A Writing Process to Lead to More Delight

On Tuesday this week, I took an essay written by Ross Gay in The Book of Delights.  It was a four paragraph essay about a flower growing in the space where the curb meets the sidewalk (or was it the street?).  I also copied the preface to the book so that students could have insight to his writing process, as described in this interview:  "For his most recent work, The Book of Delights, the Indiana University professor assigned himself a simple task: He would compose an essay each day about something he found delightful. It didn’t have to be big. It didn’t have to be profound. Just something that caught his fancy."

In that interview, Gay describes the process this way:  

"This last book of essays, I gave myself the task to write a short essay every day for a year about something that delighted me, that’s kind of what the book is. I had a task, and the task was to take 30 minutes to draft the essay. It wasn’t like “20 minutes at night every night,” I would get it in whatever time. That was the most regimented I’ve been for a while. I was usually kind of feeling around for it [the object of delight].

But usually it’s thinking, reading, studying, trying to find something that turns you on and going for a bit. I’ve been lucky to kind of ride it for some days. It might get quiet for a bit, so I’ll think and try to wake it up."

When I brought the essay and the preface to my English 102 class (Composition II), we talked about this process, or rather, I talked.  I talked about how we value what we give our attention to, and if we focus on a lot of negative input, it can affect our mood.  I asked how they thought a person's life or mood might change if they wrote about 1 thing that gave them delight each day, if they adopted that as a practice.

I said that I wasn't going to require that they do this, and this term, I'm not.  But I am thinking of it as an experiment for next semester's classes.  I would do it at the beginning of the term, as a warm up to the class, as a way of getting our writing muscles used to moving again after a long break between terms.  I'm teaching English 101, the standard first year Composition class, so I'll make connections to the rest of the work we will be doing.

It's one of my unexpected delights of this term, finding inspirations for next term.  And it's one of the benefits of having so much control over my own classes.  I can try this idea and see what happens.