by Peter Elbow.  New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.  (This is a reprint of the 1973 original with an updated introduction by the author. )

My interest in Peter Elbow's work stems from a class I took last spring in which I basically "discovered" what my old high school teachers--in 1975 and 1976--were up to when they introduced me to the 'chaos' method of writing.  Most of it seems to come from writing research and writing instructors experimenting with student-driven classrooms in the 1960s.  Though the terms Elbow uses are foreign to me, his basic method is essentially the same ones that launched me into writing seriously in the mid-1970s.  The basic premise is this:  You learn to write by writing ... and you learn to write well by writing a lot and knowing how to clean house.  "Don't try to get it right the first time.  The best writing is in the rewrite," as one of my high school teachers used to say. 

Elbow's book is geared towards adults who are not in school--the general public, in other words.  His theory is that most school and most teachers (though not all, of course) are detrimental to the writing process because of the focus on perfection and the final product, the editing end of the process rather than on the producing end of the process.  The same holds true, Elbow says, to most books about writing.  In the Preface, he says,

"Most books on writing try to describe the characteristics of good writing so as to help you produce it, and the characteristics of bad writing to help you avoid it.  But not this book.  Here you will find no descriptions of good and bad constructions, strong and weak sentences, correct and incorrect useages.  When people try to tell me about good and bad writing it doesn't usually improve my writing at all; and when I try to tell other people it seldom improves their writing either. If you want a book to tell you the characteristics of good and bad writing, this is not it.

"Instead I try for two things: 1) to help you actually generate words better--more freely, lucidly, and powerfully; not make judgments about words but generate them better; 2) to help you improve your ability to make your own judgments about which parts of your own writing to keep and which to throw away" (pgs v-vi). 

The book talks about:

1.  "Freewriting," or the idea of writing for ten minutes a day about anything or nothing. Just put words to paper day in and day out, so that the act of writing ceases to be intimidating. 

2.  Writing towards understanding.  Even if you're not sure what you mean to say in any piece, whether it is a poem, story or essay, just start writing.  Write and write and write until you start to see what you mean to say, then starting over and writing some more. 

3.  Getting feedback, or as Elbow calls it, creating the "Teacherless classroom," where people get together to read one another's work and respond to it not as a teacher, but as a reader.  Included in his discussions of teacherless classrooms are guidelines on how to give feedback and how to receive feedback.

I'm definitely a believer in the method.  However, the book itself annoys me somewhat.  In some ways, the book reads as a series of unrelated essays.  Also, Elbow doesn't always get to his point as quickly as I'd like, and I find some of his autobiographical antecdotes too precious. 

Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for moral support in book form and  general guidelines for how to get engage in almost any writing project inside or outside the classroom.

Yesterday afternoon, I heard an interview with John Leguizamo on NPR's Fresh Air.  He was promoting a new movie, Cronicas, as well as another of his one-man shows, the title of which, unfortunately, escapes me. The new show, however, seemed to me to have some similarities and recurring characters from a one-man stage play I read earlier this summer. I wrote about it in my mel_easy_reader  journal on June 28, 2005, and am cross-posting it here:

Leguizamo, John.  Spic-O-Rama: A Dysfunctional Comedy.  New York: Bantam Books, 1994.

As often happens, I go to the library for one book and come home with two or more. Last week, I was in the stacks of Maag Library, looking for a copy of Ursula K. Leguin’s Left Hand of Darkness, and ran into the book version of John Leguizamo’s one-man show, Spic-O-Rama: A Dysfunctional Comedy.  What a wonderful find!

When I think of John Leguizamo, I think of ChiChi, the character he played in the movie To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.  Or Benny in Carlito’s Way.  With those characters as background, it was very easy for me to imagine Leguizamo playing all six characters in his one-man play. The book makes wonderful use of black and white still shots of the characters on stage (and John in various costume and facial expressions), but Leguizamo also made wonderful use of slides and graphic effects when he conceived of and wrote the play originally. The very first act of the play features nine-year-old Miggy, who is doing a show-and-tell presentation for his teacher and class (offstage), in which he uses slides to introduce his schoolmates to his family and his father’s girlfriends.

Miggy’s the character who "gets" to me most, because he’s a kid and we get to see what his family does to him emotionally. His family consists of a drunken and lecherous father, a jealous and preoccupied mother, and three older brothers—one a Desert Storm vet, one an angry cripple confined to a wheelchair, one an actor who wants to be a white. No one is having any fun, least of all Miggy. He gets the worst of it because his family ignores him while they wage verbal warfare on one another.

In the final scene, Miggy has been sent to his room while his parents fight in another part of the house. He finally looses his temper and turns on God: "Okay, God, I’m warning you! If you don’t make them stop, I’m never gonna believe in you. Okay, you asked for it, I’mma take the Virgin Mary and tie her up, put her in a brown paper bag, and if you ever wanna see your mother again, you’ll do what I tell you."

A very dark yet very funny script. On the back flap of the cover jacket is a quote from a review from Newsweek: "Astonishing . . . Every laugh [Leguizamo] gets is booby-trapped with pain and pathos. He’s a remarkably mature writer and a born performer.”

My sentiments, exactly.

current mood: impressed