Goal setting

Goal setting, as discussed in Chapter Two, is clearly a central driver of the writing process as setting goals or deciding which problems to solve determines motivation to write and intentions for content, style and writing process. In other words, goals determine what is written about and how the writer intends to go about writing about them. The choice of genre was also revealed to be part of the goal setting process as it is a choice the author makes in order to express content he or she feels strongly about (such as Orford’s expression of an emotional truth she could not express in

journalistic writing), as Csikszentmihalyi held. However, this complicates the Flower and Hayes model’s characterization of the rhetorical problem as ‘outside the writer’s skin’ and therefore part of the task environment rather than the actual cognitive writing process. In fiction writing the rhetorical problem is mostly generated by the author in response to personally determined content goals rather than to a topic from an outside source.

Initial problem conceptualization is vital to the goal setting process, as pointed out by both Csikszentmihalyi and Flower and Hayes. While the initial idea can be generated in the same way that later ideas are generated, with dramatic Aha! moments of inspiration or through research and exploration, these ideas are tested out in the initial stages of planning against the author’s sense that they will generate the kind of content goals that will sustain a long term project such as a novel. This could be a key difference between writing shorter (shorter poems, articles) and longer pieces of writing (books, themed collections of poems, novels). While undoubtedly all ideas have to be tested against the author’s inner sense that the idea is worth investing energy and time in, this must be even more vigorously examined in the case of writing that could take months, if not years, of the author’s time (the average in this study was eight months to a year per book, with Coovadia taking considerably longer as he also works in academia). Beake mentioned needing a passion for one’s subject as key to writing, while both Coovadia and Orford mentioned that the initial question or problem had to be very strong. It was in the early stages of exploring this question that writer’s block could occur – after this, the implication was that the waste of energy and time for a professional writer could be too expensive to contemplate. A point not picked up on elsewhere in the literature review for this study was how writers of series might differ in their content goal setting processes from other fiction writers. Van de Ruit and Orford have very narrow central thematic focus, derived from strong personal interests, driving more than one book in a series, and resulting coherent content and style goals that span three or more books. This strong underlying thematic pull could explain why they are able to and also why they chose to write series with core characters and even settings which remain the same across a number of writing projects, where each book cannot be said to follow an entirely separate writing process from the others. More than for Beake and Coovadia, these two authors have to sustain their energy and interest in their topics and characters, in addition to resisting and coping with outside deadline pressures, over many years as they have

committed to publishers and fans in advance. Beake is currently working on trilogies for the first time and is also experiencing this superstructure of goal setting.

While each fresh book has to be able to stand on its own in terms of many of its content goals, authors nevertheless have overarching themes and undercurrents stemming from deeply personal interests and perceptions of societal needs, whether they write series or not. Thus Coovadia’s South African Islamic themes draw a common thread across three very different novels just as much as Orford’s

exploration of violence against women and children and her defense of the erotic span her series of thrillers where the main character’s professional specialization makes these themes inevitable. Beake’s interest in the universality of diverse children’s experiences tie together books with topics ranging from the rural San in Namibia to street children in Cape Town, an only child of an archaeologist interacting with a girl of the same age dead for millennia and futuristic tales of environmental disaster. At the same time, Van de Ruit’s strong interest in masculinity in South Africa spans not only his Spud high school diaries series, but also the topic for his drama Masters thesis and his plays.

Previous careers and studies revolve around similar themes, and thus the themes that drive content goals and problem setting for all of these authors could be said to be life themes rather than simply writing themes, inextricably tied to the writer’s personal identity. Coovadia, exposed to a South African Islamic milieu and caught between youth under apartheid and post-apartheid immigrations, has woven his personal interests, travels and family narratives into his style goals for capturing accents and characterization, as well as his content goals. Beake was a school teacher and travelled widely as a result of her husband’s job while launching her early fiction writing career. Orford was a journalist and commissioning editor, exploring the traumas of Southern African society that her studies of novelists, in similar oppressive systems to Apartheid, led her to admire. Van de Ruit’s own developing masculine identity as an adolescent in a dominantly male school environment is perhaps the most obvious of the author’s uses of autobiographical themes to drive content of their books.

This provides some research-based theoretical confirmation that typical injunctions in creative writing classes and textbooks to know oneself are probably worthwhile. No one can promise that they will lead to a novel of merit, but what they can perhaps guarantee a possibility of completing a novel, as a well-chosen topic that will sustain the writer’s interest provides the motivation to sustain longer writing processes. There must, in other words, be some match between the world of the writer and the world they wish to create in a novel if debilitating writer’s block is to be avoided.

Csikszentmihalyi stated that ‘while it lasts, creative writing is the next best thing to having a world of one’s own in which what’s wrong with the “real” world can be set right’ (1997: 264) and the imaginary worlds that writers create appear to be as necessary to the writer as the physical world they actually inhabit, as they create a ‘symbolic refuge’ from reality (1997: 239).

The above observations on how central themes inextricably linked to an author’s world view constituted overarching content goals correlated well with

Csikszentmihalyi and Flower and Hayes. However, it also pointed out what both Csikszentmihalyi and Berkenkotter and Murray mention that Flower and Hayes’

context-stripped study could not account for, namely how long incubation time for problem setting or ideas generation can really take. This could corroborate

Csikszentmihalyi’s point that the ‘Aha!’ moment so famous in the creative process occurs as a result of a problem brewing in the creative person’s mind for some time and then finding a solution so good that it is forced to pop into consciousness. Csikszentmihalyi’s study showed this ‘Aha!’ moment to be the result of hours or more often years of mulling over a particular subject and this study’s exploration of the content goals and generation of ideas of the participants supports this. Another surprise for Murray when he was studied was that the incubation time for generating ideas can take far longer than he had realized and this realization is probably not well developed in the authors of this study either as they described as inexplicable,

spontaneous occurrences the arrival of ideas or characters clearly linked to the central thematic interests discussed above, which had been a preoccupation of theirs for a long time. The conclusion of this research is that writing does not occur in an isolated chunk of time separated from the rest of a writer’s life, even if it may feel this way at times to a writer. This makes it difficult to answer the question ‘when does the writing process start?’ because writing is characterized as a cognitive process and not simply the physical act of putting words onto paper.

The choice of the genre of fiction (novels), not poetry, academic writing, journalism or play scripts as a goal has implications in terms of time commitments (and thus writing process goals) but also in terms of constituting both a content goal (the choice of genre sets certain problems for the writer to solve) and a style goal (prose as a style instead of poetic form). The participants were noticeably hesitant in describing themselves as necessarily in love with or obsessed with language in itself or with words. This contrasted with Csikszentmihalyi’s claim that a love of words and language was essential to all writers (it is notable that he was generalizing mostly from poets in his study, and that Coovadia mentioned his friends who were poets were more interested in words and language than he was as a novelist). They were more interested in the overall effects of style and in ideas or content goals, and this could provide a clue to a difference between poets and novelists that is worth exploring in further research. Related to this is the key element of character development in novels, as they are crucial vehicles and for conveying ideas as well as filters through which facts are transmuted into convincing fiction, because they see the world through a particular lens and act in particular ways.

An aspect of the goal setting process that is difficult to pinpoint is how exactly an awareness of audience influences goal setting. Imagining a future readership does appear to influence style and content goal setting but this is limited to goals based on general principles such as using dialogue to break up a text and make it easier to read or avoiding spoiling a reader’s enjoyment of a plot by presenting researched facts or personal experiences in ways that were out of character or out of keeping with the genre style, or being overly preoccupied with the truth where exaggeration might be more entertaining. There is thus a sense of taking a reader into consideration, quite possibly derived from what the author themselves feels makes a book good or bad, based on their own reading preferences. This supports Ong’s argument (1975: 9) that ‘the writer’s audience is always a fiction in the sense that it is a mental construct and not a real person or group of people that can be clearly identified, particularly in the

case of novelists85. Atwood (2002: 49-50), a novelist and poet, further supports this position:

For the tale-teller, the audience is right there in front of him, but the writer’s audience consists of individuals whom he may never see or know. Writer and audience are invisible to each other; the only visible thing is the book, and a reader may get hold of a book long after the writer is dead.

As Orford pointed out, a book could also be read while the author is alive, but in another country. Furthermore, Ong (1975: 10) mentions, and Van de Ruit confirmed, editors and publishers may urge a writer to consider their audience as the ‘real persons [who] will buy and read’ the author’s books, but realistically even publishers cannot have a very accurate idea who their successful author’s readers are without

conducting extensive and expensive research. The author has to make up his or her own mind as to what their audience wants or how they plan to affect them, sometimes

against or in compromise with the advice of publishers and fans, as Beake and Van de Ruit do.

This supports Berkenkotter and Murray and Csikszentmihalyi as being closer to an accurate description of the complex and often indirect way that audience influences goal setting than Flower and Hayes who posited it as a crucial part of the rhetorical problem to the extent that it was built into their laboratory experiment’s design from the start (a very specific audience was given along with the topic each writer had to write about during the protocol capturing process86). The authors in this study confessed to often having no idea who their readers actually were and pointed to the impossibility of in any real sense ‘knowing’ the tastes of a readership of many thousands across more than one country. A notable exception was Beake, who writes for a very specific target audience and makes a study of this audience while writing to check responses to her work. This could be a function of writing for an audience far removed from her in terms of age and circumstances. However, for her, as for the other authors, the readers’ responses they do hear of are sometimes a surprise. Readers may laugh where the author did not intend this or seem to strongly desire closure where none was given in a book. Where the response seems clear, the author may incorporate it into future style goals, as when Van de Ruit accepted his

publisher’s appraisal of his readership’s desire to see a continuation of the fart jokes in his latest Spud books, or when Beake created a new goal of always having a resolution to her stories for young people after the responses she has witnessed to

Strollers.

Pace of plot development and frequent climactic moments were a critical style concern for all of the authors, as this keeps readers interested, whether in the humour of Van de Ruit’s schoolboys’ antics or the suspense of Orford’s thrillers. Beake mentioned how young readers want action on every page of a book, and Coovadia,

85

Further supported by Elbow in his ‘Argument for ignoring audience’ (in Corbett, Myers and Tate, Eds. 2000: 335).

86

Beake and Van de Ruit said dialogue was important to break up the text for readers because it is easier to read than solid blocks of text.

As with the audience, the topic of a book is usually generated by the author – even in the case of Beake’s books, as she is only rarely given a theme like soccer for 2010 and mostly decides on topics for herself. The idea of a topic provided by an outsider could be part of the university paradigm in which Flower and Hayes conducted their

research. While in the world outside the pedagogical institutions of school and university, this situation may exist, such as when journalists are given a very closed news topic to write about by an editor, with a well market-researched audience, this element might need re-characterizing as part of the goal setting process for a creative writing process model as it does not ring true for the fiction writing processes

examined in this study (or Csikszentmihalyi’s). The centrality of the rhetorical problem to the goal setting process and the personal nature of this choice of rhetorical problem as well as the mental construction of the audience by the author point to these elements being very much inside the writer’s mind, part of what Orford described as an author’s ‘totality of vision’ and which Coovadia called his internal sense of precision, in contrast to Flower and Hayes’ modeling of these factors as something external that the author has to respond to.

There is much evidence to support Berkenkotter’s addition of style goals as a distinct category missing from the goal setting process of the Flower and Hayes model. These particular goals center around desired effects of the writing on readers as well as on books the authors had read that they either admired and wished to emulate, or disliked and wished to avoid copying. This could furthermore link to Csikszentmihalyi’s discovery that a perceived gap in the domain is strong motivator in choosing style goals in particular, as all of the authors mentioned wanting to convey something in their own unique style or an existing style in other countries’ literature that they were adapting to the South African context. In other words, they were setting a style goal driven by a perceived gap in their particular genre of fiction in South Africa which they wished to remedy.

There was an awareness of the different style needs of fiction versus sociology (mentioned by Orford), psychology (mentioned by Coovadia), academic writing (mentioned by Van de Ruit) and magazine writing (mentioned by Beake). An

important style goal for all of the authors was to transmute their personal experiences or research into writing that was at once honest, readable and interesting and at the same time possessing some authenticity beyond these autobiographical experiences or research.The authors felt that other forms of prose or non-fiction writing, in their experience, were somewhat easier in terms of style requirements than fiction writing. The feeling appeared to be that research did not need to go through quite such a dramatic transformation process in other forms of writing as it does in fiction. In fiction, information is not reported on in a straight-forward way, or transformed through commentary and analysis, but rather integrated seamlessly into the story and made to appear a natural part of it through characterisation. Attitudes, values, ideas and facts are filtered through the personality of a fictional character and demonstrated through sensory imagery, actions and dialogue in a way that connects with a reader on a more visceral level than perhaps a journalistic text, for example, can achieve. This supports the often-quoted rule for writers of ‘show, don’t tell’ (Keats, 1999: 21) and

Orford described this as a kind of alchemy achieved through distillation, indicating that this could indeed be a strong determiner of style goals for novelists.

Writing process goals were set in addition to style and content goals, in accord with the Flower and Hayes model. As the writers’ descriptions of their creative writing processes indicated, they had developed systematic, even ritualistic ways of progressing from initial problem setting through to a completed, published book. Writing process goals included any strategies that would help support content and style goals, and were individually determined, although some, such as the goal of writing at a particular time each day, had been learnt from mentors or teachers. As discussed further in the processes that follow, particular strategies such as following a particular pattern to ease the writing process, while consciously breaking the pattern in order to curtail boredom for both writer and reader, could all be characterized as writing process goals, as could the decision to listen to music, conduct research or go on a retreat as a strategy for generating emotion while writing.

7.2.1.2 Generating

Ideas were generally generated in ways that were in harmony with the goals the