This is my fourth blog post and it is about my writing process and how I use other authors words to help describe it. The authors and their pieces of work that I will be using are Don Murray’s Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product, Mary Karr’s Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision, and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.
In the strange land known as Rio Vermelho (Red River in Portugese) there is a wandering explorer that goes by the name of Tre. On one of his most recent expeditions he finds a cave and at the entrance there’s words engraved into it that say: “The writing process itself can be divided into three stages: pre-writing, writing, and re-writing” -Don Murray. This was completely random to Tre because to him his writing strategy was to procrastinate until you needed to write so that you could write everything down quickly and be done with it. So he entered the cave and saw indistinct engravings on the walls all over. However there was one that was literate and it said “Writing is painful- it is “fun” only for novices.” "Other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision.“ "The best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which leads them to a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.” All of this was under a big name at the top that read: Mary Karr. At that moment Tre realized that he may have stumbled upon the Fabled “Literacy Cave”. There have been stories about the so called first author, Anne Lamott. Some of the most notable quotes from her stories are: “writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it’s about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up, grow and belong.”, “E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way”, and “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.” Tre believed it was all a myth up and writing was nothing but an irrelevant form of communication that not many people used. He walked in the cave a wanderer and left a linguist.
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Red RiverI'm a man of few words but I will use this blog to make sure whatever I write is meaningful to me and hopefully to others as well. ArchivesCategories |