Hello and welcome back! In this blog assignment for my English Composition class, I was asked to read and annotate texts from Don Murray, Marry Karr and Anne Lamott. I have to set my own scene for a writers’ roundtable discussion about the writing process and provided tree quotes from each reading creating, which will be a total of nine quotes. Creating this story was a kind of fun for me and hope reading it will as fun as it was for me. Here are the links for tree texts.
It was my third semester at Delaware County Community College and during that semester I had to take English composition I class. One day during the class time we were talking about the writing process when my teacher got the good idea to invite tree famous writers for us so we could discuss about writing with them and have some idea about how to develop our writing skills. Those three famous writers were Don Murray, Mary Karr and Anne Lamott. We met a Tuesday afternoon in the cafeteria of the college and everyone was exited to talk with them. It was my turn to talk with Anne Lamott, so I went to her table and introduced myself and the first thing I started telling her was how bad I was in writhing. I even didn’t finish my sentence when she stopped me and looked me deep in eye. “Almost all good writhing begins with terrible first efforts”, “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it”, she said. To be honest, those two sentences made me comfortable and confident a little bit, but the first question that came in my mind after was: was Anne Lamott a terrible writer at the beginning? However, I was too shy to ask her that question. We kept taking about writing and at a point, I told her that I’m lazy and easily get discouraged when it comes to writing. After I finished explaining her that, she told a sentence that comes in mind every time when I have a writing assignment. ”We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment”. Then comes the time to meet and talk with Mary Karr, and we spent all our meeting time talking about revisions and inspiration. The first question that came in my mind when we met was “what can I do to avoid stress while beginning to write and how many time should I write the same text to get it perfect?”. Mary Karr just replies by “thinking, they’ve raised their taste beyond their skill levels. So when they stare down at their pages, they can no longer superimpose what’s in their heads onto the work” and “revision is the secret to their troubles and yours. That, and a sense of quality that exceeds what you can do that gives you something to strive for. Actually, every writer needs two selves, the generative self and the editor self”. She explained me the context of negative and editor self for a while and then asked me if I had another question for her. Then came my last question, how can I start to write if I have no inspiration? That’s when Mary Karr told me the last sentence that concluded our conversation. “In the beginning, when there are zero pages, you have to cheer yourself into cranking stuff out, even if it later lands on the cutting room floor”. That sentence concluded our conversation, but also my fear of beginning writing. “Writing is the act of producing a first draft. It is the fastest part of the process, and the most frightening, for it is a commitment”, Don Murry said at the beginning of our conversation. “Instead of teaching finished writing, we should teach unfinished writing, and glory in its unfinishedness” And “The writing process itself can be divided into three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting”. Here are the tree main points I discussed with Don Murry during that afternoon meeting at school. My conversation with Don Murry was short, but very interesting and what he told still help me with my writing. “Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps”, “a writing process describes the series of physical and mental actions that people take in the course of producing any kind of text” and “creating a successful paper is a different process for everyone” were the only tree things I knew about the writing process before I met Don Murry, Mary Karr and Anne Lamott. Meeting those tree famous writers was very interesting and instructive, I learned a lot about writing and how to increase my writing skills.
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AbdoulHi, welcome to my blog. My name is Abdoulaye Ngor Diouf and my goal here is to improve my writing skills and have a better connection with my other self. I hope you will enjoy reading my work. thanks ArchivesCategories |