Being Your Own Best Reader

One of the hardest things I had to learn as a writer was to critically read my own work. It is difficult because seeing our thoughts manifest on a page, thoughts that are familiar and dazzling, is magical. Centuries after the invention of the alphabet and written language, humans still can be awe-struck by this human capacity to create the illusion of permanence.

Nevertheless, if we wish to share our language creations with others, we must be able to imagine how our audience will read our texts. And that is the frustrating quality of language, especially written language. It can never represent all the nuances of our experience. Neuropsychologists call this personalizing effect of experience our “qualia.” Even as I look out my study window at a brilliant white snow bank rolling down to a frozen lake, I can never adequately capture in language all the sensory inputs and neuronal responses that are shaping my moment in this time as past memories mingle with new impressions.

So should we even try?

Of course.

To share our thoughts as clearly as possible with others is one of the great challenges of writing, but it is also one of the motivations to write. Writing can meaningfully connect us to other humans. We are social creatures who exploit every way we are able to be part of the collective. To do so with writing means that we must step away from our thoughts on the page and put ourselves in the place of the other, to see what is not on the page even though we, as authors, can see it in the shadows.

So what are some ways this can be done? The approach I have found most effective is time. Writing something well in advance and then tucking it away to be read several days or weeks later is of great benefit. It gives space for my fascination to subside as the writing becomes estranged from the heartbeat of its creation.

Upon returning to the writing, there are small techniques I use to further make it feel unfamiliar. I read the work aloud to a real or imagined audience to make the recognition of ‘the other’ more concrete. At a textual level, I will develop a sentence outline of the piece if I am uncertain about the structure and want to follow the logic of my thinking. If it is a poem or story, I will sometimes try to draw a representation of the structure, everything from lines to spirals. Sometimes, I read the work backwards, checking each sentence to focus on my crafting. This process takes me outside the logic line of the writing and focuses on meaning at a syntactic level. And finally, I read through the entire piece, line by line or sentence by sentence, watching for extraneous or vague words, focusing on precise nouns and verbs, and questioning my adjectives and adverbs. It is the close reading that writing needs.

It is important to realize, however, that this process is never finished. If your work is published and you reread it a month or years later, you still will find sentences you mentally revise. One of the interesting things about writing a blog is that I have a sense of an immediate audience and the capacity to continually revise. It is a new way of thinking about my revision process, and I am not sure how this might be influencing my writing.

A number of years ago, after Peter Gzowski interviewed Alice Munro on CBC radio about her newest book of short stories, she read several passages and then promptly noted how she would revise some of what she had written. It was a revelation for me that famous authors continued to revise published work even after critical acclaim. That is the interesting thing about writing. Eventually we move on and write other things, and when we look back, we may cringe, but we may also see, perhaps with fondness, who we were and recognize that we are already somewhere else in our ever-emerging lives.

Allatonceness

During January, I challenged students each week with a different dimension of writing: close reading and its relationship to writing; crafting sentences and using punctuation; dialogue and description; and finally, the qualities of genre, beginning with memoir. When one of the students described the feeling of having too many things to focus on while trying to write a memoir, I knew things were working as I had hoped.

It may sound like I was gleeful about their confusion, but that is not the case. What the comment indicated to me was that they were discovering the real challenge of writing. Beyond having to formulate thoughts and shape ideas, writing is about employing a multitude of possibilities in the complex system of language, including drawing on numerous intertwined skills. By asking the students to focus on some of these skills to the exclusion of others, I raised their awareness of the complexity. But, like all creative and artistic forms, there are ways of practicing these skills so that over time, they do not need to be such a subject of focus and automaticity can take over.

Reflecting on that conversation in class took me back to my early graduate work when I was introduced to Ann Berthoff’s work and her description of the “allatonceness” of writing. (I won’t tell you how long it took me to figure out how to pronounce that word—but let me say that writing it as all-at-onceness would have helped greatly.) She says:

In composing, everything happens at once—or it doesn’t happen at all. We make new meanings by means of old ones; we discover what we want to say as we say it and tell ourselves what it is that we are saying; we continually identify relationships and how relationships relate to one another. And all the thinking and languaging is going on as we are trying to construct sentences and paragraphs. (1988, p. 61)

In the midst of this allatonceness, when we are asked to focus on a particular skill such as description, we may feel like we are learning to ride a bike again. “Focus on your balance, keep it going. Don’t forget to pedal. Watch out for that car!” What the concept of allatonceness does, however, is remind us of the need for ambiguity and tentativeness while we are writing. Berthoff, ever striving for evocative metaphors, calls this the “hinges of thought.”

Learning to writing is a matter of learning to tolerate ambiguity, of learning that the making of meaning is a dialectical process determined by perspective and context. Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times. Meanings are not prebaked or set for all time; they are created, found, formed, and reformed. (1981, 71)

I was heartened to see this statement in my master’s thesis: “Not only do students need other ways of experiencing the allatonceness of writing, but they need to be pointed to particular things that might happen during the writing, so they can both recognize and use these opportunities” (Luce-Kapler, 1994). There I could see the roots of the pedagogy I use today in my teaching of writing. It was reassuring somehow that such a belief has sustained me all these years as I work with writers, the belief that we need to exist in a mindful ambiguity while we write, developing skills that can slide onto the page or the computer screen as we work the “hinges of thought.”

It was interesting going back to this old work; it offered an opportunity to measure the change in my scholarship. Twenty years ago it did not occur to me to follow up on the word allatonceness. I assumed that Berthoff had created it. This time, however, I was not content to leave it there. I did some further research and found that it is usually attributed to media scholar, Marshall McLuhan. He used the term to describe the process of mass communications being shared in unison across widespread communities, leading to his conception of the “global village.” It creates an interesting image when I shift from the global village to my writing process.

What a difference a developed scholarly practice makes—oh yes, and there was that little technological shift called “the internet” that helped too.