Response to Boice Essay (and brief comments on Drew and Anne's responses)

 There are a few parts of the Boice essay that I found useful and also applicable I think to teaching english composition. When he describes how waiting to write can lead to not being able to find the motivation to do it. “When we wait too often for magic, we make ourselves vulnerable to disappointment and, in turn, hopelessness” (9). I do believe this message transcends to composition courses. Students (obviously) like to wait until the the deadline to do the writing assignments, then find out when it's too late that there are aspects they don't understand, or that they still don't have a clue what to write about. The message in all this, I think, is the important of getting into a daily habit of writing, or regularly thinking about the ideas you want to express and working to develop them, whether they pertain to creative writing or argumentative writing or anything else.

I also found it helpful when Boice talks about the idea of treating writing as participating in a conversation. That is something I'll try and think about throughout the semester as I prepare students to write their own essays. Maybe if they can enter into the mindset that they're “writing for public consumption” it will help them get more interested in doing it.

I think if you build into your syllabus scheduled preparation for the major writing assignments it will help alleviate some of the hypomania students could possibly face. Getting them to slowly progress into developing their thoughts so that when the deadlines come they're not experiencing the bingeing writing experiences Boice talks about. This also teaches them the points of time management that come later on in the article. Breaking up a paper into mini chunks (thinking about ideas, coming up with a thesis, writing a first paragraph, peer review paragraph to help further develop the idea, writing rough draft, etc.) gives them the ability to focus on a single task each time, culminating into the final draft of a paper. Breaking these chunks up into as Boice refers to them as “brief, daily sessions” or bds, will also reinforce the concept that writing is a process and not something that's done in a single frenzied moment of divine inspiration.

In looking at the other blog posts, I do agree with Anne when she talks about hypomania. She's right, a lot of creative writers do often work that way. I do think though the problem with beginning writers (perfect example: those in composition) think that hypomania is the first, last, and only part of writing anything. The truth of the matter is that writing is a process. Maybe the first couple of drafts will be written in a hypomaniac (maniacal?) form, but eventually there will be revisions, and there will be edits, and because of these things the concepts of bps and stopping apply.

I also thought Anne's activity was an interesting idea. She made the connection with finding the inspiration to write through physical activity which is something I've heard talked about from other writers—Joyce Carol Oates, for example, talks about the relationship between boxing and running in her book On Boxing, and there's also the memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.

I find it funny (humorous?) that both Anne, Drew and I focused on the binge/hypomania parts of the article. Maybe it's because that's sort of the glamourous image of the writer—writing genius prose or poetry in a drunken, gin-infused binge (or vodka or whiskey or whatever). It's certainly what we think of when we picture writers like Keroauac or Faulkner. Faulkner in an essay talks about how a writer should be “demon-driven” which further perpetuates the idea. The truth of the matter is, whatever binges Faulkner had, like almost all writers he revised. A lot. Again, this brings me back to the earlier points of how writing, no matter what it is, is a process.