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I spent a good part of the weekend @ Lynda Barry's workshop on "Writing the Unthinkable."  Barry was VERY funny, and also had some great ideas about getting going on writing. Aside from her notion (as cmorias explains) that writing is a biological act, one that involves keeping-the-body-in-motion, Barry invited to us to "go to a piece of paper to find something. Don't worry about not having content before you write -- you write to have an experience" (rather than, say, to record an experience). Writing can be a time when the "drawbridge opens up between the back of the brain and the front of it"; you can develop a "gradual belief in a spontaneous ordering form available in the back of your mind." I think a lot of Barry's exercises would be useful ones for all of us, for getting ourselves started on writing analytical essays, as well as creative ones, and I hope we can try out some of them together as a class.

Two interesting counter-moments, though, that I also wanted to put on record here: At the very end of the workshop this afternoon, when both Barry and a number of the participants were getting a little punchy--@ that point of exhaustion where we are "made happy by anything"--a participant read a description of an early childhood friend born w/ a deformity, and there were lots of gaffaws. That connected for me w/ something Barry said @ the very beginning of Saturday morning's session. Emphasizing her point that we should NOT read over our writing during the workshop (in order to prevent ourselves from commentary, from thinking and editing), she said,  "Don't read over what you've written, asking fretfully, 'Is my baby defective?' Just keep on writing, and don't look back!"

So: I haven't thought this through all the way yet, but it seems to me that there may be a troublingly useful analogy operating here: just as we may think of people who are disabled as being "deformed," Barry was similarly inviting us [not!] to think of the imperfect first drafts of our writing as "defective." Both sorts of thinking are hampered by a notion of the "perfect," of the "ideal," of the "norm" that I think we might usefully re-think (and re-state! and re-write!).