We emphasize the value of critical reading above, and this type of reading is intertwined with prewriting. As you read, get in the habit of annotating your texts. Whether you write marginal notes, highlight, underline, or draw boxes and circles around important words and phrases, you’ll eventually develop a system that allows you to retrieve significant ideas and elements from the text. Another way to record your impressions of a work — as with any other experience — is to keep a journal. By writing down your reactions to characters, images, language, actions, and other matters in a reading journal, you can often determine why you like or dislike a work or feel sympathetic or antagonistic to an author or discover paths into a work that might have eluded you if you hadn’t preserved your impressions. Your journal notes and annotations may take whatever form you find useful; full sentences and grammatical correctness are not essential (unless your instructor deems them important and requires that you hand them in), though fuller thoughts might allow you to make better sense of your own reflections than incomplete thoughts might. The point is simply to put in writing ideas that you can retrieve when you need them for class discussion or a writing assignment. Far from making extra work, this process saves you considerable time when you get to the writing phase.
Taking notes will preserve your initial reactions to the work. First impressions are often valid. Your response to a peculiar character in a story, a striking phrase in a poem, or a subtle bit of stage business in a play might lead to larger perceptions. The student paper on (“John Updike’s “A & P” as a State of Mind”) later in this chapter, for example, began with the student writing “how come?” next to the story’s title in her textbook. She thought it strange that the title didn’t refer to a character or to the story’s conflict. That brief annotated response eventually led her to examine the significance of the setting, which became the central focus of her paper.
Prewriting activities should not interfere with your initial encounter with a text, though: you would do well to keep your pen tucked behind your ear as you first read a text so that you can get a sense of its unique characteristics, its concerns, its possible meaning, or its pleasures and delights. You should take detailed notes only after you’ve read through the work. If you write too many notes during the first reading, you’re likely to disrupt your response. Moreover, until you have a sense of the entire work, it will be difficult to determine how connections can be made among its various elements. In addition to recording your first impressions and noting significant passages, characters, actions, and so on, you should consult the Questions for Responsive Reading and Writing about fiction, poetry, and drama. These questions can assist you in getting inside a work as well as organizing your notes.
Inevitably, you will take more notes than you finally use in the paper. Note taking is a form of thinking aloud, but because your ideas are on paper (or on a laptop, phone, or tablet), you don’t have to worry about forgetting them. As you develop a better sense of a potential topic, your notes will become more focused and detailed.
If your instructor assigns a topic or list of approved topics, some of your work is already completed. Instead of being asked to come up with a topic about Oedipus the King (Chapter 36), you may be asked to write a three-page essay that specifically discusses whether Oedipus’s downfall is a result of fate or foolish pride. If that is the case, you also have the assurance that a specified topic will be manageable within the suggested number of pages. Unless you ask your instructor for permission to write on a different or related topic, be certain to address yourself to the assignment. There is room even in an assigned topic to develop your own approach. Assigned topics do not relieve you of thinking about an aspect of a work, but they do focus your thinking.
Other assignments might be left open so that you can engage your particular point of view more thoroughly. Before you start considering a topic, you should have a sense of how long the paper will be because the assigned length can help to determine the extent to which you should develop your topic. Ideally, the paper’s length should be based on how much space you deem necessary to present your discussion clearly and convincingly, but if you have any doubts and no specific guidelines have been indicated, ask. The question is important; a topic that might be appropriate for a three-page paper could be too narrow for ten pages. Three pages would probably be adequate for a discussion of why Emily murders Homer in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Conversely, it would be futile to try to summarize Faulkner’s use of the South as a setting in his fiction in even ten pages; this would have to be narrowed to something like “Images of the South in ‘A Rose for Emily.’ ”
Once you have a firm sense of the scope of what you are expected to write, you can begin to decide on your topic. If you have a choice, it’s generally best to write about a topic that you feel strongly about. If you’re not fascinated by the rebellious act of tearing wallpaper off a wall in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” then perhaps you’re more attuned to the murderous revenge that fuels Andre Dubus’s “Killings,”or maybe you can explain why the act of destroying a room’s décor is so boring to you as an act of defiance. Choose a work that has moved you so that you have something to say about it. The student who wrote “John Updike’s A & P as a State of Mind” was initially attracted to the story’s title because she had once worked in a similar store. After reading the story, she became fascinated with its setting because Updike’s descriptions seemed so accurate. Her paper then grew out of her curiosity about the setting’s purpose. When a writer is engaged in a topic, the paper has a better chance of being interesting to a reader.
After you have settled on a particular work, your notes and annotations of the text should prove useful for generating a topic. The paper on “A & P” developed naturally from the notes the student jotted down about the setting and antagonist. You are likely to find when you review your notes that your thoughts have clustered into one or more topics. Perhaps there are patterns of imagery that seem to make a point about life. There may be scenes that are ironically paired or secondary characters who reveal certain qualities about the protagonist. Your notes and annotations on such aspects can lead you to a particular effect or impression. Having chuckled your way through “A & P,” you may discover that your notations about the story’s humor point to a serious satire of society’s values.
When you are satisfied that you have something interesting to say about a work and that your notes have led you to a focused topic, you are moving in the direction of formulating a thesis statement, the central idea of the paper. Whereas the topic indicates what the paper focuses on (the setting in “A & P”), the thesis explains what you have to say about the topic (because the intolerant setting of “A & P” is the antagonist in the story, it is crucial to our understanding of Sammy’s decision to quit his job). The thesis is a statement that will probably not fully emerge until the revision stage of your drafting process rather than during prewriting, but you should be aware during prewriting that you are eventually moving in the direction of an argument, which is the formal, structured analysis you are building; the thesis is the argument’s distilled statement.
An intermediate step between deciding on a topic and formulating a thesis statement is to generate a working thesis that will direct your thinking. One simple first step to generate a working thesis about a literary work is to ask the question “why?” Why do these images appear in the poem? Why do the main characters in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest lie so much? Why does Hemingway choose the Midwest as the setting of “Soldier’s Home”? Your responses to these kinds of questions can lead to a working thesis.
Writers sometimes use freewriting to help themselves explore possible answers to such questions. It can be an effective way of generating ideas. Freewriting is nonstop writing without concern for mechanics or editing of any kind. (The equivalent in fiction is stream of consciousness.) Freewriting for ten minutes or so on a question will result in fragments and repetitions, but it can also produce some ideas. A freewriting sentence that a student writer might generate in response to Updike’s “A & P” could look like this: “Sammy’s job like mine at the Cheesecake Factory both of us wear stupid uniforms and have to deal with obnoxious customers and incompetent bosses but he doesn’t get to move around like I do.” There’s not much in that sentence that would end up in a final draft, especially the personal connection to the character in the story, but the writer is conditioning herself to think about elements of the story that might be relevant: Sammy’s uniform and lack of mobility could become important points for analysis.