Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Simplest Definition of Invention Ever

Is it possible that invention can be defined almost entirely as about finding the right relationship to audience? That it comes down to locating our most beneficial proximity to audience? And this includes the self as audience: tuning into the frequency of our intrapersonal dialog? 

Can invention for writing be that streamlined?
I'm starting to think so.

Invention, one of the five canons of classical Greco-Roman rhetoric, is widely known as the starting point to a writing task. It's the set of moments when we come up with ideas, material, approaches. For me, it's when I prop a mental plank up the side of my desk and start climbing.

Most people agree that starting a piece of writing can be one of the most challenging moments in a writing process.

In fact, writing experts may feel a little squeamish to actually teach moments of invention. It seems too nebulous, and perhaps its notion that a teacher can enter a student's thought process seems too intrusive and personal. 

In her chapter in Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, Janet Lauder has described that reluctance in Writing Studies to address invention: "a number of earlier emphases in scholarship on invention have either disappeared or been marginalized: the relationship between invention and the writing process, the heuristic function of invention as a kind of thinking that stimulates knew knowledge, invention as an art or strategic practice, [and] the importance of classroom attention to invention."

For many writers, invention resembles hibernation. Little seems to be happening. Maybe the writer is staring off into the woods, going on long walks, vacuuming. 

Don Murray, in "The Essential Delay," described five reasons writers undergo a waiting period during invention. Murray thought the writers wait until they have sufficient information, insight, voice, and need. If a writer accepts what's occurring during this period of latency, the anxiety of not-starting is manageable. Students, of course, usually don't benefit from this extended period of non-verbal reflection and operate under multiple simultaneous deadlines. 

I'm thinking that what's happening during those moments of hibernation (or strain) falls entirely under the act of adjusting one's dynamic with audience-in-the-head. 

This means noticing the types of fictional Audience Characters one has installed in one's thinking. This means noticing the conversations we're carrying on in our minds with that Audience Character. Or Characters--they're frequently composites. [See the post from January 2014, "Make a Caricature of a Tricky Audience."] This means being aware of our own embodied or physical situations while we write--watching our breathing, posture, energy levels. [See the post, "Yoga for Hands," or Sondra Perl's book Felt Sense.] And that means noticing the present moment of writing: the fundamental vacancy of your actual writing circumstance in which no reader from the future (editor, teacher, critic, reader) is actually seeing your work. [See How-To Tip #1: Kicking Out the Reader-in-the-Head from August 2012.]

When I say above "most beneficial relationship to audience," I'm not necessarily talking about easy street. Sometimes a challenging audience-in-the-head is precisely what our writing needs in the moment. So this audience dynamic inside Invention is context-specific and will change depending on the genre, writing task, audience, and physical circumstances of your life.


 * Image from bozgo.com

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