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AU T H O R I N G A N d A l I c e s H e l d O N When you get through you can be a 10th rate writer like me. Alice Sheldon Interviewed by Contemporary Authors in 1982, Alice Sheldon revealed something of her “so-called writing technique.” I mull over the story in my head, and in notes, until I have a complete visual-aural picture of everything; every scene, people, whether somebody hands another person something with their right or left hand, what people who aren’t even mentioned are doing—everything pictured and heard. I’d say, like a movie, but films today are all cut and fancied and are art themselves : maybe like a very dull and complete documentary. Then when I have it all pictured, I tell the story, just as I would if it were a piece of life, in what I hope is a punchy way. (qtd in Locher 1983) To balance her dismissive “so-called writing technique,” she adds that “I’ve found that some other writers at least do it too.” Indeed, on occasion other authors describe something like the same style of composing. Joyce Carol Oates said that “By the time I come to type out my writing formally, I’ve envisioned it repeatedly” (Darnton 2001, 171). C. S. Forester, author of The African Queen, the Horatio Hornblower series, and a stack of other historical adventures, would have a mental picture of a new work, begin writing as if possessed, continue writing in a frenzy for weeks until the book was done, then send the manuscript off to the publisher and thereafter refuse to revise a word. Not only fiction writers, some of them, follow this method of internally composing much of a work before then copying it down. Stephen Jay Gould said, “I never write a second draft. I almost never shift a paragraph . I add something if something new comes up. But I’m a believer in the old-fashioned technique of outlining—that is, you don’t sit down and write until you pretty much know how it goes” (Monastersky 2002, A17). The style may have to do with genre. Technical writer Barrie Van Dyck describes the authoring of certain kinds of banking documents as 234 AU T H ORI N G “first time final.” The contents and the form are fully rehearsed ahead of time and all it takes is typing the piece out, with changes, if any, made along the way (Van Dyck 1980). Or the composing style may be personal. “I hate to revise. I would rather write a completely new essay than revise extensively a completed one,” confesses much published compositionist Frank D’Angelo (Waldrep 1988, 50). In part, the defensive tone (“so-called,” “old-fashioned”) in these author testimonies may owe to the good press multi-drafting and multiple revising has received for decades in English classes. It is hard to resist the appeal of legendary revisers such as Dylan Thomas, who could pen a hundred versions of a line before it finally rested in print. Even harder for English students to resist the line sung by a solid chorus of composition teachers (Frank D’Angelo was an apostate). As with collaboration (see Chapter 8), revision carries the clout of holy writ in textbooks and websites. The name of the game is inksheddings, freewrites, or mind dumps, followed by a draft, followed by peer and teacher critique, followed by second draft, followed by proofreading. In course syllabi, “paper due” has been replaced by “first draft due.” So what happens to students whose personal authoring style, as Sheldon’s, prefers a long mental rehearsal followed by a first time final scribing?1 This is not a question of a habit of composing that is necessarily immature or counterproductive. Research into authoring behavior indicates that a “think-then-do” strategy is ingrained with some students, associated with better quality writing, and stable over an undergraduate career (Torrance, Thomas, and Robinson 2000). Stephen Witte (1987) studied “pre-text,” or what goes on in the heads of writers before they scribe text, and found some writers forming large chunks and then translating a good deal of it nearly verbatim. Muriel Harris (1989) discovered the presence of “one-draft writers” among undergraduates, good writers who “do all or most of the revising of those plans and pre-texts mentally, before transcribing,” and these are not the kind of poor student writers...

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