teachersnotesch6.html

Developing a draft:
Just write without worrying about sharing it with anyone. Try to cut off the internal critic, too, and be free to write whatever comes into your mind. Play with your words if you want. Let them go all over the page and enjoy them.

Look at the first paragraph of this chapter: Imaginative writing has its source in dream, risk, mystery, and play. But if you are to be a good--and perhaps a professional--writer, you will need discipline, care, and ultimately even an obsessive perfectionism (217).

Creativity comes from chaos...chaos from creativity. Alice Munro reminds us that possibility abounds here in this duality of a process in which seeking order remains both mysterious and a struggle.

Revision:
As poet Paul Engle famously said, Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten (217).

A well crafted work is one that still seems to play across the page after you have revised.
It may play that way in your readers mind, too, and stay a little longer than average work.

I suggest you keep a journal/notebook/box/totebag--a place to stash ideas or things that make you think of things to write about. Save all the bits you cut from other work as you revise. Keep them in your stash. I have a folder of stuff I call Geraldines Junk, cut words, lines, titles, things that may be junk today but a treasure for me tomorrow.
Sort through your stash(es) on a regular basis. Feel free to give suggestions to someone you think might be able to better use a line, idea, word, etc. The person may have an idea to share with you.

We focused on pages 222-228 in this chapter at the beginning of the semester.
Id like for you to read this material on revision, editing, and the workshop again.
How have you been doing? How have you been helped? Have you been hindered?
What could we do better as a group? Tell us. If you want to make an anonymous suggestion, type it up and do not put your name on it. Drop it in my mailbox. Thanks!