Throughout “Writ 5: The Foreigner Within: Metamorphosis and Otherness”, I’ve found myself drawing connections between the concepts discussed in class and my life, and my writing is no exception. I began this term with a rather rigid mode of writing in which I expected myself to develop a thesis before even starting the first draft. I think this largely came from writing timed essays in high school, for which the purpose was to demonstrate what I know or what I can piece together in a short time period. In reality, however, writing is more of a living, breathing process.
The first text we read for this class was “The Sixth Paragraph: A Re-Vision of the Essay” by Paul Lynch. This piece stuck with me in particular because it radically challenged my concept of writing. As someone who struggles with perfectionism, I tend to wait to write until I have the perfect concept of what I am writing about. Yet Lynch notes that the origins of essay writing lie in Montaigne’s essais in which he “was simply testing out ideas” (291). Rather than thinking and then creating a retrospective record, essay writing is more like mapping out the journey of the mind in real-time. After reading Lynch’s piece, I was surprised to feel liberated in my writing.
However, like any metamorphosis, altering my writing process took more than the time between reading Lynch and writing my first essay. I told myself that if I ever struggled to develop a topic, I could always turn to contemplative writing to hash out some ideas. But heaven forbid that I actually employ this mindset in setting down my first draft– the exploratory essay was still in my mind a separate concept from the draft.
This misconception was not much of an issue for my first essay– I jotted down notes in the margin of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, including, “will others’ perceptions of our ID/nature always triumph above our own, even though we act to realize our IDs?”. In a document I titled “Essay 1 Brainstorm,” I listed pieces of related evidence and put together an outline for my first draft: I would focus on the wind imagery and the irony surrounding Daphne’s beauty in order to demonstrate the lack of individual agency in metamorphosis. My final paper hardly strayed from this, my thesis stating, “By bridging descriptions of both Daphne’s independence and Apollo’s admiration of her beauty with wind imagery, and by employing situational irony in Daphne’s sudden submission and in her retention of beauty following transformation, Ovid implies that despite Daphne’s best efforts at redirecting her fate, the results of her metamorphosis are ultimately subject to Apollo’s interpretations”.
In pre-determining my essay, however, I got stuck in a logical structure that did not work to my advantage; my peer reviewers and Professor Godley all remarked that the balance between the wind imagery section and the irony section was far from complementary and that there was little logical flow between the two sections. Other than that, because this first essay was only a brief textual analysis of a single text, I was able to get away with my rigid drafting process.
While writing my second essay, however, I found myself struggling to develop an argument out of my typical drafting process. I began with a list of quotes I wanted to integrate from each of my sources (Scarry, Deleuze, and Kafka), but there was too much to consider at once. From there, I tried the exploratory writing process and wrote a few paragraphs developing my theory; none of these paragraphs actually made it into my essay, but they helped me refine how I wanted to bridge the texts and I essentially summarized them into a few sentences which made up my introduction. When I received feedback for this essay, my logical structure was far more effective than it was for my first essay; this time, I just needed to work on expanding upon unclear theoretical concepts.
Writing my third essay– the most complex of them all– has truly challenged my drafting process. I spent nearly a week researching and trying to establish a central argument, but my usual process of collecting quotes and synthesizing was fruitless in the face of so many sources (I took 20 pages of notes!). All I had was a vague sense that a metamorphosis of identity occurs when one is diagnosed with chronic illness. I met with an RWIT tutor, who helped me think through my argument; in doing so, I realized that talking through my ideas was much like Montaigne’s exploratory writing. I was able to draw connections during our conversation that I would not have made otherwise; namely, I pinpointed the gap I would attempt to fill as the lack of effective mental health care, and I set out to fill that gap by carrying over the conclusions drawn from scholarship on chronic illnesses. This essay was the real turning point in changing my drafting process as without talking through my ideas, I was stuck trying to write an introduction to an argument I didn’t even know yet. Now, I realize the importance of just starting to write (or talk) without expecting the result to even make it into my first draft.
In researching and writing my second and third essays, I’ve argued for the power of writing to explore ideas that seem inexpressible. Earlier, I considered this only in the context of healing pain through creative stuttering, and I failed to apply my advice to my own writing process– although not necessarily healing pain, expressing complex arguments can feel next to impossible. By freely writing out my thoughts, I can find the words I need to express even the most nuanced ideas.
