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and not his, I realize – by way of Writing Without Teachers, I
was so attracted to what he had to say about writing, to how he
saw writing. Those two writers, one writing from out of the
world of popular fiction and the other that of academia but both
writing to share their lessons, and love, of writing, allowed me
to see and re-see each of those worlds with greater clarity and
greater understanding. This sort of converging of worlds, the
curricular with the non-curricular, has been very common for me
throughout the years and it has influenced me as both a writer
and a teacher of writing because, through it, I could see that,
no matter how separate they may seem, their correspondence is
profound. But to return to Elbow, of the fear that may come
from experiencing the uncertainty offered through the
“explosive” writing Bradbury had decreed, he explains:
The reason it feels like chaos and disorientation to
write freely is because you are giving up a good deal
of control. You are allowing yourself to proceed
without a full plan – or allowing yourself to depart
from whatever plan you have. You are trying to let
the words, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions try to
find some of their own order, logic, coherence.
You’re trying to get your material to do some of the
steering instead of doing it all yourself. (31-2)
For Elbow, such “chaos and disorientation” is not simply good
for writing, it is an utter necessity if it is to avoid becoming
the sort of “boring obvious writing” that is produced when
writers “patch up, mop up, neaten up the half-cooked and
unsatisfactory ideas they find lying around in their head” (72):
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