Elbow 48-75

Elbow’s theories about cooking and non-cooking were rather confusing. It wasn’t until I got closer to the end of the chapter that I began to see his reasoning a little more clearly. Elbow encourages chaos and disorder while writing so as to come up with fully developed ideas. He rejects the middle ground. I feel as though my thoughts are already chaotic and should be less chaotic. Coming up with 20 pages of writing only to come away with 20 one liners on note cards “crab apples” is daunting. I agree with Elbows ideas and feels as though they will work but it is difficult to justify that much writing. On the other hand, if that much writing can allow a person to free their thoughts up enough to form coherent words which then shape into a great paper, book, poem or other mode then his ideas are truly worth the time and effort that his method requires.

I don’t know if it is too late to change something that has been pounded into my head in school. I feel as if I’m diving headfirst into dangerous waters just by reading Elbow. It is exciting and scary to think that my chaotic thoughts that I have to muddle through to get any semblance of an idea of how I want my paper to go is a good thing and not a bad thing. I am a disorganized person by nature and I struggle to create order. Now I am reading a book that discourages order and encourages randomness. While that should be a comfort to me, I still find myself questioning his methods for myself. I feel that if I let chaos reign and let go over the control that I grappeled to gain that I will be sliding backward not gaining ground. I have yet to try his freewriting although I am experimenting a little with it while writing this blog. I want to go back and take out the ideas that seem out of place or that don’t make any sense but I’m forcing myself to leave them in there.
Somehow every semester I seem to come up with a paper for whatever assignment that I’m given that receives an A. I always start the paper out feeling as though I have nothing important to say and that this will be the paper that I will fall face first in the mud with. I somehow seem to pull off something that frankly amazes me that I had those words and thoughts and was able to put them on paper and get a great response back. I have the same fears for this class but I feel a little better knowing that I am not alone in this fear.