Peter Elbow's Ideas

A true blog consists of profound opinions either agreeing or disagreeing with a subject topic.... Unfortunately, I do not consider myself to be part of the blogging family, therefore my opinions are not profound or interesting. In mentioning the above statements, I apologize in advance to the readers of this blog on how dry and unimportant you find my postings.

Peter Elbow constructed ideas from his own personal experience on how his writing process works. The you tube video dives into three of Peters ideas.

First the video explains the concept of how Peter Learned by Failure. Peter explains how he dropped out of grad school because of his inability to write a good paper. It was from the experience of failing that led Peter to study the writing process and figure out how he could master it.

Peter is an advocate of Making a Mess. He believes by letting your mind wander and writing down thoughts in no form what so ever will lead to one or potentially many brilliant ideas that couldn't be achieved by writing from a traditional form such as an outline. As a writer it is important to forage into a mess of thoughts to pull out the ones that can be developed into a solid idea or strand of ideas.

Creating and criticizing is a balance. Before anything, you must allow the generative muscle to write a lot, which in turn leads to you opening the door to possibilities... But as a writer you need to be able to criticize those ideas and help to logically make sense of what is written to help make the mess begin to flow.

Peter also advocates Sowing Early Seeds, a process in which you write down all minor thoughts towards a topic and create a pile of them as a foundation for when you start to write a genuine draft.

Peter Elbow shares a writing process that has helped him to be successful through out his schooling and as an author. By no means is Peter Elbow correct or wrong in his assumptions. His process is based solely on experience and may not be the best process for everyone. Personally, I believe that each writer needs to capture his own inner voice and correlate it into a process that works best for himself.