Writing as a Process
Estimated Time: 30 minutes
Now that we have explored how to evaluate writing and what good writing looks like, we are going to dive into how you can go about creating good text.
This course takes a process approach to improve writing skills. Therefore it is worth reflecting on how you currently write and how well your current process is serving your needs.
Discuss: How You Write
💬 How do you write? Do you follow a deliberate process with defined steps? Do you use this process for all types of writing?
Reflect on how you write by answering the questions in the Padlet below.
The Flowers Paradigm
"What's the hardest part of writing?" I ask on the first day of class.
"Getting started," someone offers, groaning.
"No, it's not getting started," a voice in the back of the room corrects. "It's keeping on once you do get started. I can always write a sentence or two-but then I get stuck."
"Why?" I ask.
"I don't know. I am writing along, and all of a sudden I realize how awful it is, and I tear it up. Then I start over again, and after two sentences, the same thing happens."
"Let me suggest something which might help," I say. Turning to the board, I write four words: "madman," "architect," "carpenter," "judge."
What happens when you get stuck is that two competing energies are locked horn to horn, pushing against each other. One is the energy of what I'll call your 'madman.' He is full of ideas, writes crazily and perhaps rather sloppily, gets carried away by enthusiasm or anger, and if really let loose, could turn out ten pages an hour.
The second is a kind of critical energy--what I'll call the 'judge.' He's been educated and knows a sentence fragment when he sees one. He peers over your shoulder and says, 'That's trash!' with such authority that the madman loses his crazy confidence and shrivels up. You know the judge is right-after all, he speaks with the voice of your most imperious English teacher. But for all his sharpness of eye, he can't create anything.
- Betty S. Flowers
📖 Read the rest of this article here: Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge
📺 Watch the following video to learn about the four voices of The Flowers Paradigm: the madman, the architect, the carpenter, and the judge
To best utilise each of these writing voices, it is helpful to use a standard process with deliberate steps that help get the most out of the madman, architect, carpenter, and judge at the appropriate time. This is called the writing process, and we will explore its steps in the next section and then deep dive into each step of the process over the following three lessons of this course.
Note that the writing process that we will use deviates a little from the Flowers Paradigm in the use of the Madman and Carpenter. More on that in the next section!