“The maker’s eye is never satisfied”, wrote writer Donald M. Murray, “for each word has the potential to ignite new meaning”(Murray 108).
A writer reads differently than all other readers. According to Murray, each time a true writer reads a piece of writing, he or she knows that it is unfinished. A true writer knows that no work is ever finished, each word can forever be “changed and rearranged, can set off a chain reaction of confusion of clarified meaning” (Murray 105).
In her novel Writing Down The Bones, author Natalie Goldberg compares editing to a garbage dump: we gather our experiences and “from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds comes nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil” blooms our writing from the very core of our experiences. It takes a long to time get to this core, “our senses by themselves are dumb. They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through” the garbage until the soil can be made and the true ideas can be realized (Goldberg 15).
–>The Editing Process
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Subconsciously, something in our minds chose a topic to write about. By drafting our minds can further develop our thoughts, coming closer and closer to the reason why it was in our subconscious in the first place, the reason it drew us in.
As much as I understand Murray’s idea of infinitely unfinished writing, I believe that writing can bring forth a realization in the writer. This is not necessarily an end to the piece but rather a consciousness achieved that was floating in our subconscious mind longing to be exposed. ”The power is always the act of writing” (Goldberg 35). Write until you feel satisfied with what you discovered about yourself through the process of writing the piece and then let it go.
