I started (and finished) my undergraduate career as an English major. In those days, at my university, English major meant literature major, and I was pleased with that focus. In fact, I loved that program so much that I stayed on to earn a master's degree. But at some point during those two years of graduate study, a significant shift occurred in the way I approached literature. Gradually, I could feel my attention turning from questions about the “whats” of the product to focusing increasingly on the “hows” of the processes that generated the poetry and prose I was reading.

I believe this shift had to do, in part, with the fact that I was also preparing to be a teacher. Having pursued teacher certification at the undergraduate level, I had already completed 16 weeks of student teaching at an area high school, and, as a master's student, I was tutoring several hours weekly in my university's writing center. The challenge of mentoring students who struggled with writing, trying to offer them strategies for composing that could make a difference in the quality of their work as well as in their attitude toward it, altered my focus. I became consumed with trying to understand why, on one end of the spectrum, some individuals suffered under the strain of a given writing task while, on the opposite end, others took it in stride and achieved success relatively easily.

Observing this shift in my attention, one of my professors suggested that I pursue doctoral work in rhetoric and composition, a more eclectic, interdisciplinary field that would welcome such inquiry and allow a broad latitude in approaches to addressing the questions that now motivated me. I took his advice, and, to fast-forward a few decades, I have spent the better part of my career observing, reading and writing about composing processes. Though at different stages of inquiry I’ve applied different lenses, the most compelling to me is creativity theory, a subfield of psychology that explores the cognitive and affective phenomena involved in problem-solving.

Within this subfield exists a corpus of scholarship that productively illuminates questions at the heart of my professional agenda and that will captivate readers who are concerned with invention in any discipline—that is, research examining retrospective accounts of famous creators’ visions and realizations of their greatest accomplishments.

The select anecdotes and observations woven into the preceding chapters merely hint at the hours of entertainment The Paris Review (PR) interviews will afford those who are intrigued by famous authors and the circumstances that shaped their careers. For readers looking to grow as writers, the interviews yield countless lessons in composing, and, as Chapter 1 demonstrates, more than a few aspiring authors have cherry-picked the interviews for that purpose. Adopting a more comprehensive and systematic approach to mining this rich repository of composing advice, the study detailed in this book analyzes a large sample of the interviews for patterns in author experience and practice, with the ultimate goal of entertaining their relevance for individualized and large-scale expository writing pedagogy. Of course, the findings reported near the end of Chapter 8 combine for a mixed review of formal creative writing instruction, as several interviewees contend that gains produced by writing courses are negligible, while others attribute such courses with a variety of benefits. Despite these authors’ attitudes about creative writing classes, they are staples in the contemporary university, as are required courses in expository composition, and teachers are always searching for strategies that can assist them in educating their students.

As for the expository composition classroom (the focus of this chapter), pedagogical theories have waxed and waned across the last several decades, resulting in fluctuating emphases. Interest in composing processes flourished during the late 1970s and 1980s, soon inviting important and ongoing qualifications and elaborations regarding the extracognitive, social aspects of writing (see Chapter 1 for more on such concerns). Of course, the discipline's evolution in this respect is by no means a sorry development; on the contrary, alternate theories have illuminated important aspects of writing that overzealous and undernuanced process instruction largely ignores. The fear, though, is that in the presence of alternate theories, process instruction may become too vague, too limited and too inconsistent to realize its promise. Reassuringly, the recent onslaught of research on metacognition, knowledge transfer and neurobiology (again, see Chapter 1) demonstrates a revived interest in the nature of composing processes and how best to nurture them.

As established in Chapter 1, the ultimate goal of this study is to mine a collection of The Paris Review (PR) interviews for advice that expository writers might employ to negotiate writing challenges and facilitate their composing processes. Chapter 2 lays theoretical groundwork for such cross-genre application since some readers—though accepting that wisdom drawn from the interviews could be helpful to fiction writers and poets—might be skeptical of the notion that this same wisdom could benefit writers of news articles, academic papers, blog posts and other expository texts. Perhaps such skepticism is to be expected given that, historically, writing curricula have maintained rather sharp divisions between expository composition and creative writing. Painting an especially bleak picture of this situation, compositionist George T. Karnezis differentiates between what he terms the “Creative Writing Oasis,” where students enjoy the fun and imaginative work of fashioning stories and poems, and the “curricular Wasteland” of “other school-taught ‘writing’ ” courses, where students are subjected to the drudgeries of preparing for subsequent coursework and careers. This educational architecture is displayed in overtly labeled “creative writing assignments” that celebrate freedom, risk-taking and inventiveness in contrast to expository assignments that impose rigid formulas and regurgitation of others’ ideas, often in strict adherence to standardized assessment initiatives.

Troubled by these disciplinary divisions between composition and creative writing and the damage they can do, especially in the eyes of students, several rhetoric and composition teacher/scholars in line with Karnezis have questioned the practice of so radically distinguishing the two fields. A pioneering voice in this conversation, Wendy Bishop argued years ago that language curricula “need to be crossing the line between composition and creative writing far more often than [they] do” and that, perhaps, they need “to eliminate the line entirely.” In support of her contention, Bishop relates stories of confusing school-imposed distinctions between creative and expository genres, as she depicts former students who struggled with defining and/or satisfying expectations relevant to appropriate subject matter, presumed target audiences and required truth value of claims or observations. To combat such confusion, Bishop recommends including fiction and poetry in firstyear writing courses; sharing various forms of writing research in all writing classrooms; studying the “best, most exciting, most creative texts in all genres”; and viewing teachers and students, first and foremost, as writers.

The Eureka experience, the Aha! moment, the incubation effect—all are synonyms for insight, the fourth element of the paradigmatic creative process model introduced in Chapters 1 and 2 as the emergence of a solution to a creative problem. As Chapters 3, 4 and 5 collectively indicate, insight typically follows upon considerable labor and frustration associated with defining the parameters of a particular challenge, gathering background information essential to undertaking it, managing the stress of mental blocks, as well as locating and applying strategies for breaking through them. In response to all the effort and vexation, insight is an exhilarating reward that keeps creators engaged with their work despite the intense cognitive, emotional and physical endurance it requires.

Relevant to writing, insight is most reasonably linked with drafting. In other words, the solution to a creative problem reveals itself in the execution of a concept or plan for a literary work in the form of easily and smoothly expressed phrases, sentences, paragraphs and even larger sections of text, accompanied by a feeling that the draft in progress is an apt realization of that concept or plan. These circumstances often result in a state of “flow,” defined in Chapter 2 as “an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness” in the midst of “painful, risky, difficult activities that stretch [personal] capacity and [involve] an element of novelty and discovery.” This definition is worth repeating here since it previews the vast majority of references to insight in The Paris Review (PR) interviews sampled for this study as will become clear in the remainder of this chapter. References coded as insight total 136 and fall into four subcategories that clarify how the interview subjects experience insight: effortless drafting, autonomous literary elements, discovery writing and sudden connections. Each of these subcategories contains passages that communicate a sense of how Eureka moments feel and/or how they come to be.

Special difficulties in coding this element of the creative process model involved distinguishing it from first insight. Readers will recall that first insight is the initial vision for a project, usually a vague and underdeveloped notion merely suggestive of a direction or final destination.

As the previous chapter establishes, the second element in the paradigmatic creative process model, preparation, may consume weeks, months or years and may involve diverse modes of inquiry. In some cases, preparation on the heels of a promising first insight immediately yields more substantial insights that advance a project. In other cases, the well-prepared mind becomes saturated, having reached a point where additional research holds little promise, and yet still it cannot conceive a productive pathway forward, cannot grasp how the accumulated knowledge should be combined or reenvisioned in the quest for a solution to the creative problem. Of course, given its recursive nature, creative activity may be arrested at any moment, and history portends that scientific and artistic endeavors of any consequence rarely proceed in seamless fashion, free of obstructions that threaten to undermine them. It is in these disheartening moments of stagnation that the value of incubation—the third element listed in the creative process model and the subject of this chapter—can be fully appreciated.

In practical terms, incubation (not to be confused with procrastination) is defined as the interval of time between the onset of a break from deliberate work on a creative problem and the achievement of insight (the fourth element of the creative process model). Given that incubation occurs entirely within the mind and is, therefore, difficult to study directly, researchers typically infer its nature and usefulness from behaviors and happenings surrounding it, either by observing people at work or by listening to or reading accounts of creative accomplishment. Empirical investigations regularly label the most significant of those happenings, the arrival of insight, as an “incubation effect,” thereby positing a direct cause– effect relationship between the two constructs. While the insightstimulating benefits of incubation are widely associated with unique powers of the unconscious, they have also been linked to fringe consciousness (e.g., daydreaming) and to what Robert M. Olton dubs “creative worrying” (i.e., alternating bouts of conscious and unconscious mentation) on grounds that both enable the sort of loose, uninhibited thinking attributed to the unconscious and thus liberate the mind from cognitive fixations that impede original or fresh perspectives.

In the trajectory of any given artistic or scientific endeavor, the sense of excitement attending first insight (see Chapter 3)—as well as the subsequent insights crucial to realizing an initial vision (see Chapter 6)—often gives way to memories of prolonged, unglamorous, mentally and physically taxing groundwork essential to creative achievement. Such groundwork falls under “preparation” in the paradigmatic creative process model, the term no doubt bringing to mind (in line with the definition in Chapter 1) images of lonely individuals locked in various modes of formal research: a chemist vetting the most recently published articles in her field to determine relevance for a current experiment, a painter meticulously observing the landscape he's decided to depict on canvas, a playwright devouring biographies of the famous character she's struggling to portray. All of these activities qualify as preparation, but this element of the creative process model is far more wide-ranging than these examples imply. In addition to formal research lies the instructive potential of virtually all experiences and relationships, both personal and professional. In the end, then, it is reasonable to assume that every aspect of an artist's or scientist's existence is a possible resource for preparation.

Excerpts classified as preparation from The Paris Review (PR) interviews sampled for this study demonstrate that poets and fiction writers rely on varied means of acquiring knowledge or information needed to satisfy their creative aspirations. As expected, these writers collectively reference a diversity of formal research strategies, as well as periods of deep reflection on significant life events from early childhood through late adulthood. Frequently, preparatory effort follows directly upon first insights; at other times, in recursive fashion, it commences or resurfaces when a project in question is well underway. Because the category of preparation is so sweeping and eclectic, it demonstrates more glaringly than any other category in this study the interpretive nature of the coding processes as recognized in the permeable boundaries of not only the subcategories to be identified but also the themes within those subcategories.

Despite the challenges of assigning textual units (a total of 490) relevant to preparation, they convincingly align in six viable, if admittedly overlapping, subcategories: mentorship, distinctive personal experiences, formal research, study of others’ literary works, prewriting strategies and cross-pollination between disciplines.

As established in the first two chapters of this book, the paradigmatic creative process model is a long-standing template for understanding and categorizing activities involved in a variety of creative endeavors. Of course, most (if not all) models are flawed to some degree as their inherent economy prevents them from fully accounting for the phenomena they represent. In keeping with that observation, the model applied in analyzing data for this study does not, by itself, automatically call to mind the rich array of contextual factors that may influence creativity. While Chapters 3 through 7 of this study do regularly entertain contextual factors that affect the model's elements as illustrated in the sampled Paris Review (PR) interviews, the model does not readily subsume all salient themes that emerge through close reading of the data. To that point, the outlying patterns addressed in this chapter have less to do with particular composing subprocesses and their immediate stimuli and more to do with acts of composing on the whole. In metaphorical terms, while Chapters 3 through 7 zoom in on specific writing practices and matters that directly influence them, Chapter 8 adopts a wide-angle lens, revealing how a number of environmental, economic and sociocultural circumstances can impact the larger experience of becoming and living as a professional writer.

Data addressed in this chapter, a total of 651 passages, ultimately disperse across six subcategories: reasons for writing; role of art, including writing; difficulty of writing; confidence, or lack thereof; conditions for writing; and attitudes toward creative writing courses. Further, the data relevant to each of these subcategories fall into themes that lend those subcategories an illuminating level of detail. The themes attributed to conditions for writing are especially significant in terms of the number of data points that cluster around each of them (which might have justified them as subcategories in their own right). While readers may take issue with the assignment of some of the data presented in this chapter, it bears emphasizing, as mentioned in previous chapters, that qualitative research is not and does not purport to be an exact science.

For all the excitement and relief that accompany insights as depicted in Chapter 6, wizened artists and scientists live with the reality that the high of those Aha! moments may be short-lived, that ostensible solutions to creative problems they’ve posed may, in hindsight, be deemed inadequate or even false. Hindsight in this context equates with verification, the fifth element of the paradigmatic creative process model, which involves further reflection on proposed solutions in the interest of testing their viability. Tests for viability of insights in writing may occur relevant to various elements of the paradigmatic composing process model. At times, an insight's efficacy is borne out in the maintenance of flow during drafting; put another way, a break in flow could signal that the supposed insight is erroneous or inadequate. Most commonly, however, efficacy is determined in the analysis of all the inner workings of a text during revision and editing processes.

While certain measures of viability are performed by writers as they are engaged in their craft, verification eventually extends beyond authors’ assessments of their own works as they are subjected to the judgments of individual readers, target audiences, the publishing industry and professional critics. Along these lines, the 434 references to verification in the transcripts of The Paris Review (PR) interviews examined for this study break neatly into two subcategories: self-evaluation and evaluation by others. The first subcategory to be addressed explores authors’ reflections on their drafting and revision processes, but it also acknowledges the significance of individual artistic sensibility. The second subcategory focuses on the estimation of others, not only those whose opinions the authors especially value, including family members and close friends, but also members of the literary establishment.

Self-Evaluation

Three manifestations of self-evaluation as a mode of verification appear in the interview data, including the writer's identification as a professional, revision practices and the author's sense of “rightness” regarding a text under review. It seems appropriate to begin this section with the theme of professional identity since, separate from it, the other modes of self-evaluation would essentially become moot.

Arguably the most unnerving period of time in the professional life of any creative individual is the purgatory between projects, when the satisfaction of successfully responding to one artistic or scientific challenge is superseded by the call to get started on the next. The drive to answer this call can be intense, often inciting feelings of desperation as time progresses in the absence of promising, fresh concepts for new endeavors. Relief for this state of being, according to the paradigmatic creative process model, comes in the form of first insight, defined in earlier chapters as the initial glimmer of an idea that serves as a catalyst for innovation. Readers may remember from discussion of the paradigmatic creative process model in Chapter 2 that first insight and insight mimic each other to the extent that both serve as breakthrough moments. However, the former is distinguished by its status as the inception of a creative act and, as follows, by its comparatively underdeveloped nature. Put another way, while insight alleviates cognitive blocks that arise once work on an already formulated project is well underway, first insight alleviates cognitive blocks impeding the birth of a project.

Instances of first insight reported by fiction writers and poets in The Paris Review (PR) interviews sampled for this study depict a diversity of experiences, ranging from vague sensations that a revelation is imminent, to flashes of concrete starting points for focused reflection or investigation. The coding process for first insight ultimately yielded 125 references in accordance with the methodology outlined in Chapter 1 and the definition established in the previous paragraph. Although the aforementioned similarities between first insight and insight presented occasional difficulty in assigning textual units to one category over the other, multiple passes through the data reinforced the integrity of the coding scheme. In the end, textual units classified as first insight branched into four distinct subcategories: felt sense, cognitive dissonance, preference for certain literary elements and specific images. The number of subcategories reveals that first insight adopts various guises, an observation that is illustrated in the remainder of this chapter. Discussion of these findings begins with a subcategory characterizing first insight as a highly nebulous phenomenon and then moves through the other subcategories in an order that depicts the construct as increasingly well demarcated and capable of accurately foreshadowing the essence of a final product.

Most readers poised to engage this study have asked themselves these questions, even those who have enjoyed authorial success; moreover, those who mentor developing writers are bound to have faced such questions from their charges in one form or another. Responses to these questions are abundant and disparate regardless of genre or composing context, and they arise from a diversity of research lenses. One historically prolific lens is the study of writing processes—namely, reflecting on one's own processes and analyzing the processes of others. Pertinent to expository genres and composing contexts, the ultimate focus of this monograph, process considerations have long occupied the discipline of rhetoric and composition, early on in attempts to describe writers’ processes and identify patterns in their approaches to given writing acts and, later, in post-process warnings about the dangers of promoting a single set of steps that fits all individuals in all rhetorical situations. With due attention to post-process concerns, over time the discipline has come to take for granted that writers are most successful when they are cognizant of their own default composing practices (the effective and the ineffective) and when they have resources and opportunity to fuel experimentation with alternative strategies.

Working from this theoretical vantage point and with special concern for expository writing, the research informing this book poses possible answers to the questions asked at the outset of this chapter, but it pursues this aim through perhaps unexpected means—that is, analyzing established literary figures’ retrospective accounts of their own writing processes. While this perennially intriguing but insufficiently vetted resource of composing advice is applicable to creative writing in obvious ways, its relevance for expository discourse is, at best, underexplored. This seems unfortunate given the widely entertained assertion and central premise of this study that all writing, including expository writing, is creative, and that, therefore, famous authors’ commentary on what does and doesn't work when they are writing is potentially applicable in all composing situations.

Anecdotes about composing processes appear liberally in authors’ memoirs and in biographies they’ve inspired, and they are scattered through literary histories and composition scholarship. However, empirical treatments of such reflective discourse across authors—particularly, large subject pools of established authors—are sparse.

Diagram of Analytical Categories, Subcategories and Themes

Coding Table

Copyright © by The Paris Review, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

Chinua Achebe

Martin Amis

Maya Angelou

John Ashbery (“John Ashbery” in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV. Copyright © 2009 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author's Estate)

Paul Auster

James Baldwin

Saul Bellow

Elizabeth Bishop

Jorge Luis Borges

James M. Cain

Truman Capote

Peter Carey (Copyright © Peter Carey. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN; and with permission of Radhika Jones)

Raymond Carver

John Cheever

Joan Didion

Isak Dinesen

T. S. Eliot

Ralph Ellison

William Faulkner (“William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction #12” Copyright © 1956 by Jean Stein. All rights not specifically granted herein are hereby reserved to the Licensor)

William Gaddis (and with permission of Zoltan Abadi-Nagy)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

John Gardner (and with permission of the Brockport Writers Forum)

Jack Gilbert

Graham Greene

David Grossman (and with permission of Jonathan Shainin)

Earnest Hemingway

Ted Hughes

Jack Kerouac

Stephen King (Excerpts from The Paris Review Interviews by Stephen King. Copyright © 2006 by Stephen King. All rights reserved. Used courtesy of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents; and with permission of the estate of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt)

Philip Larkin

Robert Lowell

Norman Mailer (Copyright © Andrew O’Hagan. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN)

Marianne Moore

Jan Morris

Toni Morrison (and with permission of Claudia Brodsky)

Alice Munro

Haruki Murakami

V. S. Naipaul

Joyce Carol Oates

Orhan Pamuk

Dorothy Parker

Harold Pinter

Richard Price (and with permission of James Linville)

Jean Rhys

Marilynne Robinson (and with permission of Sarah Fay)

Philip Roth

Salman Rushdie (and with permission of Jack Livings)

Georges Simenon

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Stephen Sondheim (and with permission of the estate of James Lipton)

Robert Stone

William Styron

James Thurber

Kurt Vonnegut

Evelyn Waugh

Eudora Welty

Rebecca West

E. B. White

Billy Wilder

William Carlos Williams

P. G. Wodehouse