disc-thinking

Thinking in Discovery Grove

Blasting through Writer's Block
Discovering Startling Connections, Tangents, Leaps, and Obsessions

Blasting through Writer's Block

This is a PowerPoint slide presentation. It may take a few seconds to download. If you have never viewed a PowerPoint slide show online, you may want to read "Tips for Viewing PowerPoint Presentations" before you begin the show.

Discovering Startling Connections, Tangents, Leaps, and Obsessions

In A Community of Writers, Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff give us some good advice about looking back over our private writing.

Some theorists think that we haven't, in a sense, finished expressing any thought until we finally make it public in some form: without communication, a natural cycle isn't complete. We disagree. We think it's perfectly natural to express some thoughts and feelings and keep them to ourselves. Some speak of this as being our own audience. We often need privacy in order to explore our thinking and feelings without nervousness or fear….

The first step is to look back over your private writing…just to get it fresh in your mind. As you look back, you're likely to have mixed feelings about it. You may feel good about how much you wrote, about how diverse it is, and about how you were able to record your thinking and feeling in a way you'd never done before….But you may react negatively, at least to part of it: "Yuk. What a mess!" This reaction often occurs when people first try out private exploratory writing. It's important to remember that you weren't trying to produce good, well-organized writing; you were trying to give yourself safety to produce an accurate mind-scan or brain x-ray, as it were. Minds are messy. When you produce messy writing, that's not a problem--indeed, in a way, it's a good sign.

For the mess means not only that you were able to trust yourself enough to record what was actually going on in your mind. It also means that you have begun to learn a powerful way to find things to write. (122-123)

Here are some things to look for and note in your private writing. You may want to use highlighter pens to mark your findings:

Startling Connections
Sometimes you may have a sudden insight while you are mapping or free writing. For example, recently I had this insight: an hourglass turned on its side looks like

, the symbol for infinity.

Tangents
Your writing was going in one direction but gradually took a turn down a side path that connects with the topic you were thinking about, but in another way. Why did you take this turn? How does this side path relate to your main topic? Which is more interesting? More focused?

Leaps
Even more interesting, sometimes, are sudden leaps. You were writing along when suddenly your mind jumped to something else. What caused you to make this leap? Even though your mind is messy, it is logical. If you made a leap at that point, there was a reason--either an outside stimulus or an inner connection. If you can describe the mental link, you may make a discovery.

Obsessions
Or, perhaps, all of your writing was on one topic. Even when you deliberately tried to change topics, you kept coming back to the same event, problem, situation, or person. Don't fight your obsession. Exploit it. This is a powerful subject for you and you want to write about it. You can't avoid it. The best way to get rid of an obsession is often by writing it down so you don't have to carry it around in your mind anymore. You may even find ways to use this powerful topic as a starting point for future papers.

Possible topics for future assignments
Finally, as you look over your private writing you should make a list of topics that catch your attention--topics that you might consider using for the papers you are going to write this term. You may come back to Discovery Grove again and do more free-writing or mapping about one or more of these topics.

Return to the top of this page.

© Copyright 2009 the WorldWide Writers' PLACE - Elizabeth A. Nist All rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including downloading and printing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the owner.