Extra Credit

I enjoyed listening to the podcast of the Writer to Writer conversation with Philip Deloria. It was cool to hear from a writer about how he thinks about writing. When I first heard Deloria talking about how he spent his days on leave writing, I was kind of surprised that he devoted so much of the day to writing. I think I was expecting him to say that he spent the morning writing and the rest of the day doing other stuff, but thinking about it afterward I had to remind myself that he’s a writer, so it makes a lot of sense for him to spend a lot of his day writing. I think that him having a set schedule every day centered around writing defined his writing as a main piece of work as opposed to a hobby. Another thing that I found important in this part of the conversation was that he said that he avoided checking his email before or during his writing time because it would distract him and disrupt the writing process. I agree with this, but thinking about it I also realized that I often check my email, even when I know I don’t have any new emails, as a way to distract myself from writing or doing other work. Because of this, I know very well that it doesn’t help the writing process, but I also know that it can be difficult to not get distracted by little things when the task at hand gets a little bit hard or boring. Deloria’s conversation is a reminder that discipline is very important when trying to complete a task. Even when writing gets hard or boring, it’s probably really important to force yourself to keep thinking about it, or at least not distract your brain with something else, because during that time new ideas could develop. If you give in to distractions, the opportunity for new ideas is gone.

When asked where his initial ideas come from, Deloria said that one of the things he finds important in realizing ideas is to pay 100% attention to the world, after which he immediately acknowledged that you can’t really always be paying 100% attention. But when you can give all of your attention to something, do it! He said to actually SEE stuff and not let it pass you by, which reminded me a lot of this class, especially what we talked about early on in the year. In every one of our essays we have been asked to look past what is immediately obvious, and dig deeper into things. We have also been encouraged to actually look and pay attention to our surroundings, especially in the first essay of the semester. I think this idea relates a lot to what Deloria was saying about seeing stuff and not letting it pass you by. There are so many things in our lives that we don’t actually see because they are there so much. Ordinary things that we don’t pay any attention to because either we don’t notice them anymore or because we don’t think they deserve being noticed. Deloria talked about something slightly different; not letting the weird things pass by. He mentioned that often we brush weird things aside and don’t pay attention to them, but if given some thought, they could turn into a whole new project with all kinds of ideas bursting out of them. Hearing this was an important reminder to me to not ignore things, especially since I feel like recently I have had a tendency to just keep walking and not give too much attention to things I might be curious about.

In talking about things he wishes he could get his students to do, Deloria said that he wishes students would understand the importance of taking the drafting process more seriously. He then gave an example of his experience drafting and re-drafting some of his own writing. Talking about his own writing seemed like the obvious thing to do, but at the same time added in some humanity and credibility to his suggestion and to himself - it showed that he, too, is a regular person in addition to being a writer, and that some parts of the writing process aren’t easy for him either. He talked about having done a draft that he liked and felt good about, but also knew that he needed to reorganize it, which is a very familiar feeling to me. I think often I am very reluctant to change things that I know need to be changed because I don’t want to feel like my ideas will be erased or destroyed. Deloria talked about the importance of being open to multiple draftings because no one nails it the first time. He also said to make sure there’s time to stop, pause, and have some time to think about what you’ve written. That’s something I’ve known for a while that I should do, but often during this semester I found myself putting off writing drafts so that, besides the time between peer reviews and final drafts, I didn’t really end up having time to set the draft aside and come back to it. That is something I hope to work on in the future. I appreciated that he acknowledged that the drafting process can be painful because that makes me seem less different from a “real” writer.

Deloria also said that one of his favorite moments as a writer is reading something and realizing it’s not as bad as he thought it was. This is actually similar to one of my favorite feelings - going back and reading something and thinking “I wrote this? Dang! That’s brilliant!” It’s humbling to see that people who write professionally can doubt themselves so much and have these moments too.