Preliminary draft note dump

Disclaimer:  I don't claim for any of this to make sense or be correct

"Nikki is thinking about authority over writing that is developed through peer modeling - peer communities = where peers are the audience, and will interpret stories from her transcript as models for re-featureing authority in the classroom.  Stories - about Key words = mentoring.  Theorists: Shotter, Chamberlian + Dufy => look at which of the social constructionists in this collection work best)" --Dr. Chandler's blog

What are you talking about?  Peer mentorship/readership should be considered essential in the development of writing, straying from the traditional dynamic that results in teachers becoming the arbiters of what is "good" writing and what isn't--even when authentication of their expertise is absent (ex: unlike in Heidi's class where she does the assignments with the students, therefore they see her writing and can access her as a fund of knowledge).  The sort of peer-level interaction I'm hoping to point out is already happening in other areas, such as non-academic and recreational activities.  But life overlaps indefinitely and the development of writing definitely falls into these rhythms.

What do you see in your data? I saw that while I valued my teacher's guidance in the structures of writing, abided by their instructions and grew from their teachings, I was more so concerned with the opinions of my peers in and outside academic life.  I have a few set stories so far==> "The Wasabi Woman/Roleplay" , "Stephy", "(I STOPPED HERE)))
Critical lens/lit review
why this problem is important in general--other writers that aren't me
examples/stories that make a point about our focus
different points
----
Intro--states questions and problem it addresses
methods--how you will analyze your data=methods you will use
any names you give to what is going on in your data

Blog 4.

Gergen opened up a lot of thinking for me in relation to my research. Despite my findings in my transcript and during my interview, where school was a pleasant experience where I received a lot of validation for my skill, I still feel that only a small fraction of the classroom experience was responsible for my actual learning to write.  Rather, I learned that there were different "formats" for writing--different tricks and nuances that were learned for social acceptance that were in themselves not exercises for writing, but for molding the vessels that contain it.  Looking back on my growing data and my memories, I felt like it was the way you learn to use a different set of table manners for home vs. not home; a different discourse.  I learned how to write a limerick here, how to dot-and-jot class notes there; outlines, five paragraph essays, literary criticism, analysis.  I learned formulas, valuable formulas at that,but not writing.

Writing I learned from the non-traditional spaces--and I learned a completely different set of code and conduct for writing there than from at school--in online forums and multiplayer games, paper and pencil roleplays, fanfiction sites, the books I read, how people in my life responded to my writing--the list goes on.  While I learned in school that plagiarism would get me expelled and the first two lines of a limerick should rhyme==>I learned "outside" that it's in poor taste to go out of character in fanfiction just to satisfy one's desires, and feelings can transfer from a person to the word to another person and that's part of what draws in readers, how to keep some writing private and others shared--these and countless other lessons are things I value primarily, while academia is secondary.

However, these "outside" lessons were also taught "inside" at times and vice versa.   I still saw the academic environment as an authority, something I answered to and sought approval from, but at the same time my loyalty was often highly selective and I would dismiss judgment from my teachers about one set of writing while obeying when it came to another set--like academic papers.  For example, I was far more concerned with what my online friends and roleplay partners thought about my latest original fantasy chapter than the opinion of my teachers, if they ever even knew I was working on such a thing.

Am I holding "outside" learning superior to what I learned in the academic environment?  Do I want to dismiss the academic and focus on that outside space where is no authority or good/bad writing?  Probably.  But that is only how I have been shaped how I shape my assumptions; even as I say so, I feel that I'm highly over-generalizing that shape in this post by turning myself into an explainable character, as I've learned to try and do.   I realize that there are also limitations to that mindset I might never overcome, and others will undoubtedly have different values and skill sets.

nonassignment blurb

It seems behind each word we say, speak, and write is a complex, non-linear superstorm of detonated synapses sparking off into forever.  They collide with others and among themselves and conflict,  connect and mold new meaning, or die off, and it doesn't seem to stop, ever, because we're always saying or thinking something, whether amongst company or by oneself with all of the different faces of the psyche, in the dark room behind our eyes where the sparks flash brightest.

Writing snapshots

I

At any time between 7:11am and 2:21pm, my middle-to high school day.  The small desk with the hollow bottom and the varnish with the strength of stone far too close to me, carved into by past scribblers.  It's exceedingly quiet, enough to hear the air conditioning humming through the ceiling.  It's SSR (silent selected reading), but my forehead's on the edge of the desk and my body's bent to hide the marble composition notebook laid out on my lap.  My open book is settled in the hull of the desk just in case the teacher comes by.  I smell paper and the acrid clean smell of blue Pilot rolling ball ink.  The words on the page are all tall and awkward, yet small, and once there's more of them they are uniform.  I'm writing a dialogue between the castle stable boy and an elite fire mage about to set out on a quest.  The margins of the page are filled with little symbols of elements, like flames and leaves and thunderbolts, teardrops.  Manga-style eyeballs and a random Pikachu face.  As I come to the end of the page my handwriting gets awkward, and I triumphantly mark the page number in the top right corner and turn it.

II

Uncomfortably warm, and my arm is going numb from leaning on my side, dominating the keyboard with my right hand while my left thumb spaces.  Quantum Leap is whining low from my little TV, but the glare from the window makes the picture invisible.  My old white box computer sits on an old coffee table next to my closet, cuddled up to the bed.  The word processor's background is screen-of-death blue, and the letters are blocky and yellow.  Everything takes a while to do on this machine but the writing goes fast, but a freeware RPG is open in another tab, waiting to be summoned if someone walks through to go to the den.  My hamster died months ago, but I haven't removed the empty tank from my room yet, and the smell makes me think of hay.  Four sisters escape a pseudo-Spain for the safety of the youngest, putting their trust in a sailor who doesn't trust them.

III

I open my history textbook and marvel at the large complication of it.  It's made bulkier by the paper bag I have taped around it to keep the cover safe.  When Mr. Crosby isn't looking I put my marble composition book open on top of the current page and tilt the textbook towards me, and continue on about the siege of the temple Firadra, a long forgotten dungeon beneath the quiet town of Bracos.  As my protagonist teeters along narrow walkways cradled by lava toward the altar, my attention drifts in and out to the lecture, nodding and looking profound at the appropriate times, gathering just enough to know what's happening should he catch me unaware, and then I proceed.  The boy next to me is dipping his head into his arms.  It's only 11:43, and the flourescent bulbs along with the natural sunlight streaming in make everything overbright and skewed.  If Crosby catches him, he'll come over and slam the paddle on his desk, so I carve each word zealously, ever-ready to flip the page and start bogus notes on Henry Ford and the assembly line.  It's much more effort than it's worth, but I do it anyway.

Thoughts on my research project

At this point, I have fallen a fair bit behind on my blog posts and I'm trying my best to catch back up.  This blog is supposed to be about what I might be interested in doing for my research project for 5030.
Even with this delayed post, I'm still not quite certain, and yet I have a multitude of ideas.  After my conference with Dr. Chandler and listening back on our interview tape, I think I might like to explore emotional engagement to writing.  This morning I read an article on the emotional engagement to reading, and how it helps readers become more empathetic in their daily lives.  I understand this wholeheartedly--throughout my life, I feel that my internal code of conduct has been pieced together not just through my personal life experience, but also through the things I've read--the things I was emotionally attached to as a reader and heroes/heroines I wanted to aspire to in reality, etc.  Stories like Lang's fairy books, the poems of the Tao te Ching, Tamora Pierce's fiction, Calvin and Hobbes--all and more shaped how I look at the world and how I want to be a part in it.

Osmosis through reading, we've agreed in class, is one of the primary ways we learn writing that does not necessarily connect to academia.  So, I would like to approach this thought from another direction--how do we become emotionally invested in writing?  Is this too created by reading, or other factors?

As an avid writer of fiction stories, I often (admittedly) hurry through my daily routines just to get back to the page, just to tell my story, much like the way I would hurry to Crunchyroll to catch up on my favorite anime or sneak a few pages of the book I'm currently reading between train stops.  It doesn't matter to me if what I'm writing will prove unusable later; what matters is that I need to write it and I get somewhat cranky if I can't manage to get back to it reasonably soon.  It's play that I can call work with a somewhat straight face.  It's familiar and it's sensual and it's stimulating and calming at once.

But what gets me this way?  I found that I've relied on writing since I was little to sustain me when everything else was unsustainable. Currently I'm working on a scene where my protagonist meets his future foster aunt on a lonely rainy road, but she's trapped beneath a fallen limb.  It's challenging, but exciting to find just the right words to make this scene click when it begins and ends so differently.  His nostalgia for the life he's running away from might come from my constant moving around in life, the familiar being taken away, but then the hope of change and the freedom that new surroundings bring.  I'm emotionally invested.

 Is the love of writing born out of some level of suffering, only meant for healing?  I'm not sure I would agree with that.  There's something about the mere act of writing that brings me back--the fresh page or the waiting half-finished sentence, the odd acrid smell of the blue ink, and the cosmetic uniform my otherwise shoddy handwriting takes on once there are a bunch of paragraphs.  There is something material about it as well as emotional, too.

I'll think more on it.

Reflections

 Reflections on what you do as a writer, what is most valuable to you, and what you have been "taught"; and what you haven't.

As a writer, I tend to perform more creative, self-assigned tasks outside of the academic world.  I free-write at least 2-3 pages each day, and either work on my manuscripts or manage pre-writing tasks related to them like world-building or character development.  If I can't manage that, I default to play-by-post roleplaying on forums, or to my Daily Writer prompts.  I always try and have something to do because if I find if I don't write on some level every day, I'm more likely to become depressed and go into weeks-long creative ruts.  the act of writing itself is very valuable to me.

What is almost important to me as a writer is feedback and criticism.  I'm not going to say that I have a thick skin and can take harsh criticism, because it's still my writing and on some level I'm attached to it.  But I am realistic and have learned to be honest about my skills.  If something I write isn't up to my usual par I likely know it already and I want to see what went wrong from someone else's perspective because I know I might be too close to see the specifics.  What I find most valuable are people responding to my writing with questions rather than statements.  And at the end, if I don't find others' suggestions feasible to me--even if it was helpful--I reserve the authority to keep what I have or build off the ideas to find my own solutions.  I guess collaboration, even for my solitary projects, are key to me.

In the academic world, I was taught first to copy sentences from workbooks, and to copy words from the dictionary and use them in sentences.  We had workbooks where we had to determine grammatically correct sentences from incorrect, and the unspoken understand was that we emulate that pattern.  We also learned how to write in cursive format, and had to copy sentences from books in cursive.  This was the norm for a long time heading up into high school--copy and paste, no real thoughts of our own.  We were to find the 'right' answers.

In high school this continued, but towards the goals of completing our standardized testing and SATs.  Listen and repeat became the game, but now we had to listen and then repeat the same information in a way that had not been said before.  Paraphrasing was the ideal to reach.  Once again, our own opinions were not important.  Everything we could think of had been thought of before, and if we thought of something new we were wrong.  

I wasn't taught how to form my own opinions in my writing until well after it should have been too late, but I had long since been doing it on my own through journaling, pseudo-anonymous forum posting, etc.  I couldn't NOT have an opinion on the world or its aspects, even if I wasn't asked for it.  At the same time, because of personal trauma (my father reading through my diaries and confronting me about the content) this sort of writing was very personal to me and I expressed it privately or anonymously.   It was a long time before I was able to learn how to insert it into my academic writing in a way that would make my content original and please my professors, but also please myself without suffering anxiety of being persecuted for my thoughts.  That was a process I went through on my own--classroom composition wasn't really a factor.

Freshman composition did teach me the values of revising--of being close to your work and caring about it, and thus not simply stopping at the first draft and parting with it.