(The) Writer's Mind: Course Purpose
Overview
The Course Catalog describes The Writer's Mind as follows:
The Writer’s Mind enhances students’ understanding of what it means to be a writer through emphasis on craft-specific approaches to writing and by developing critical awareness of their own and others’ written work. Working in different genres of writing, students will gain experience in developing effective revision strategies, in analyzing audience, and in increasing awareness of the visual aspects of the printed or electronic page. |
To extend this a bit further, the promise of the course is to leave you with access to being a writer in your life, which will require of you to discover for yourself what it means to be a writer. This will require you to question what you already know about being a writer, which will open up new possibilities for you.
Toward this end, you will write in the genre of creative nonfiction, and in the process you will practice adapting to some of its conventions, including most importantly:
After investigating and discovering material drawn from your own lived experience, you will strive to write narratives that attempt to impact your intended audiences. We will work to minimize exposition, to amplify in-scene writing, to structure narratives with conflict, and to allow the reflective voice of a character-narrator to emerge in your writing.
Approaching these writing practices as an inquiry makes it more likely for you to have a substantial experience of what it means to be a writer. The goal in this inquiry is not to find the "answer"--I don't expect you to have merely some new information about writing--but to receptively experience previously undisclosed complexities of your world and to wonder over what it means to creatively impact that world through authoring new meanings.
Exercising these receptive and creative powers together make it possible to see and understand the world as a writer sees and understands, a writer committed to make some mark, some difference in the world.
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The Role of Revision
We develop as writers--and we write at our best--when we take risks to participate in writing situations even when we "don't already know how"; the same is true for this course, which is designed to provide opportunities to distinguish, challenge, and even alter your relationship to revision.
Exploring revision in this way invites us to consider a provocative insight into rhetoric: when you revise your writing, your writing revises “you.”
For my part, you can count on me to provide the necessary series of steps of the course, to do so with integrity and clarity, while at the same time challenging you to write beyond your customary approaches.
What you must do to succeed in The Writer’s Mind is simple: show up, on time, having done the work. However, just because something is simple doesn’t make it “easy.”
In fact, while opening up new spaces for discovery and growth can be exhilarating, you can also count on the full gamut of emotions showing up as you navigate the requirements of writing and revision processes, rife as they are with risk and sacrifice. And so calmness and anger, fear and trust, certainty and confusion will occur during all stages of writing in this course, and in no particular order: wash, rinse, and repeat. I will advise you to give yourself the space to experience these various moods and include them as crucial elements of moving through your course.
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The creative [nonfiction] writing course... may be thought of as promoting an awareness of being as creative being. It promotes an awareness of the radical openness of the universe, the extravagant freedom that comes of the ability of writing to (un)define each moment of creation... It promotes an awareness of the disruptive nature of creativity, the potential for newness in the unsettling nature of writing. It promotes an awareness of the againness of existence, the patterns of revision that mark the (dis)continuous character of beginnings. |