Facilitate your writing: Self-interview for Writers

This post by Druzelle Cederquist offers an intriguing means to further the writing process.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

"What Surprised Me Today?" - Self-Interview for Writers

Ollie Hartsfield at June 2008 Workshop: Creativity, Craft & Connection

My last post was about a simple interview project with a person who matters to you, with help from StoryCorps – a project for everyone. This post is about self-interview and speaks more to writers, although it is a good exercise in awareness for everyone. After all, we may learn from listening, reading, interacting with others, but for first-hand experience of the world each of us has one resource – ourself.

The self-interview below comes from Donald R. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and award-winning teacher of writing. He advised writers to always carry a notebook or 3 x 5 cards – something on which to capture snatches of the day's encounters and those shimmering bits of thought and feeling that drift through us, and are easily forgotten if we don't jot them down.

These sketch-notes become a rich resource for the fuller writing process through which we excavate thought, memory, experience to create vivid, insightful writing. The more keenly we pay attention to the details around and within, the richer the creative soil we have to muck around in – that raw, unformed stuff that is transformed by the writing process into what "we did not know we knew" – Murray's words.

"The interview always makes my world expand," writes Murray. "My life that seemed dull and ordinary becomes more interesting as I listen to the answers to my own questions. The same thing may happen to you if you answer my questions."

What am I thinking about while waiting in line?
What irritated me today?
What made me laugh?
What made me angry?
What did I learn today?
What contradicted what I know – or thought I knew?
What made me feel good?
What made me feel bad?
What confuses me?
What does somebody else need to know that I know?
What questions do I need answered?
What surprised me today?

"Try this," Murray advises. "Write down your answers in fragments. Don't worry about spelling or grammar or neatness or fully developed paragraphs or sentences. You are trying to catch an idea, a half of an idea, a quarter of an idea, just the quick glint of where an idea was a moment ago. Play with words, images, facts. See if any of them connect. Pay close attention to anything that surprises you, that is different from what you expected. Follow the surprise or connection in your mind or on paper to see where your thinking may take you." **

For excellent practical insights into the nitty-gritty process of writing I highly recommend Donald R. Murray's book The Craft of Revision. Murray, who died December 2006, was a true mentor of writers -- one of those who possessed "a lucid mind and loving spirit" and loved to see others learn and excel. For a taste of what Murray had to say, see this online copy of his speech What a Writing Life Has Given Me.

**The Craft of Revision, 5th edition, p.9-10