’m afraid that if I let someone outside myself look at it before I’ve gotten it mostly written out, their opinions or comments will dry up any creativity I have, so I think that this is the kind of writing I would go to a coach with for revision work.
The one thing that is the same for both creative writing and academic writing is the influence of music on my ability to write. I find it much easier to get words out when I have some kind of music playing in the background. When I’m writing for school, the music is ambient background noise, usually instrumental pieces from movie scores, because I find lyrics distracting when I’m trying to write into a complex subject. My creative writing process almost always starts with creating playlists. Relationships, chapters, situations, or the whole mood of the piece itself inform music choices. When I’m writing for myself, music is inspiration, a catalyst. When I’m writing for school, music is a way to drown out background noise (like roommates) and keeps me focused on the task ahead. No matter what, music is involved, not that that particularly matters to the subject at hand.
I’d probably be a very difficult person for a writing coach to handle during the manic periods of idea generation before I actually begin writing for class assignments, because they’d have to follow my stream of consciousness babbling about a subject and try to interject with appropriate observations when I’m jumping from idea to idea at warp factor 9, but that’s probably when I would benefit most from a writing center session. When I’m working on creative pieces, I’d probably bring a fully written project for opinions or an idea of what the coach finds enjoyable rather than coming to them earlier on in my process, mostly because of my superstitions, but also because I know what works best for me, and earlier on when writing creative pieces, I’m very secretive.
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