Blog 3

In Graves’ essay, What I Learned From Verle Barnes, I particularly enjoyed the passage at the bottom of page 116 regarding the creative process. When our brain is overly focused on rules, our creativity becomes inhibited. In order to truly reach our potential as writers, we must be able to put aside these restrictive barriers. While reading this section, I was reminded of a similar hurdle that had to be faced in my undergraduate acting workshop courses. As actors, we were constantly reminded to get “out of our heads.” In order to fully adopt a character, we had to enable ourselves to act instinctively in the way in which that character would behave. If we thought too much about what we were doing, we would be less likely to make bold choices. We therefore would be told to “get out of your head” in order to let the creative process happen instinctively. In the same manner, we must encourage our students to get out of their heads. If they are too busy worrying about following rules or how others will judge their writing, they will be unable to truly reach their highest potential.

Graves’ “lesson” from Verle Barnes is that you have to find a subject you are passionate about so that the writing process possesses you. This past weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along at Signature Theatre in Washington D.C. In the musical, the central character, composer Franklin Shepard, provides the following advice to an aspiring writer. "Don't just write what you know," Franklin says as he points to his head. Instead, he encourages the youth to "write what you know," pointing to his heart. I found this statement to be incredibly profound. Good writing is writing that comes not from our head but from our heart. Our subject should be something about which we are truly passionate. Verle was not just writing about something he knew, but rather was writing about something that had captivated him so much that he HAD to share it with others.

In Lesley Rex’s essay, the author describes how he questioned his students “So what?” after they read a piece of personal writing to the class. One of the ideas he is presenting is the idea of raising the stakes in your writing. Once again, I’ll make a direct comparison to my acting background….in order to draw in an audience, actors are constantly pushed to raise the stakes in a scene. If you really want to captivate your readers, there must be a reason for writing about a particular subject. In order to steer our students away from simply writing for an assignment, we must remind them to raise the stakes, so that the reader won’t be left asking “SO WHAT????”

I agree with Danielle that I loved the fact that Charles Suhor pointed out the intense aesthetic experience that one can receive from literature and other arts. Too often in the English classes that I have taken, students were told what they should think and feel about a piece of literature. Like music, theater, or art, literature should transport you to another place or leave you with a particular feeling. In order to help our students gain a full appreciation for literature and the humanities, we as teachers should encourage students to truly experience art rather than simply analyzing or studying it at a superficial level.