Peter Elbow's 'On Writing: A Memoir The Craft'

The writing process, when explained on paper, seems like a series of simple steps, though this is entirely not the case. As supported by the four authors in this unit, the writing process, though it does adhere to a few basic steps in development, it is an art that takes a tremendous amount of trial, error, and learning from mistakes to be perfected. The professional writers of this unit made claim that the act of writing is an extremely intricate process; described using words such as “chaos” from Peter Elbow in his “The process of Writing —Growing.”

Expanding upon this, Elbow explains our editorial instinct is much stronger than our producing instinct, which naturally causes the process of producing written material to slacken for the

In Steven King’s curriculum vitae: “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” records his experiences beginning with his first writing experience, then to years later, describing his multiple accounts of sending work to various magazines, only to be ultimately turned down by them. Because of his desire to improve ever since his youth, his drive and his passion to write stories, and a few encouraging words from his mother and the famous owners of the magazines, his openness of learning from his mistakes allowed him to grow into the infamous writer he is

In the twelfth grade, my teacher would assign us to free-write every week, which was the act of writing without editing and not stopping until time is called. This was described by both Maugham and Elbow, and I instantly connected and agreed with the authors when I read their descriptions of its importance. When it came to freewriting for me, looking at the end result of my work I was never proud of the final product. There were often misspellings from writing too fast, or certain sentences which wouldn’t make 100% to anyone reading it aside from myself. Although, actively recording my “stream of consciousness” as Elbow puts it, allowed me to work out an entire essay’s “center of gravity” in a fifth of the time it would take me if I painstakingly built and composed the essay painstakingly sentence by sentence. In fact, I used freewriting to create even this post more efficiently. I wrote whatever came to mind about the questions posed this unit for us to address, then I revised my work several times to produce this final product you are reading now. I sympathized with all of Elbow’s findings and studies on the writing process, and especially with the how “chaos and disorientation” eventually results in bringing clarity to the big picture of the project, and then allows for the careful edits to be made,