Early on What a Writer Needs, Ralph Fletcher discusses writing-as-discovery (21). I loved that he includes this section because I think that writing-as-discovery is a particular skill in writing that needs to be explicitly taught.
I usually discuss writing-as-discovery with my students when we talk about how to write an introduction. Some writers get so hung up on making their introduction perfect, it freezes them before they even start writing (which is why I really liked Fletcher’s title for this chapter “Freezing to the Face”). I was one of these writers: I was so intent on coming up with the perfect introduction that I would waste hours trying to get my introduction just right, with an brilliant thesis, and then by the time I finished writing the rest of my paper, what I actually said in the paper was far different from what I thought and didn’t match my introduction at all. I’d have to go back and rewrite my introduction. It took me until I got to be about a junior in college before I figured out that I should write my introduction last. I wish someone would have told me that, or at the very least, suggested it to me as a way to help me get started—when I think about how many late nights I spent agonizing over introductions, I want to cry.
My point is that I figured out what I wanted to say by actually writing it out—what Fletcher terms “writing-as-discovery”—and I think that is an invaluable skill to teach our students. Whenever I tell my students to just get a general idea for a thesis and then forget about the introduction until the end, they look at me like I just told them I want to kill their pets. However, when they give it a try, they find they write much better papers. Sometimes it just takes someone pointing out the obvious to get a person moving in the right direction.