This is why I'm not an expressivist.

We've had some interesting discussions about free-writing as a tool to pull students out of the self-conscious paralysis of the blank page and to get them expressing their ideas without worrying about grammar, form, and organization. Dr. Rickley in particular had some great examples of students who turned in the blandest, most institutional essays imaginable but metamorphosed when they were prompted to write off the top of their heads on something they really cared about.

And I maintain that free-writing exercises have never helped me one bit.

Give me a ten-minute free-write, and it'll usually go something like this: I'll write the first sentence that occurs to me. Then I'll stare at it for two minutes. I'll want to change something about it, but I know I'm not supposed to. I'll have an idea, but I can't quite connect it to the first sentence, so it doesn't coagulate. We're five minutes in now, and I finally come up with a connecting thought between the first and second sentences, and the organization clicks into place. I finish out the paragraph with the other thoughts that have been swimming around looking for a home, but then I realize I'm still really just introducing the topic. Time is up, and I have an introductory paragraph for an idea I may or may not have any investment in, but, chances are, this violence against my customary writing process has turned me off.

I simply cannot write without prewriting. I can't separate composition from organization. If my ideas aren't organized in some way, I can't express them.

I know free-writing doesn't mean writing without thought, but you could have fooled me from how my elementary and junior-high teachers talked about it. I honestly came away with the impression that they expected something meaningful to effortlessly come out on the page as long as my pencil was moving. I spent so much of those free-writing exercises bashing my head against what I thought they expected from me that I barely had any time to write at all - I ended up concluding that free-writing was just a colossal waste of time.

I'm not certain whether free-writing is something that is just at odds with my cognitive processes or whether I just never learned to do it right. There are certainly times I know I have ideas but don't have a framework for them, and I wish I had a way of just dumping them onto the page and picking through them and shuffling them around like those refrigerator poetry magnets, but I'm so hardwired to try to form connections any time I'm writing things in sequence that I feel almost physically restrained from doing so. I am an obsessive-compulsive writer.

In class, I was the only person to mention having had difficulty with free-writing. Most of the other people who talked about it at all did so in glowing terms. That seems to suggest to me that I'm in the minority. I certainly expect that most of the 1301 students don't have the same sorts of perfectionistic roadblocks that I have - they're going to have different roadblocks.

Which leads me to wonder how I'm going to be able to use free-writing in my class. If I struggle with it, how am I going to be able to help students who have never encountered it before? If there will be students in my classroom for whom free-writing is the catalyst they've always needed, how am I going to provide that, and how can I tell the difference between those who just need a little more prompting and those, like me, who just aren't connecting with the idea?

And on the subject, I'm not going to assume that there's no one else with the same problem. How do I deal with students whose problem isn't that they don't know how to express themselves but that they just need time to do so? How do I overcome the artificiality of the "write without thinking" prompts I got in junior high? How do I avoid embittering another generation of perfectionists while hopefully encouraging them to loosen up a little?

One thing that I definitely think needs to go is the VAGUE PROMPTS. "Write about something that makes you feel happy. Look out the window and start writing about what you see. Tell me about the person you would like to be in twenty years." Either they were telling us to write about nothing at all or giving us a topic so broad and so daunting any attempt I could offer in ten minutes would be trivial. These sorts of hazy ideas don't spark my creative process; they paralyze it. Give me something constructive to do, something to respond to, a starting point, a context where I can at least find some anchor points for the structure my mind insists on building.

I can sort of identify with the poor poetry student who couldn't get his head around metaphor. I don't have a problem with the literary device, but I do have a problem when it works its way into instructions. Tell me to write without thinking, and I will reply, "vwe.aEIGES>gdflgna;oEWO;n>sdg:OiEWSREDL:kfdgslkjsD."

Because, come on. Even free-writing is about learning to think.