Blog 10

When you compare writing to another form of aesthetics such as dance or painting the immediate response in my head is "how?" the only immediate similarity that i saw was creativity but you can be creative in the way you arrange your bedroom as well as how you write a story. Then i thought about it a little more and i started piecing it together slowly but surely. I don't see the similarities so much in the process as i do in the finished product. A favorite quote of mine come from Nietzsche when he says "only as an aesthetic phenomenon is the world justified." Writing is an aesthetic, not only in the print on the page but in the physical structure of a book itself. When something is really well written, you don't realize that you have stopped paying attention to each individual word to piece together a sentence and started paying attention to each individual sentence that constructs a paragraph. Or even bigger each paragraph that constructs a chapter, or each chapter that constructs a section of, or the whole, book. The aesthetic quality of a work can be found when you stop yourself and re-read a paragraph or two of prose that put a definite image or feeling inside you. This is where i see the similarity between writing and painting because you see the whole picture first in a painting and then have to go back to study the details and critique what you say. I've been getting caught up in the nitty gritty of sentence structure and word choice, and this is important, but i think that somehow as teachers we should try to come up with a way to teach efficient paragraph writing, or efficient chapter writing because the intricacy and detail eventually leads to this greater entity altogether. Maybe if could teach writing by having our students write 10 pages worth of work with a beginning middle and end and then take that work and go through it section by section we could make them understand how to use the process as they write as well as as they revise. Good painters start by appreciating completed art, and good writers start by appreciating good books. The problem is that a lot of students don't have a wide background in literature and it's hard to teach them how to get somewhere they have never even witnessed.