Binding time

Nancy Sommers’ “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” raises a lot of interesting questions for me when she compares the revision process to composing music. She argues against the linear models of writing that place revision at the end of the process. She claims that this is not how writing happens, and to present it this way is to take away from the meaning making that happens during the revision process. It is more than fixing words.

She says:

“The analogy with music is readily seen in the compositions of experienced writers: both sorts of composition are based precisely on those structures experienced writers seek in their writing. It is this complicated relationship between the parts and the whole in the work of experienced writers which destroys the linear model; writing cannot develop “like a line” because each addition or deletion is a reordering of the whole” (p. 385)

As I read this I was reminded of Peter Elbow’s “The Music of Form” in which he compares music to writing as well, saying that writing is more than just spatial organization, but it is also temporal. It happens in time. In this regard he compares writing to musical composition, though in a different way. He says, “[t]he problem of organizing a piece of writing is not so much a problem in “structure”—building a visual or spatial creation and giving some kind of satisfying visual/spatial relationship among the parts. It’s more a problem in binding time” (p. 625).

It is interesting to me to think of my own composing processes in the light of these two ideas. I tend of compose short pieces with very little revision, and have never been taught the benefits of revision. As a reader of student work, however, I am constantly asking students to revise in both a structural and lexical level. I have also never been taught to think of my writing as moving through time, and that a reader might naturally approach it that way (even with signposting, headings, etc.). I do read student work that way, however, looking for themes and rhythms that move the piece along.

 

For you, how would a conception of revising and composing as the attempt to bind time change your process of your own writing, or how you engage with your students’ writing?

2 thoughts on “Binding time

  1. Jack, I would be interested in seeing a wiki of one of my poems in process. Would you? That’s all I could think about with the Sommers and the Dolmage piece. I, too, haven’t done as much revision as I would like. And I do want to get better at it. It must be an art, no?

    1. That would be an interesting experience for sure. If a poem is somehow a distillation of an image, there would be some beauty to see how the muddied waters settle. Great idea. Let’s try it!

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