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Homework answers / question archive / assignment for this week is the following: Crafting the Personal Essay, Chapter 19, "On a Regular Writing Routine" Crafting the Personal Essay, Chapter 21, "Red Light, Green Light: Tips for Conquering Writer's Block" General posting guidelines this week: Please post just a Primary Post in response to the discussion topic(s) below
assignment for this week is the following:
General posting guidelines this week: Please post just a Primary Post in response to the discussion topic(s) below. Since this is a holiday week, only the one primary post is required of you. It's worth 10 points, and it's due this Wednesday 11/27.
To ensure a cordial style, please remember to greet your classmates and sign your name in your post.
In Chapter 19, "On a Regular Writing Routine," Dinty W. Moore discusses the importance of sticking to a regular writing routine. In order to produce good work, emphasizes Moore, writers need to write habitually--even if nothing much of interest is written. With the routine in place, the opportunity for better writing can occur.
Similarly, in Chapter 21, "Red Light, Green Light: Tips for Conquering Writer's Block," Moore talks about the advantages of simply sticking with the task of writing to avoid what's sometimes called writer's block. "If you stay at the task, you aren't blocked, just idling for a while" (Moore 215). As Maya Angelou writes in the epigraph to this chapter, "What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks 'the cat sat on the mat' [ . . . ]. But I try" (qtd. in Moore 214).
After reading Chapters 19 and 21, please respond to one of the following prompts:
Option 1: Please make a specific connection between Moore's ideas in Chapter 19 about sticking with a regular routine and something else that you try to do routinely. You may not be great at the task, but you stick with it, and eventually, results start to show.
For example, perhaps you are not in the greatest physical shape, but you jog every day for 30 minutes because you know jogging will benefit your health. Or maybe you are just an average musician, but you dig out your dad's old guitar and spend a few minutes three times a week teaching yourself chords on the instrument.
Option 2: Please respond to Moore's advice in Chapter 21: "Expect the negative voices" when you write; "Expect a lousy first draft," as well (216-217). Do you find that you are able to plough through feelings of being blocked or stymied in your writing if you follow this or similar advice? Please discuss, illustrating your response with a specific example.
Citing your source(s): Please include in your post at least one specific reference to Chapter 19 or 21. Please refer to the guidelines in Format for Citing Sources in Your Writings.
In chapter 21 of Moore's book, he talks about dealing with writer's block, as well as the "bad days" that "come with the good" days of writing (Moore 214). He discusses how writer's block "often comes when the voices in our heads drown out our confidence"; however, these voices are to be expected from any sort of writer (Moore 215). He advises the audience to "expect the voices...but not take them too seriously", as well as to "fully expect a lousy first draft" when writing out something (Moore 216, 217). I fully understand where Moore is coming from with his advice, and his advice is one I've taken to heart in all of my writing ventures. I get writer's block on occasion, and it is never fun to be stuck like that; however, inspiration does eventually come to me, and I am able to finally move on with whatever I'm writing at the moment. In one case, I was struggling with how to formulate the next chapter of the novel I was working on, unable to get out a first draft that I liked. However, when I went back and wrote the chapter without worrying about the draft being unpolished, I found it was easier to get the general outline of what I wanted to say down on paper. I actually find it better for me to write an unpolished draft of a chapter, then go back and fill in more detail, restructure awkward sentences, and so on, until I have a complete, edited chapter. No writing piece is ever going to completely perfect, and no one should expect perfection right out of the gate.
