Upate on the Tully piece

I've been working sporadically on this piece about Tully, and the (near) daily attention is very interesting.  I can see it evolve under my gaze.

Insight 1: Walking up the stairs on a very lovely morning this week, I got a chance to walk a little while with Dr. David Miller, GIS, and we got a chance to talk about writing.  He has been working on a fascinating book about hot rodders -- craftsmen and artists, really, with proprietary knowledge about how to build these automotive artworks.  He's asking these guys to tell the stories of what they know about building cars.  First person, very detail-oriented, very tedious work to transcribe.  Takes forever.  I asked him why he didn't hire someone to do the transcription for him, and he surprised me by saying that he didn't want to skip this step.  By going over them, word by word, phrase by phrase, he was able to develop a deeper understanding of what the project was turning out to be.  He said something like "the book is teaching me what form it should take," and I could connect.  Being immersed in the language, in the complexity, is necessary.  It's the only way that you can sense the patterns in the text, see places where the division are and the way they build into something (sequence, development, trajectories, arcs).  Immersion in the thick of things as a form of scuba diving into your work.

Insight 2: Talking on the phone with my brother yesterday, he talked about his teaching his students art, which is always interesting to me.  He said that sometimes he would ask his undergraduates to work on a single piece for an hour, doing some mundane task such as sanding it or carving it.  Very often, they were incredulous.  "You want me to just do that for an entire hour?" he reported them as saying.  The idea of not making progress, of having an accomplishment, of working on something for a while and having it develop out of the work, to not have there be an obvious alternative and immediate resolution, was hard for them. Heck, it was more than hard, it was not going to happen.  If it doesn't happen easily, then it doesn't happen.  But the point is not just that his students were distractable (Nicholas Carr, anyone?!), but that they didn't know -- they didn't even suspect -- that knowing somethignusualy requires being immersed in it for a long time.  He said it takes 15 years of doing woodworking before you start to have a vision of a project as if from above, with the know-how embedded in your hands and a feel for what makes sense and is likely to work.  Malcolm Gladwell called this the rule of 10,000 hours, and that seems about right.  Immersion, not insight, is the way of the craftsman.  Writing is one of the last hand-made crafts, and that is as it should be.

Insight 3: No time for number three, but it has to do with finding tensions, putting the myth first, and developing detail sentence by sentence............................𕶕†©ø¨˙ø†¶ˆ®ˆ¥ƒπ¨ª§§£∞¨˙∫∆˙©¬øˆæ¨ø¥´¶•

Tuesday, April 19

PWR 497

We have five writing days left after today.

We write:

• What has your progress been on your project since last Tuesday?
• What are your writing goals for today?

> and at the end of class, we return to this page and write about our accomplishments<

+++++++++++++++++++++

Rubrics help us know we're on track.  Here is a rubric for the final project.  Hope you find it useful:

What readers want:

·      A sense of direction and development toward greater complexity.

·      A sense of investment: characters that are not “flat” or clichés, plots that surprise, images that are fresh

·      A distinct style to the piece

·      A sense of voice, of the author’s sensibility

·      A clean page, free of distracting errors (what’s “distracting” may depend on the reader, of course)

·      Length.  Readers should not want it to quit.

·      Challenge.  Though some readers are interested in reading the same thing over, most readers want to see something that challenges them to think differently.

·      A sense of quality: the parts fit together and the work is revised

     Humor, wit, insight – the mind at work helps give the work freshness

Thursday, April 14 and Scholars' Day

Wow, you guys did great, both as revisers Thursday and in the reading Friday.  Nice way to support each other.

Tuesday, April 12

Class: Early on in Senior Seminar we made a list was just a list of what would go in the portfolio.  This time it's the actual documents themselves that are to be brought to class: the entire portfolio, printed out, in the flesh, for us to read and share.  Today is workshop, giving feedback on how to improve your peers' portfolios.

Major Projects Revealed!

Today was a fast day in Senior Sem.  Folks brought their major project drafts, and we read them.  Sounds simple enough.  Fascinating stuff, all of it unfinished and in-progress.  Authors asked for specific kinds of feedback on their papers (something other than the vague "do you like it," which means very little).  We read, annotated, and gave comments.

For Thursday, authors are to write two more pages (500 words at least) and somehow (how this will be done is a mystery to me), draw from the handout, below.  It has to look natural, too!


Print this for class.  I'll print it if you send it on before class.  

Looking forward to it.

DRF

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• Malcolm Gladwell writes “Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.  Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig” Outliers, 150.
• “Working really hard is what successful people do….[it gives] a way to find meaning the midst of great uncertainly and poverty” (239)
• “Intelligence has a threshold” (80).
• “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing you do that makes you good” (42).
• “We all live inside our own private version of the adjacent possible” Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From, 40.
• “Darwin’s ideas evolve because on some basic leel the notebook platform creates a cultivaten space for his hunches; it is not that th notebook is a mere transcription of the ideas, which are happening offstage in Darwin’s mind” (83). 

Tuesday, March 29

So Fish is trying too hard, huh, to write "good" sentences?  Nice point in class from several people.  I concur.  The book is not unsmart, but the prose is self-conscious and sometimes overwrought.  Yet his principles remain: good prose has to be part of  a strongly held and powerfully understood purpose.  In fact, in class we discussed how "purpose" and "context" are nearly synonymous.  This parallel or synonymity (to coin a word) is in many ways Johnson's argument, too.  Context makes (induces, elicits, promotes, supports, "under-stands") our discoveries.  The papers you all wrote on Johnson make explicit connections between his book and writing -- again, it's interesting, but, more importantly, it is useful to find these metaphors and images and stories of "where good writings come from."  One claim, for example, that came from class discussion, is that inspiration and insight is not nearly as important as the context and community that sponsors your "personal" discovery.  Being in a stimulating environment (and what that means varies for everyone, but it seems to generally include conversation and reading) is important.  We discussed also the ways that a commonplace book can serve as a form of "conversation" with oneself and one's influential authors.

On Thursday we will spend the entire time writing on our individual projects.  At the end of class, we will post them, perhaps to Google Docs.  Conferences are as follows next week (Taylor, you and I will hold our conferences on the phone).  The point is to discuss your project's process.

9:00 Monday Elise
9:30 Heather
10: Sean

Richard 9:00 Wednesday
Taylor 9:30

9:00 Corey
9:30 Zack
10:00 David

We're on The Map

A list of Professional Writing programs was just released.  Note that we're rubbing shoulders with Perdue, Little Rock, and even Syracuse.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=217085203997748400413.00049f2ccd987df5bb24a&z=0%3E