Writing about Writing

From my experience, it seems that the more disorganized a person is, the more structure they need in order to function and get things done. This is most certainly true of me in my writing. Any time I start a piece, I must first have a clear mental flow chart of where the piece is going (that is, at least if I don’t want it to end up unfinished and abandoned, as they so often do). With particular regards to class essays and assignments, the flow chart must be even more detailed and well thought out to prevent my mind from wandering or just rambling. Once this is established however, the rest usually comes easily. I just let all of my thoughts flow out into the little boxes I have established for them and, viola, literary masterpiece.
Not really. After this first verbal spew, I go back and re-read what I have written a good fifty times. My word document trembles at the threat of my trigger-happy backspace bar. You see, I’m what’s known as a detail hound. Once I’ve established some sort of order for the essay, I begin obsessing not over what I’ve said in my essay (I’ve already determined that much) but how I’ve said it. Particular word choices and word order are constantly in question. That’s where the majority of my time is spent in writing. As a result though, I sometimes have a hard time seeing the big picture of how my essay reads (though not the big picture of the subject matter itself.) This is where I need help- I have to ask a third party to read the essay and point out for me any big pieces left unexplained.
When writing my exploratory essay for The Sound and the Fury, I found it fairly easy to follow my usual procedure, possibly even more so since I wasn’t constrained to the usual five-paragraph thesis driven regulation. My real troubles with the essay came in the revision. As I stated before, in order for me to get anything done, I have to have a more or less set plan in my mind, so when it came to revising, my immediate reaction is “Ok, I need to re-write this whole thing in order to account for the things I have either left or am taking out”. I had a hard time making the connection between what the comments on my essay meant, and the way I was going to apply them to my paper. In the case of some comments, I felt it was best to leave them out because to explain myself properly, I would have had to either go off on a complete tangent or insert a sort of disclaimer, which didn’t exactly flow with the rest of my paper. (Specifically, when I mentioned that my family was “typically Hispanic” and was asked to explain what made it uniquely Hispanic. To provide a clear understanding of the differences between the Hispanic culture and, say, the Italian culture, would have required a possibly (and most likely, knowing me) lengthy digression. I tried saying “typically (but not uniquely) Hispanic” family, but that didn’t sound right. So I just left it out altogether.) But other changes I did make in the essay led me to down a different path of thought than I had previously seen, causing me to remove and replace whole ideas within my paper. What I got out of the comments left to me was confirmation that, in getting caught up within my own thoughts and the writing process itself, I sometimes have difficulty explaining myself clearly and/or thoroughly to an outside reader. Through the process of writing an exploratory essay over the Sound and the Fury, it has made me more aware of the thought process that goes into understanding a concept or text. It has sort of forced me to be constantly aware of the development of a thesis, and refine its progression. My goal for my next piece is to shorten the gap between my understanding of the subject and the reader’s understanding of my thoughts through being more concise in my explanations, while not losing subtlety or my individual point of view. People (students, aspiring writers- I’m not sure what to deem the collective I’m referring to) have this tendency to fall into their “writer’s” voice when they narrate, using nice literary elements and good vocab. words just like they were taught. But what one has to remember is that there’s nothing wrong with using your own voice. In fact, learning using your own voice effectively and adapting it to the literary elements (rather than just pulling them out as necessary tools) is what differentiates between a good writer and a mediocre one. This is my over-all goal I would like to achieve in my future writing: to be able to express myself clearly without giving in to the typical narrative of “good” writing. The most important thing I learned while working on this essay is that there are still so many ways of expression I have to explore, and that I have a lot to improve on.