The Drama of Dramatizing your Thoughts

I’m sitting in a classroom, facing my expository writing students. They stare blankly at me after spending the past few weeks together, delving into the essay’s puzzles, reading and writing, talking and thinking. I’ve just urged them to try to dramatize their thinking on the page. I say, “Most professional writers do it automatically.”

But for my students, it’s new. How do you dramatize thinking? How do you let go of preconceived thesis statements, carefully crafted introductions, and more, to follow the contours of your mind? How do you consider prancing across the pages unclothed?

One of them shouts, “Who wants to be nude in public?”

I say, “Thomas Wolfe or Joan Didion? They do it. And you’ve been reading their work.”

Frowning, eyebrows scrunched together, they lean over their notebooks, hands gripping pens, scribbling on the page, engaged in an intimate act with themselves and each other. They frown, eyebrows furrowed, gripping their pens like lifelines. Some hesitate, afraid to loosen the reigns, while others scribble frantically, unsure of what will spill out but unable to stop the flood.

In dramatizing our thinking, letting our minds spill directly onto the page, uncensored, we’re touching tender places we’ve never known before. And in stirring our own unknown parts, our rawness, we’re doing the same in others—our readers.

I watch their eyes blink from the intensity, the thoughtful looks on their faces, their mouths in sync with words creeping across the page. Do I say they’ve now crossed some boundary in themselves and there will be no going back? It’s no easy thing to have an authentic dialogue with yourself or others, but it is addictive. Once you have a taste for this intimacy, for discovering thoughts and  feelings you didn’t know you had, there’s no going back. And nothing will replace it.