Warnock

           Warnock writes, “Indirection is the way we find direction; only rarely do we live by the straight and narrow, travel he direct route, or know where we’re going before we begin. Ours are not single-copy, single-voice, or single-identity lives” (46).

   I usually write without a clear idea in mind; I'm usually driven by a feeling or an idea I want to get across. But it's usually not enough to drive the story forward. For example, I might want to write a story about how people fail to communicate with each other.  And I might think of a scenario which depicts that idea and is worthy of a story but I won't have any specific characters in mind, a setting or much of a plot. Most of the time I give up. But when I do choose to write on, I somehow fill in the spaces as I go along. When I do have a set story in mind it almost always changes by becoming bigger or more specific than I anticipated. I've always thought that (and I know this is going to sound horribly cliche)  the stories find the author. I've always had the theory that the kind of story an author writes successfully can only be written by that author because it is written from their unique imagination. Everyone sees the world slightly different and what might appeal to me to write about won't appeal to another author. We all have subjects we feel we need to write about.

Do you believe writing and reading are critical to our ability to live? What kinds of things have you written to cope? And do you think that there is room, in academic spaces, for this kind of writing (writing that focuses more on revision and process,   writing as a strategic tool to help us better manage our lives versus writing as product... written  to rest at its deadline)?

I don't think that reading and writing are essential to our lives. People lived perfectly fulfilling lives without doing either but I do believe they greatly improve our understanding of the self and the world. I've been in poetry and creative writing classes that encouraged revision but of course we needed to turn something in at the end of class. I've had teachers who've reminded me to keep revising beyond the end of the assignment. Have I done so? That's another story. The kind of writing that calls for revision and rewriting has a place in the creative arts but I don't see scientists embracing writing as a tool to help them manage their lives.

Warnock explains, “For years, I remembered not my father’s encouragement about my writing, but his warning that I put my family first. By identifying and untangling the threads and by retelling the stories, I can create new patterns and in part rewrite my life”(45).  Warnock seems to be speaking to the process of selective re-examination:  of finally being able to take the microscope into our own hands in order to zoom in and focus on a different part of the slide. Can we,  in revision, symbolically, rewrite our lives?  How and why or why not?

I honestly don't understand Warnock when she talks about using writing to re-write life. The examples given in the chapter examines people using writing to affirm their hopes or using writing to heal. "I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window." Could she have thought that and achieved it without writing it down? Of course but is her sentiment more concrete because she wrote it down? I think so. 

Do you think, to some extent, this might be partially the point of writing – to find common ground, to imagine that we are not so different from one another in that we are, each and every one of us, fallible? How have you embraced the ‘comic corrective’ in your own writing? And how have you rejected it?

I think writing helps us see how human we all are. I've always written from the point of view of someone who is misunderstood, someone who is clearly different in some way and I've attempted to tell their story. I write about characters I like or identify with. I've always given character traits I dislike to characters I try to depict as the antagonists, in that way I reject the comic corrective.