Writing is like water. You can mold it to whatever shape you want, yet without guidelines it is shapeless, free, and random.
You hate that too? Good. Look, it isn’t that I dislike writing without guidelines, its just that there isn’t any fun in it. You know that feeling you got when you were a kid where you would love the thrill of living on the edge, that “I know I shouldn’t be doing this” high. No? Alright fine, but humor me. Writing isn’t just about the theories and ideas you can craft or the artsy bullshit that comes out of those hipster 80 degree scarf wearers. Most of the fun in writing is knowing you’re getting away with something you shouldn’t. It’s the all or nothing gamble where you throw away the rulebook and hope for the best. Sure, people can write to make themselves feel better or to impress some audience. There is certainly some merit in those practices, but where is your sense of adventure? Back home with my other failing grades, Dylan, now get on with whatever point you’re making so I can comment on it and move on. I guess that’s a fair response from someone as focused and important as you. Whatever, I’ll get to it. You’re wrong. Everything you know is wrong. Your letters, your reading, and most of all, your writing. It isn’t that you don’t try, no you follow directions to the letter and make sure that you’ve covered everything. However in the end, the finished product doesn’t stand out. It doesn’t hook people in or create controversy. It just exists and like the hundreds of millions of other papers written by people like you all over the world, it is wrong.
Writing style doesn’t have to be breathtaking. Sometimes single lines of text are the most powerful. The key thing to remember is to be different. People remember different, they study it and try to fit it into their broken systems so that it can be neatly categorized away and forgotten like last year’s Chem test. Taking risks with writing isn’t easy, you’re going to fail. You’re going to get people that hate it and won’t read past the third line. Fine. Perfect. I wasn’t writing for You anyhow. Not being afraid to take risks is how progress is made. It’s how most advances in technology took place, and it should be the center of your writing process. When you take risks you push yourself and struggle with the systems in place. Risk taking shows that you’re thinking on more than one level. It grows upon the struggle of literacy and branches into every aspect of life. Instead of that bland research paper, you’ve got yourself a series of interviews with children affected by war-torn cities and a narrator that is trying desperately to hold on to a thread of the comfortable past. That is how you write a summary of the children in World War II.
Why is it important? Oh you’re still reading? I thought I’d lose you somewhere in my “wrong” insults. Either way, the importance of risk taking is in the betterment of the writer. Betterment meaning that you step away from that work thinking, “I really like this idea I’ve decided to work with, it isn’t ordinary.” But betterment means more too, it means the unequaled ability to question your surroundings and draw conclusions from every aspect of a work. Betterment means gaining courage to tackle those issues nobody wants to touch and willingness to make enemies. That is how you should write. Write in a fiery defiance that anybody should dare confine your ideas to one space. And above all else, when you write to better yourself, who cares what other people think. They’re all phonies anyhow.
Let me start by saying that I love the analogy you began your post with: being able to mold writing into whatever shape we want, however, without guidelines it is shapeless. Indeed, I love freedom, however, like you, I also hate this freedom. I think I might hate it for a different reason than you (which you seem to mention is being able to rebel against the guidelines and rules). For me, the freedom is more like chaos. Well, it typically causes chaos, because what in the world do I write about?! BUT, I do understand the point that you are making, and I actually completely agree (did I just say that?). You mention that by following every single word of the rules (which I typically do), will our writing actually stand out? At the end of the day, the prompt I followed, the rules I followed, are the same rules that you followed and she followed and he followed. So I guess that’s the point you’re trying to make, rebellious writing stands out and causes controversy. Is that why I feel it’s so chaotic? Possibly. With freedom and no prompt, I end up producing a mess of jumbled thoughts that actually mean nothing to anyone except myself, partially because they’re not understandable and partially because they actually really mean nothing. Is that why I don’t take the risks, and color outside of the lines? Maybe. I need a straightforward path to follow, a checklist to guide me, or my writing is going to turn into what this reply has, and all of my other replies have, and all of my other previous blog posts have…a mess of thoughts. So is this freedom actually beneficial to me, as you say it should be? Well, that’s for you to decide.
Aside from Dylan’s concept of breaking rules just to break them (that’s Camden talking), I like what is being said here. Writing free from the confines of a prompt or an expectation can be a beautiful thing. We expand our minds to places we haven’t before when we are sent off into the world to write about whatever, however. I think the most important freedom we achieve from this is style. Kristie, you might be afraid that your thoughts will become a jumbled mess without rules, but don’t you think it’s kind of cool to see the sentences you create when you aren’t writing for anyone is particular?
I agree with both of you that it isn’t easy. Breaking rules takes time to master, if that makes sense. We’ve been told how different types of writing “should” look (persuasive, haiku, business letter, etc.) and the thought of throwing years and years of education out the window is scary. There’s a variation of some quote that lovers of the English language sometimes say…”if you know the rules of the English language, you can break them” or something like that. Maybe we are given such strict rules for so long so we have this epiphany later in life. Maybe we’re call having a quarter-life (fifth-life? trying to be optimistic) crisis because we all realize we have to take the next step in our lives within the next year or so. I know that it scares the hell out of me that I will be teaching kids within the next two years. I’ve wanted it for so long but now it’s so close; it’s frightening. Maybe I’m lashing out about something comfortable because I’m nervous I won’t teach my students to understand and love reading and writing the English language and literature the way I do. Maybe I’m only realizing this now because I fell down some strange rabbit hole as I wrote this comment. Either way, leave it to Dylan to throw some strange post into the wild and cause two future teachers to comment back with concern.
Is breaking rules for the sake of being different really revolutionary? Your work will still be defined and limited by the rules. If say, I’m supposed to write a response of a hundred words, but decide I don’t want my expression forced in this way, I will write something of less or more than 100 words, but not hit that number only because someone asked me to achieve that number. What if it happens that I do come up with a response of exactly 100 words, should I add or take away a phrase so I’m not confined? Or does matter more what those words are, however few or many they may be, whether they number a hundred or not?
Dylan is certainly a free spirit who cannot be tamed by the ordinary conventions of literacy. While I may not be quite as zealous about it, I certainly understand where he is coming from. What I’ve enjoyed about this class vs. other ones is the fact that I don’t lose my voice in any of my papers. I’ve always hated that idea of removing words like “I”, “me”, “We”, or “my” in papers. While I understand that it’s a bit redundant to say because it’s obviously how you feel since YOU wrote the paper, but it’s the principal behind it that really bothers me.
The idea that by connecting myself even further with my paper and ideas, I’ve somehow done something wrong. It’s this lack of stake in a paper that is turning most of them into these standard BS papers that Dylan was writing about. Without a sense of identity in writing there is a significant decrease in the will to actually care about that paper for anything besides a grade.