writingaboutwriting2ebim

Getting Ready to Read

Getting Ready to Read

Before you read, do at least one of the following activities:

Think of the act of revising a piece of writing and write down how it feels, tastes, sounds, and smells to you. Are these associations negative, positive, or neutral?
Try to remember how you talk about the acts of writing and revising. Are there any words, phrases, metaphors, or similes that you usually use when you talk about writing? What are they? What do they suggest about how you feel about writing?

As you read, consider the following questions:

How many of the metaphors mentioned in the article have you heard before? How many have you used yourself? Most interestingly, what metaphors do you use that don’t come up here?
Tomlinson takes a wide range of seemingly unrelated metaphors to describe revision and demonstrates how they come together in an overall story about the nature of writing. What is this story? Is it a compelling one, in your opinion?
What have you learned about revision—how it works, its place in writing, the importance of it—through reading this piece that you didn’t know before?
What other aspects of writing might we be able to investigate by studying the language we use to describe them?

Rewriting... is a slow, grinding business. (Vidal, 1974)

Is rewriting a “slow, grinding business”? Is it a matter of chiseling away at a rock-hard text? or pushing and pulling a text of malleable clay? Is it a job for a smelter? or a surgeon? or a tune-up expert? Literary writers like Vidal frequently tell us so, drawing upon such figurative language to explain their processes of composing. I present and analyze here eight prominent “metaphorical stories” that professional writers use when describing their revising activities in literary interviews. I will argue that such patterns of figurative expressions are an important part of our socially shared knowledge of composing and that, as such, they influence our conceptions of composing—and may well influence our composing behavior. At the same time, these metaphorical stories focus attention on aspects of revising that we may have overlooked, challenging our current ways of classifying revision.

Is rewriting a “slow, grinding business”? Is it a matter of chiseling away at a rock-hard text? or pushing and pulling a text of malleable clay?

People tend to have two important sources of information about the writing process: metacognitive experiences and culturally shared information. During the process of writing, writers have moments when they become aware of themselves as thinkers and writers, moments when they are, in effect, pausing to observe themselves in the act of writing or to reflect on what they are doing. These moments are “metacognitive experiences,” and are a source of information about composing. But because metacognitive experiences are often confusing and unclear, people are likely to use other sources of information to help themselves interpret those experiences, particularly social sources such as teachers, parents, and professional writers. A good deal of what people “know” about composing (perhaps most of what they know) is based not on careful observation of their own activities, but on this culturally shared information about the writing process. (For discussion of culturally shared knowledge as the basis of people’s metacognitive explanations of their cognitive processes, see Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Flavell, 1979; for discussion specific to writing, see Tomlinson, 1984.)

Social scientists Alfred Schutz and W. I. Thomas would contend that such socially distributed information about composing influences our “definition of the [writing] situation”—and consequently our writing behavior (Schutz, 1962; Thomas, 1951). (For evidence that people’s theories and assumptions about the world influence their behavior, see, for example, Gentner & Stevens, 1983; for evidence specific to writing, see Boice, 1985; Rose, 1980, 1984, 1985; for evidence specific to metaphor, see Gentner & Gentner, 1983.) With respect to writing, Mike Rose’s research has already revealed links between conceptions about composing and composing performance: studying fluent and blocked college writers, Rose (1984) found that blocked writers held dysfunctional assumptions about appropriate composing strategies and tended to operate according to these assumptions; fluent writers envisioned composing as more flexible and operated accordingly.

Since metaphorical expressions about composing that are common in the culture are part of such socially distributed information, it is likely that they too influence our conceptions and our behavior as writers—an assertion certainly supported by the work on metaphor of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980a, 1980b), Michael Reddy (1979), and Donald A. Schon (1979). Lakoff and Johnson, concerned with conceptual metaphors often overlooked in everyday language, assert that we “draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor” (1980a, p. 485). Michael Reddy describes a pervasive and powerful metaphor—the conduit metaphor—that strongly influences our conceptions of communication. Donald A. Schon describes how “stories” told through metaphor influence our thinking.

Each story conveys a different view of reality and represents a special way of seeing. From a situation that is vague, ambiguous, and indeterminate (or rich and complex, depending on one’s frame of mind), each story selects . . . for attention a few salient features and relations from what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly complex reality . . . [giving] these elements a coherent organization. (1979, p. 264)

Thus patterns of common figurative expressions can form resonant, coherent narratives that both reflect and influence the ways we conceive of and act on the world. These metaphorical stories enable us to understand and communicate about amorphous, fragmented, complicated experiences like the process of writing; they enable us to bring coherence to our conceptions and communications about composing.

To explore socially shared ways of bringing structure and coherence to revising activities requires a corpus of testimony from writers, which I have selected exclusively from literary interviews. Reviewing over 2,000 published literary interviews (of the type made famous by the Paris Review), I have gathered hundreds of instances in which figurative language was used to describe composing from authors of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays—authors varying in nationality, ethnicity, and gender. Literary interviews (and other types of interviews as well) suffer from a number of problems when used as evidence about composing practices (see Tomlinson, 1984). However, these problems are not relevant when interviews are used instead as a source of discourse about composing, as text to be analyzed, my intention here.

I concentrate here on eight metaphorical stories specifically about revising, rather than stories meant to describe the whole process of writing, part of which, of course, involves revision (I do discuss metaphorical stories of that type in Tomlinson, 1986). In the eight stories, authors make reference to revising as refining ore, casting and recasting, sculpting, painting, sewing and tailoring, tying things off, fixing things (particularly mechanical things), or cutting. In the next section, I introduce each story, indicating rather briefly the perspective it offers on revising and some of the applications that may be associated with it. I then go on in the following sections to explore these implications further and to suggest how the varied perspectives of these metaphorical stories, the strength of their internal coherence, and the network of relationships among the stories challenge our common classification of revising.

Author’s Note: I would like to thank Rise Axelrod, Lori Chamberlain, and Charles Cooper for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank others who have helped with this project, particularly my superb research assistant, Peter Mortensen, graduate student in literature and composition at the University of California, San Diego.