Psychomachia

Psychomachia means the externalization of internal conflict. Like a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other.

Pedantic means show-offish about one's (frequently shallow) knowledge.

The first one has some bearing on what I'm about to say. The second one is self-referential and vaguely relates to my own urge to spice up the blog a bit. But I digress...

Anyway, here's what I want to say. Our current reading, from the David Crystal book, articulates the point I was trying to make in my last post far more eloquently than I did. This is it in a nutshell: "Full meaning does not always exist prior to writing; often the process operates in reverse...[writing is] an exploration in the use of the graphic potential of a language - a creative process, an act of discovery" (128).

Essentially, this is the basis for my distaste for prewriting: much of my own creativity and development in a piece of writing comes during the actual writing process, not in exercises preparing for the process. Like Edward Albee's quoted comment, also on page 128, "I write to find out what I'm thinking about."

This is not to say I don't think about what I'm going to write at all. Again, Crystal articulates it better than I did: "All writing involves a planning stage, during which we organize our thoughts and prepare an outline of what we want to say...All writers introduce errors and make self-corrections while composing" (127).

What I like about how Crystal says this is that it implies a non-concrete planning stage, one that could be no more than simply constructing a set of arguments while driving, reading, sitting in a chair, or anything else. For example, I constructed this post, without any prewriting, while watching Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura blow stuff up in Predator, which I happened across while looking for a pleasant bit of background noise on the TV so I could write comfortably (Predator is not necessarily pleasant background noise, but it's definitely a badass movie. Get to za choppah).

Likewise, the second part of the quote on 127 implies that the revision process is not necessarily separable from the composition process. The whole progression can be remarkably fluid and all its steps can be jumbled in order.

My (admittedly very convoluted) point is this: writing processes are infinitely variable, a fact that should be embraced and not criticized. If the very process of typing things out is what helps someone think, they should be encouraged to do so.