7.1: Introduction

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Colin Charlton

[T]he “ format” of this piece—it goes against what I’ve been
taught: to keep things orderly and clump ideas together. This piece
is my way of taking everything that has been fumbling around in
my mind and putting it on paper. Essentially, this is my brain
splattered in ink and words on the paper before you. This is my
baby-step attempt at experimentation. I am “painting a picture
with words,” . . . as cliché as that may sound.

—Brittany Ramirez, “My Written Mess,” Reflective Portfolio
Cover Letter, English 1301-Rhetoric & Composition I

This is a chapter for you if you’re in a first year writing class right now and this thought has recently crossed your mind: What am I going to write?* I hope it helps you do two things: (1) realize everyday potentials you have to write something unexpected, and (2) realize that, rather than one strategy, you can and should develop many writing strategies that work during the course of a writing class. When we face a new writing situation, regardless of its origin, we want direction. We crave instruction. “Just tell me what you want!” is not a cry owned solely by

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freshmen writers, but one felt and repeated by anyone who struggles with a fresh scene. In the unfamiliar territory of a research project that begins with a question instead of an already known answer, we still hope for a light at the end of the research and writing tunnel. The trick is to find ways to keep the struggle going, to make manageable the hard work of writing, reading, and re-seeing what we’ve created in light of new questions we cannot foresee.

I’m talking about invention, or how we bring a variety of ideas and/or objects together to make a meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. If you find a confident writer in a room full of doubt, chances are you’ve found someone who has figured out through trial and error how to invent as a writer. In the following pages, then, you will find a variety of strategies for coming up with ideas based on real students and their writing. These won’t be plug-and-play strategies. Instead, they enact philosophies for invention that you can adapt to your writing situations. You will also find a critical look at the writing classroom and how you can bring ideas of invention into it. This blend of reflection and action, of theory and practice, of thinking and doing, is the praxis, or practice, of writing. This essay is, simply put, a demonstration and an invitation to transform the uncertainty of What am I going to write? into an opportunity to make new connections between texts, people, and ideas. Throughout the essay and the visual essay that is embedded in the following pages, you’ll get to hear from students who experimented with invention, both in terms of their major writing projects and their reflections on our work together. Erika, Adbe, Ozzy, and Brittany’s work and ideas, I think, illustrate the challenge and the reward of a writing class that emphasizes potentials over outcomes.