Elbow pgs. 48 -75 Blog 2

I am finding it difficult to write this blog entry because I found 90% of the reading completely worthless. It seems that Elbow and I just don’t see eye-to-eye on the writing process. Throughout the reading I was extremely frustrated with Elbow’s methods (and even his writing style: “till” is not a word and sentence fragments annoy me.) But perhaps my biggest problem with this week’s reading is this: I hate cooking. Whether it be with actual food, or in the writing model Elbow suggests, it is equally useless to me.

I’ve often thought about actual food cooking as “what is the point when I can stick a meal in the microwave or get take-out? You save all of that time and end up with something just as good.” I think this applies to writing cooking just as readily. Elbow even admits that for some people, “internal cooking” might be the key answer. What is the point of “trying to turn […] ten or twenty pages of wandering mush into twenty or thirty hard little crab apples.” (62) What even is the likeliness of that happening? When you are “Allow[ing] your writing to fall into poetry and then back into prose; from informal to formal; form personal to impersonal; first person to third person; fiction, nonfiction; empirical, a priori,” how is it likely that you will end up with anything useful at all? (54) It seems to me all this would produce is a garbled, frustrating mess that you then have to look over—possibly again and again and again—to gain any insight from at all. How frustrating! What a waste of time and energy! “First you are writing about a dog you had; then you are writing about sadness; then you are writing about personalities of dogs; then about the effect of the past; then a poem about names; then a autobiographical self-analysis; then a story about your family,” (55) and then what!? You realize you were supposed to be writing a thought-provoking essay on a completely different topic and just wasted two hours and came up with a worthless 10 page mess? I understand that each way of writing CAN bring out a different aspect of the material (55), but that is a best-case scenario. It seems to me that Elbow ignores the possibilities of the downsides of his method. Wasted time, energy, and effort will only make writers more frustrated.

At least Elbow and I can slightly agree on one point: Internal cooking. I think I am very much an “internal cooker.” Throughout the reading, I kept wondering what Elbow would think of my model of writing. That is, think about what you are going to write while going about your daily life (especially when showering—all of my best ideas come to me when I’m showering) and then, when you are ready and have them all sorted out, sit down and write. I think this is what Elbow is referring to when he says on page 68 “You are writing and it is coming out well. Or you are not writing—sitting or walking around—but you can feel it bubbling inside. Things are going well. You can fell it’s not waster energy even if you are not writing.” (68)