Teaching the Other Self: The Writer's First Reader

Abstract

We command our students to write for others, but writers report they write for themselves. write for me, says Edward Albee. audience of me. Teachers of composition make a serious mistake if they consider such statements a matter of artistic ego alone. The testimony of writers that they write for themselves opens a window on an important part of the writing process. If we look through that window we increase our understanding of the process become more effective teachers of writing. am my own first reader, says Isaac Bashevis Singer. Writers write for themselves not for their readers, declares Rebecca West, and that art has nothing to do with communication between person person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind. think the audience an artist imagines, states Vladimir Nabakov, he imagines that sort of thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask. Edmund Blunden adds, don't think I have ever written for anybody except the other in one's self. The act of writing might be described as a conversation between two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench. The self speaks, the other self listens responds. The self proposes, the other self considers. The self makes, the other self evaluates. The two selves collaborate: a problem is spotted, discussed, defined; solutions are proposed, rejected, suggested, attempted, tested, discarded, accepted. This process is described in that fine German novel, The German Lesson, by Siegfried Lenz (Hamburg, Germany: Hoffman Und Campe Verlag, 1968; New York: Hill Wang, 1971), when the narrator in the novel watches the painter Nansen at work. And, as always when he was at work, he was talking. He didn't talk to himself, he talked to someone by the name of Balthasar, who stood beside him, his Balthasar, who only he could see hear, with whom he chatted argued whom he sometimes jabbed with his elbow, so hard that even we, who couldn't see any Balthasar, would sud-

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