Rule Making & Assumption Setting

When I was in the library one day, taking notes on How to Read a Book by Adler, I made a mistake in my handwriting and made the move to scribble it out with that circular motion I regularly employ. This gets me thinking, and writing:

When I messed up that word and scribbled it out back there, I flashed back to being told in school to mark out errors with a single line, which I automatically codified as a universal rule. Was it for readability? or so they could check over our mistakes? maybe even so they could review our thought processes? or to train us not to obliterate our mistakes, instead to remain calm?

I imagine the truth was probably that student handwriting was generally so difficult to read that the ban on scribbling existed for the sake of teacher's sanity. I think it's interesting, though, how our young minds would tend to hear a recommendation like that, or even a rule, and think that it applied to all of life. Watch out for wrong assumptions. It isn't only young minds that make them.

Regardless of what the teacher's intention was, I am still trying to find an underlying principle in what I have considered above, and I think it relates to some of the other things I've been reading lately. Michael and I are participating in Financial Peace University this year at our church. It is the second time we have gone through the program in going on eleven years of marriage. Anyway, in one of his books Dave Ramsey talks about the fact that successful people are people who haven't let a fear of failure stop them. When they fail they see what they can learn from the failure, and then they try again. Personally, I hate failure. Though I am a recovering perfectionist, I still veer toward not wanting to try things if I don't expect to do them well. I also prefer to avoid cleaning up the resulting mess. Truthfully it is one of the reasons my bathroom doesn't get cleaned more often.

Peter Elbow says that in writing sometimes you have to go ahead and use the wrong word before the right word will occur to you. Sometimes you have to go ahead and write the wrong paragraph before you can make your way clear to the write the better one. It's a good tip. Sometime it's hard for me to follow. At 34 years old I'm learning still not to try and obliterate my mistakes, to stay calm.

A Bit of Metablogging to Jumpstart the Process

This is what I call "metablogging." It's basically writing about blogging, and the only way that I've ever been able to get started. When I first started this blog, back in the October after my now four year old son was born, I started with metablogging. I talked about how hard it was to get started, how hard it was to figure out what I should be writing about. Well, here I am, almost three years later, wondering how to get started. I've hardly been able to write at all since before my 21 month old son was born.
 I keep telling people: It's been hard to write even a basic email for months and months and months. My friend Alina assures me that it's the left-over hormones from pregnancy and breastfeeding that have done this to me. Ever since she told me that, I suppose I've used it as an excuse for not getting started. I've tried posting to the blog on numerous occasions, but I've been tired, or sleep-deprived, or maybe only too easily frustrated to get in there and do it.

I've tried writing things that weren't meant for publication. I've tried taking down my thoughts as they came to me. One morning I typed up a report of sorts concerning an experiment in prayer I was undertaking, but it all came to nothing.

A few days ago, my cousin, who is a successful freelance writer, posted something about a website where you can to post 750 words of freewriting. It's a tool for writers to sort of warm themselves up for the real work that is supposed to fill their day. I'm unwilling to subscribe to the service, because I have some unanswered questions about it, but the idea is imminently sound, and at some point I will probably succumb. It's the same sort of thing Peter Elbow promotes. Peter Elbow, whose book Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing, I recently read, is a major advocate of the freewriting exercise, the premise being that successful writers need to do lots and lots of writing, not all of it anxiety ridden. He also argues that college students need low stakes outlets for writing, so that it becomes an habit and not merely an exercise in requirement. There are some lovely quotes from Elbow which I shared on facebook. Maybe I should go back and repost them here, where they can be read and remembered.

Note:  If you look back over my older posts you'll notice that the metablogging is always done in italics.  Something about that just makes me feel good.