When practice becomes praxis

It has been suggested that I might talk about my developing writing and the point at which skills and techniques that I have been practicing become praxis in my writing.

So to begin, a definition of those terms (according to https://wikidiff.com/praxis/practice ):

"As nouns the difference between praxis and practice is that praxis is the practical application of any branch of learning while practice is repetition of an activity to improve skill."

During my course, there were many activities designed to practice new skills, techniques and writing elements – we looked at person, viewpoint, voice, style, metafiction and intertextuality, tense, psychic distance, ‘show not tell’, and many other elements of creative writing. We wrote flash pieces employing these elements and were encouraged to experiment with their use in our own writing, reflecting on the success and failures of each attempt. The assignment rubric provided an expectation that our TMAs (Tutor marked assignments) would make use of these techniques; for many of our assignments we had to write an accompanying commentary which reflected on the decisions to include these and how effective they were.

Now it might need to be said that all writing includes these elements, but the intention of this aspect of the course was to be more purposeful in our technical choices, to really consider what viewpoint we would use and to what effect; how we could enhance the writing by making changes to style and voice etc. Some people, it goes without saying, are able to naturally include these in their writing with outstanding results; others (the rest of us) need to be more active in the writing process. The hardest part of the course, for me, was writing this reflective commentary as – a lot of the time at least – it felt like I was writing the story how it wanted to be told, then thinking about how to include - or how I had included - the different elements. That made my commentaries more challenging to write, as I felt I was sometimes just including things to have something to write about. I would also say that I found it very difficult to make the analysis I needed to make in the limited word count we had for these commentaries (500 words for most; 700 for one, and in the first module a lucky 1000 for a piece of writing in a different genre). Our final TMA was a commentary on our major project and that piece of work received my best mark of the course – the word limit was 2500, so I felt like I was finally able to go into the depth I needed about each element. And, of course, I was at the end of the MA so I had learned a lot more and my final project had been far more purposeful – more deliberate – than earlier writing had been. What had been ‘practice’ in my earlier submissions was finally becoming ‘praxis’.

Now that I am back in the wild of writing for myself, I am finding myself slipping into old habits – in my current WIP (work in progress) I am fully aware that I am basically ‘word dumping’ each time I sit down to write, and when I have a final draft I will be going back through to see where I might make stylistic changes to enhance the story. Whilst the prospect of going through a novel length work to make these sorts of changes is a daunting task to say the least, I feel it might still be a better approach than painstakingly working through each chapter of the story one sentence at a time as I write it to make sure I am using the correct voice/viewpoint/sufficient pathetic fallacy. That said, I have been making some technical choices as I write so maybe my praxis hasn’t completely slipped away.

Despite having completed my MA (results end of November), I am very new at the writing game, and a complete novice with novel length works, and as such I am still finding out what works for me, but perhaps reminding myself to be more deliberate as I write would be something I could work on.