Customer Reviews

Writing Without Teachers

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Since I first read Writing without Teachers in 1985,
I've written - or helped write - proposals that have won
8-figure engineering contracts. (Yes, that's $10M+.)
Prior to reading this book, I'd never written a winning
proposal. I owe Peter Elbow a lot!

His most useful prescription is not even the core of the book,
but it literally taught me how to write. It's this: if you
have to write something you understand, you have only four hours,
and you don't know where to begin, do the following.

Hour one: write for an hour
without stopping, editing, organizing, or trying to do well;
stop at the end of the hour and identify your strongest points.

Hour two: start with those points, write just as you did in
the first hour, and then extract your best points.

Hour three:
same routine again.

Hour four: now that you know what you're talking
about, capture your best points, organize, and write a structured
final draft. Sounds simple, but it's the best advice for
breaking through writer's block I've ever heard.

Peter Elbow's prose style is simple and straightforward. He's
not quite as much fun to read as Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down
the Bones) or William Goldman (Adventures in the Screen Trade) or
Lawrence Block (too many to mention), but his advice was so
well-timed that I owe him - big-time.

This book consists basically of three parts. In the first part, Elbow describes his 'freewriting'-approach to writing: growing & cooking. In the second part, Elbow writes about his idea of the 'teacherless writing class'. The third part is Elbow's appendix-essay wherein Elbow analyses the intellectual approaches to criticism (or as he calls it the relation between 'the doubting game' and 'the believing game').

As Elbow explains in the long introduction to the second edition, this book is Elbow's personal statement on writing. It was written in part out of dissatisfaction with many approaches to writing at universities, partly out of Elbow's own existential struggles with writing (as well as with other aspects of his personal life). In a sense, this book presents Elbow's anti-establishment ideas on writing and learning.

As a writing book, this is not Elbow's best. Many times, Elbow writing in this book remains abstract and is rather wordy. Consider this passage: "Simple reversal: starting to write X and seeing, thorugh development of X, that Y is right. I couldn't get there directly. I remembered I had even considered Y first, but I hadn't believed it. I had to go through X first before I could really understand Y." (36) There are more passages like this one.

I definitely recommend Elbow's "Writing with Power", since that is a brilliant book. I read that book first and then turned to this one, since I hoped to find more details on the growing & cooking process. However, "Writing with Power" is great for its conciseness and because of the many lively examples that he uses there - unlike this book. "Writing without Teachers" could have been so much better... a pity, since I am a fan of Elbow's approach.

In addition to free-writing, and the overall strategy of how to write a theme with limited time (commented by earlier reviewers), the author also shows the importance of getting feedback on your writing. He encourages you to organize groups of like-minded authors to review each other's writing. There is a very specific protocol for this... and its easy to screw up, so you really need to get the book to find out the details.

Without such feedback you will not be able to understand what the reader is thinking as he reads your work. Elbow is not describing how to get "feedback" but how to understand the effect your writing has on the reader. In these meetings each individual describes what was going on in his head, what he remembers... not whether he liked your work. Thus, you see the effect.

All three of my Peter Elbow's books have been extremely helpful. My only complaint is that his writing is too wordy. However, his wordiness is pleasant to endure. This book is easily worth a 5 out of 5.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

The main core of Elbow's book is about freewriting, which means you write nonstop for 10-20 minutes a day, just to get you into the habit of writing. You may think, well what's the big deal about that? Well, you don't stop and correct anything when freewriting, you save that for later and just write whatever comes to mind, if you're stuck you repeat the last word or sentence until something else pops up and then you write about that. Then, when you're done you can save it and look through it for the gems that you were searching for, save it for later and see if something you wrote is what you were looking for down the road, or you can throw it away and just have it be an exercise. This is to get you out of your 'writer's block' and to get you into the habit of sitting down and writing every day.

So why three stars if everyone else is giving a higher rating? If his idea wasn't so good I'd give it one star. This is the most dry, boring book I've ever had to try and slog through in my life. ... Well, almost, there are others. Also, Elbow wrote a later book called Writing with Power in which he goes through the same concepts as in this book only better, and more interesting, and with more ideas and information to help people who want to write, which, to me, makes this book obsolete. I bought both and sent this one back.

There are some great ideas in this book, it presents some fanstastic building points for any kind of writing. It's a little unconventional, and if you do everything he says, you might find you confuse your readers. But brain-opening all the same.

The first part of this book is about how writers, particularly those stuck or blocked in their work, can help themselves write more and with better results. Elbow recommends beginning the writing process with freewriting exercises, followed by quick, successive revisions to identify the piece's main ideas. However, he doesn't believe that those main ideas are necessarily obvious when a writer sits down to work; rather, he says that freewriting can lead to diversions that truly get to the heart of what a writer wants to say. He believes that through this process of "growing" and "cooking" our writing, writers can make sense of this jumble of words and ideas much better than by following a strict outline or prescribed idea.

The second part of the book describes how to form a "teacherless writing class," or what most writers would think of as a writing group. This teacherless format forces writers to submit work each week for review by the rest of the group for careful reading. Elbow's ideas for how to conduct the group are similar to his thoughts on producing work. Group members should not try to summarize or find meaning in their responses to a piece of writing. Instead, they should simply offer those reactions at face value, and let the writer decide what that means for the piece.

Best audience for this book: Writing students of any genre, especially those who have finished school.

THE ONE main strength of book: The first half of the book about fast writing and radical editing to boil down a piece to its core ideas is a very frank acknowledgement of the self-criticism and doubt that Elbow felt held back his writing. He offers a number of exercises to help other struggling writers overcome such blocks.

THE ONE main weakness: The irony in Elbow's suggestion that we silence our inner editor is that the chapters about the teacherless class could have used a good editor. This part was much less focused than the earlier sections on writing.

-Useful part(s): The first three chapters on freewriting, "growing," and "cooking" your writing. I definitely plan to try out these ideas in my work. Skip the rest.

Main topics:
A. Free writing as opposed to developing an outline. How to
get through garbage and into the good stuff, cooking.
B. How to keep your writing growing and improving your skills without a teacher.
C. Exercises to work your topic when you're stuck and you know
you haven't written what you want but don't know how to fix it.
D. How to extablish a writing group that works and lasts.
E. An essay on why writing groups should start from the basis
of belief rather than doubt/disbelief when trying to react to
the vision of their fellow writing group writers.
Of Special Interest: The author sugests ways to get "cooking:
his term for heating up the creative process where the subconscious
bubbles up to the surface and the writing gets good. His approach
is to put unlikely combinations together and see how it changes
the scene or action: unexpected people, ideas, making strange
metaphors and analogies. What to do if you get desperate and
can't get cooking.

Peter Elbow's text, Writing Without Teachers (Oxford UP: 1973, 1998) is an amazingly helpful text on the process of writing. The author provides the writer with new approaches and tools with which to approach the process of writing. These tools and approaches defy the typical writing model (having an idea, outlining it, and then writing it) in favor of a "developmental writing" model. The text values the freewriting exercise, the interactions between words and meaning, and the deferment of editing. While the text retains the traditional writing model for the last part of the Elbow approach, it is radically different in its view of the writing process.

I turned to this text out of desperation (which is a type of writing in Elbow's theory), and it worked. I wrote the necessary essays, proposal, articles, and chapters. I put it away (foolishly) until last week, when I realized I had 5-7 days to complete a major publication submission. I was always anti-outline and typically able to write a piece for a Monday deadline over the weekend. However, the dissertation process was a stage in which I hoped to grow as a writer. Elbow's method is the only one that has ever glorified my strengths as a writer, which have always been demonized by other writing models.

Elbow's theory is most helpful when applied fully to willing writers (whether professional, student, or neophytes). It loses efficacy when diluted (e.g. Bolker's use in "Writing the Diss in 15 Mins..."). Elbow's theory is a brilliant alternative to the usual, frustrating approach. Anyone who needs to meet deadlines, struggles for topics, feels comfortable without outlines before writing should try this approach. If you're perfect and can write "magically," then of course you don't need it.

Elbow has insight into the writing process that is matched by very few. This book, in fact any book by him, should be a requirement in any writer's library.

This book is targeted for beginning writers. I have no idea how this book would be valuable to any beginning writer in that it is convoluted, wordy and rambling. His method for writing is described in the reviews below, so I won't repeat it here. In the book, the method's description is full of seemingly unending twists and derivations (though they really don't say all that much) and he annoyingly and frequently quotes from his own journal. How a beginning writer would learn the process of this book and then go out and find ten other people who have done the same is beyond me. I would not read this book to learn how to write. Instead read literature, write, and repeat.