One of my English 310 students blogs about the exhaustion many of us feel near the completion of an intricate writing project and how one can get heartily sick of a subject we know we will return to with love later. Now, 310 is called "Writing for Graduate or Professional Schools" and is a Writing II class for those with at least 45 credit hours who are thinking about going beyond the baccalaureate. These students really think, and they dive into their work willingly because they know that writing well will help them now and later. With this in mind, her description of an artist's lecture in a class blog entry brought back MFA in Poetry memories for me when she describes his analysis of "why he did this, and what technique he used for that, and how he wanted to make it look like it was old, blah, blah, blah..." Yeah, I've been in that room. Ultimately, my attention span for such analysis is measured by how well I think the project turned out. I also know that there is a broad spectrum of approaches to the creative process (long-drafters, chunkers, meanderers, more...), and to assume only one is good, well no.

At times this intellectual thing can be taken too far. Especially when it comes to close analysis of a specific creative process for an already completed project, well, listening to it can be deadly. The worst of it is, the artist/writer/performer is not always the best judge of exactly what happened because he/she is too close to it. For example, readers get things from my poems that were not consciously put in there by me. Now, after the poem is complete I see it, but if I had outright planned to put all that stuff in, well, that way madness (and bad poetry) lies. Good and great artists have much going on beneath the surface, and I'm not sure it is a good idea to "stir the pond" by thinking about what you are doing while you're doing it. Now afterwards, that's different. However, leading beginning artists to think that a high degree of planning not only happens, but is normal, is not a good thing. It is akin to telling writing students to thoroughly plan their writing before beginning any actual writing in one of those tortured several-page long outlines with Roman numerals. The writing process itself gives insight, and planning it out in detail in advance takes away any opportunity for inspiration or new direction or yes, let's call it revision, while writing.

On the other hand, I do some planning when I write, even with poetry. However, the planning may be limited to me standing by the elevator looking like  someone who just got hit in the face with a shovel until I can run back to my office or some other place where I can get that moment/phrase/image down on paper. It has to be then or it slips away never to be found in that same shape again, but it is planning, and once it's on the page, I can return to it later. Secretly, I think artists/writers who claim very elaborate planning may just be jiving or may be skipping over the "uninteresting" parts in their process description. It's probably my own prejudice as a low-to-moderate planning writer, but I think the changes, setbacks, and wackiness that happens when we write (or create art, I've done both enough to know where the processes connect) are the parts that count, the parts that make journeyman work transcend itself and become art. So, I'm not saying that intricate planning can't happen, and believe me, my dissertation was planned, but being legalistic about it and not acknowledging needed revision or new paths when they rise up and hit you in the face can lead to dull writing--and art.