As time goes on, I think less and less of my writing process is the actual writing. That goes by pretty quickly these days; it's everything leading up to it and following it that takes all the time. Until I was required to come up with a fresh couple of ideas every few days, I didn't realize exactly how much time I normally took coming up with ideas. If I have a week between learning about a project and it being due, I probably spend five of them thinking up a good idea. Outlining, if I'm lucky. While I enjoyed the challenge of coming up with them fast, I think the quality of my ideas probably suffered from it; by the end I was sort of just rolling with the first semi-good idea I got.
After so many classes thinking so intensely about and hyperexamining my writing process, I'm glad I haven't gotten self-conscious about it, and I'm glad that so much of what I was already doing... works? I've definitely improved and streamlined my process a lot, and a handful of classes with truly random writing prompts got me pretty good about writing about anything I needed to, but at the end of the day my pattern of "brainstorm a lot, have idea, outline briefly if it's longer than five pages, FLY THROUGH WRITING IT ALL IN TWO HOURS, spend two days revising" seems to be working out for me. While it's good to be aware of our writing process, honestly, if we find something that works for us, we should probably just stick with it. If it ain't broke, and all that.
In particular, this class and its focus on internet language made me a bit less self-conscious about the state of my outlines which is... well. I tend to use emojis and speak very casually and in shorthand. It's a lot nicer to think of it as an "informal dialect" outline, haha. I'm surprised by how many other people seem to do something similar, and it helped me sort of come to terms with the fact that an outline doesn't have to be a super formal thing, which I always thought it did because teachers made you turn them in. I think I'm more likely to write extremely brief outlines because of that, often even jotting them down on sticky notes or something similar, just to keep my thoughts going in order while I write.
I totally know what you mean, Lee, about taking so much time beforehand to actually plan out/outline a project before I do it. I noticed that I do that as well, and the quick turn around of this class was a very new (but welcome none the less) experience for me. It was really interesting because I really enjoyed trying to write out all the different assignments, but often I would want to go back and change what I had written days later. I guess that was kind of the point, but it still felt really strange. I am really glad that I have all the material I created from this class though. I feel like it can be great material to go back to and "remix" later in my studies. As for your outline, I love it and can definitely tell you (which you probably already know) that I make similar looking ones. If you aren't having fun while writing, then more likely than not your readers won't have fun reading the product.
ReplyDeleteI really love seeing people's writing notes, outlines, marked-up drafts, etc. Thanks for sharing yours!
ReplyDeleteAnd yes: so much of the writing process happens away from the actual writing/typing. Just today, I just popped over to a colleague's house to talk about a writing problem I am wrestling with. For me, that's part of the process.
So much truth in this post, Lee. There is also a lot that happens behind the scenes with my own writing process, involving a lot of time, especially, before the actual "writing". During a typical semester, I spend a lot of time weighing out topics that are important to me and becoming familiar with them so that's something that I agree with you about, that sometimes these accelerated classes affect the quality of the work, simply because of time. But as was mentioned on the forums earlier this semester, that's just the name of game sometimes!
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