The Whale Belly

I recently read an essay by Barbara Couture on rhetoric as a mode of self-expression and emulation as a way of aligning ourselves with those we admire (“Modeling and Emulating: Rethinking Agency in the Writing Process” from Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm, ed Thomas Kent). Instead of puzzling over “how to write,” we should consider the type of person we want to become, and design our writing to resonate with that person.

My generation, and I suspect this still holds true for young people today, was taught a more or less linear approach to writing in school: prewriting, outlining, drafting, revision, and editing. This approach is essentially a distorted commercialization of the writing process that was originally developed by humanistic composition educators and cognitive theorists from, roughly, the late sixties into the eighties. In the original theory, there was a focus on writing as a method of constructing the self, but in schools, it devolved into a tool for completing assignments.

Post-process theory, which Couture’s work falls under, isn’t so much concerned with developing a model of the writing process. Instead, it focuses on this overlooked aspect of the self, situated and constructed within social and cultural contexts. Couture is interested in how writing can help a person achieve autonomy and the ways in which modeling writing techniques fails to capture the ontological significance of self-expression and self-creation. Emulating other writers, especially those we admire, is an attempt to improve ourselves, to evolve into the kind of person who can engage meaningfully with those we respect. Modeling is about learning technique detached from the writer’s essence. Emulation, on the other hand, bridges the gap between writing and being. It transitions writing from being a tool to create a product into a method to shape oneself. According to Couture, your personalized writing process is created through self-examination and collaboration in this quest to “be with” the writers you admire. This pursuit of self-improvement is the key to achieving agency.

The issue with treating writing as a device or technique is that the genres we’re supposedly learning to write are not the conventional forms of process and product that we’ve been led to believe. Instead, they represent our best-developing theories on how to engage on an equal footing with the readers and writers we aspire to connect with.

So, as I continue to write and think about my writing, I’m also trying to figure out which writers I want to be with, and how I might go about changing myself to do so.

But what do you think? Is trying to change one’s self to “be with” someone else a bad thing? Does creating a personal process based on emulation seem bound to fail? Have you successfully emulated another author and become a better writer and person as a result?