15. That’s So Random: Beyond Intent or Control
(Curious Ravens, Dancing Chickens, and Who Let the Dogs Out?)
A professor of mine once remarked, “You don’t have to be very smart to be a writer.” He was a successful novelist, so it would be easy to see his statement as a stray, self-deprecating comment, and maybe it was, but I’ve always wondered whether there was more behind it. I don’t know what he meant, but the pronouncement has come to mean something to me, something about how writing works and how we learn it.
But to get there, we need to talk about animals first.
The Bumbling Folly of Learning How to Learn
In Becoming a Tiger, Susan McCarthy examines findings on how animals learn, providing insights into what intelligence is, where it comes from, and how it relates to ability and performance. She starts by confessing her fascination with young animals and their often poor results in accomplishing various tasks, saying she is “perpetually beguiled by the bumbling folly of baby animals, while also understanding that what I see is not stupidity, but an early stage of a journey toward grace, competence, and comprehension.” For animals, this stage lasts a while:
During concept learning there is no evident improvement over chance performance until about the fifth or sixth tests . . . This delay is characteristic of what has been called “learning how to learn,” which is interpreted as a kind of “ah-ha” point at which the animal figures out the task.
As with Mike Rose’s students who needed to learn the tricks of testing before their test scores could improve, animal test scores, too, are not always a good indicator of either ability or limitations. First, there are pathways to be built, as Robert Lang would say.
McCarthy’s survey of animal studies describes modes of learning that occur in the wild.
Vertical learning happens when animals pass information down through the generations that is not innate (such as which foods are safe).
Horizontal learning is learning from siblings or a peer group (finding a good foraging place by following others).
Oblique learning is when animals learn from an unrelated member of a different generation. (Did you see what that monkey just did?)
Most of this is group learning, often in the form of play, foraging, or observation—all taking place in a rich, stimulating, constantly changing environment, similar to what we covered earlier with Bakhtin as well as Greenspan and Shanker.
Emulation often plays an important role in all of this. “When you emulate someone,” says McCarthy, “you don’t copy them exactly, though you are trying to achieve similar results.” (We will talk about this in future posts that explore the importance of teaching remix.) This is like apprenticeship, where skills are not taught directly. We saw this earlier with head fakes and Mr. Feynman and other indirect approaches to teaching. Apprentices in the animal world learn through “observational learning, trial and error, opportunity, and occasional coaching.” It’s the same with people, says McCarthy. For instance a commercial fisherman does not learn purse seining by direct instruction. “He is not taught the names of parts and he is not told why he is supposed to do tasks he is assigned. He learns one thing at a time, in no particular order, and gradually assembles them into sequences and actions.” (This is how sequenced writing assignments work as well.)
Randomness and Learning
Bernd Heinrich in Mind of the Raven says randomness is not a waste of time; in fact it’s key to learning. For instance, young ravens gravitate toward anything new, like a bottle cap or a cigarette butt or a shiny pebble, and they are especially attracted to anything someone else pays attention to. In one story, a woman was having trouble with juvenile ravens who would not leave the clothes on her clothesline alone. This was because they had observed the woman devoting a lot of attention to the clothespins. In raven logic, those pins might be important, so they became the latest thing. According to Heinrich, “an important aspect of the learning process is gaining exposure to what is important. Exposure determines what will be, as opposed to what could be, learned.” Through these random encounters with anything new, the young ravens learn how to identify the important stuff, the things they will need to pay attention to later. (Road kill, yes. Clothespins, not so much.)
E. O. Wilson uses language almost identical to McCarthy’s when describing certain learners, saying they “do not think in straight lines. They contrive concepts, evidence, relevance, connections, and analysis as they go along, parsing it all into fragments and in no particular order.” Wilson isn’t talking about toddlers or ravens or artists, though it sounds like it. He’s talking about his peers—about scientists. Like the juvenile ravens, they are gathering their pebbles and clothespins to see what might happen.
In “What the Dogs and I Have in Common,” Abigail Thomas begins with the image of her enthusiastic dogs as she lets them out the door first thing on a snowy morning. Next, she compares a writer’s mind to the “zig-zagging” prints her dogs leave in the snow:
There’s no telling where I’ll wind up, or even if it will amount to anything, but right now, that doesn’t matter. Something very interesting might show up at any moment, as long as I keep at it, as long as I don’t boss it around.
The way the dogs behave is what it feels like, she says, to be a writer at work: “The minute they wake up, when they jump out of bed, or slide off the couch, their tails are already wagging. They are expecting the next good thing.”
In this piece, Thomas shows why writers keep going, why anticipation outweighs the discouragements and disappointments or the many seemingly fruitless paths you might take. The dogs know it won’t all be pointless, and more importantly, all that zig-zagging is a joy in itself. The dogs are having a blast whether they find anything or not.
That’s what I want to teach my students, but grading makes it difficult. To them, the random parts can seem beside the point. Well, yeah, that’s the point. Without all that randomness, the most interesting things get left out. It can make you wonder if school with all its emphasis on structure, lesson plans, rubrics, and assessment—in other words, its tendency to keep us well-heeled and on leash—is focusing on clothespins and ignoring more useful things.
This kind of indirect education is okay for fishermen and ravens or dogs, you say, but randomness isn’t practical. It's not organized. It's messy. It’s not time efficient. It’s not on the syllabus!
The learning processes detailed by McCarthy, Heinrich, and others reveal a lot of parallels between learning animals and working scientists, writers, and artists. What they are all engaging in is the kind of zig-zagging work that Lang calls play.
Too many give up on writing, whether because of joyless school experiences or discouraging words from others or a perception that their progress has peaked. There may be newly driven snow blanketing the grass outside just waiting to be trampled upon, but that door is closed to them, or so they think. I’m most interested in finding ways to let the dogs out.
Dancing Chickens and Pre-Learning Dips
Another factor that can limit progress for learners is how instructors react when things don’t go according to plan. For the apprentice fisherman, scientist, writer, or raven, it’s usually not smooth sailing. Progress is interrupted by setbacks. Often, there is a “pre-learning dip.” According to McCarthy, an animal who has been learning well might all of a sudden struggle to do as well as it did before. Here is where instruction is at its most vulnerable point. It’s make-or-break time.
For instance, McCarthy cites a chicken who was trained to dance when given a certain hand signal. When the chicken responded to the signal by dancing, it got a reward. Things were going swimmingly until one day when the chicken inexplicably stopped dancing on cue. The trainer/researcher was dumbstruck. The bird was healthy and well fed. Everything seemed fine at home. What could be wrong? It turns out the researcher’s student was not being stupid; rather, the chicken had experienced what McCarthy calls an a-ha! moment. It got smart and realized the hand signal was directly connected to the food reward. To the chicken, dancing now seemed like some redundant middleman causing an unnecessary delay of gratification, a waste of valuable reward-consuming time. The hand signal—that’s where all those delicious corn pellets come from! That learner was super focused, in the zone. How smart was that chicken? Smarter than the teacher/researcher, apparently, who at this point must have seemed pretty dumb to his student. I mean, come on, what’s the holdup?
Other things can go wrong. McCarthy cites the way dogs insist on barking at delivery trucks until they go away. You see, the dogs have done their own empirical studies on this. Truck arrives. Dog barks. Truck leaves. Therefore, eureka!, barking at the UPS truck makes the UPS dude go away. Who’s a good boy!
The poor dog has no clue its hard work had no bearing on the outcome. In fact, the dog probably feels pretty damned smart. Unfortunately, even a young dog will have a tough time unlearning this old trick. As Lakoff and Johnson noted, unlearning is hard. For teachers, the lessons from these examples are that learners can be a step or two ahead of teachers sometimes or that students can learn the wrong things even when they were doing all the right things. The right answer isn’t as important as you might think. The focus should be on figuring out the thinking behind the answer. Think Dinner Party Math. “Oh, I see now how you got there.” Once you understand the logic, you can revise your methods in response.
The chicken was right—that trainer was being kind of dumb until, finally, he figured out what the chicken was thinking. (A-ha!)
The smart-ass chicken story shows how sometimes being smart makes you look dumb. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!)
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
For educators and writers this is important. If you focus prematurely on results, you may miss something crucial—for example, the time when a student who, like that smart-ass chicken, was a step ahead of me at a crucial moment, causing me to bungle the situation.
Over time in my courses, I’ve worked toward creating a feedback environment in the classroom that works this way: we do guided peer-review in small groups regularly, and we often discuss sample student essays as a full class. In the process, students learn that my voice is just one of many. This leads to revelations for me as well. In this case, when responding to prompts related to how we know things*, a student wrote in her opening paragraph about computer gaming, bringing up questions about how gaming affects the brain and whether it’s good or bad for us. She didn’t stay with that long, however. Instead, she drifted into recent findings about the neurological aspects of romantic love. Gaming was mentioned again only to show that her research had led her to her new chosen focus. After that, the gaming part disappeared.
As we discussed the paper in class, most had the same first-reading gut reaction as I did. The opening fails as an effective introduction. The writer should skip it and cut to the love chase. Then, someone said the writer shouldn’t do that but should keep and expand upon the gaming part. The reason had to do with a brief mention during the love section about cocaine addiction and how, initially, romantic love triggers the same chemicals in the same region of the brain. Then the student added “Gaming is also described as addictive. Maybe researching more about gaming could lead to new insights on love.”
This led to some joking around: Say no to love! This is your brain/This is your brain on love. The discussion then returned to the paper and how one random comment in the essay, one ray of light, can be a breakthrough moment.
The student’s charitable reading of her classmate’s essay was brilliant. This way, the writer’s paper would not become yet another cookie-cutter example of every paper ever written on the topic of addiction or romantic love. When this happens in class, students get the sense of listeners and their answers, of being collaborators or co-authors, and it helps them to look at their own writing differently. This way, students see how straying randomly from the thesis can turn out to be a gift. In addition, when they see that the great advice doesn’t have to come from me, they look at their own role as readers and classmates in new ways. They are experiencing McCarthy’s horizontal learning, which is a welcome break from that top-down, vertical learning they get from their sometimes clueless professor.
Writers are vulnerable as well to being too hasty, to dismissing random, stray, or unformed ideas as stupid or beside the point instead of considering that some of those so-called useless things are an early stage in the “journey toward grace, competence, and comprehension.” Also, we need not only to read others’ work charitably, we need to do that when reading our own.
The Writing Animal or Play, Don’t Plan
Much as we like to think they are special, writers are not a different kind of animal. They are perpetually learning how to learn, through vertical, horizontal, and oblique learning, through play, foraging, observation, and emulation as they wander through constantly changing environments. They are gathering pebbles and clothespins until they find more useful things, items they might never have found without first finding all that random stuff. They go through lots of bumbling folly (as is evident here on Writer-Type), unexplained learning dips, and seeming dead ends. In short, they are part of the animal kingdom, and the sooner they accept that and learn to adapt, the more at home they will feel. The sooner instructors accept that, the better they will be at teaching.
Thomas mentions a couple of things that should be in your bag of tricks: keep going, and let your writing roam freely instead of leashing it or bossing it around. I’m not anti-planning, but for me, as I write and revise the plan evolves, so I treat it lightly. This happens because the environment changes constantly as I come across new information or as a second reading causes me to notice insights and connections I missed the first time or as I notice something someone else did and I start emulating that. I keep going because I’m aware that if I let it happen, eventually, instead of bossing my words around, my words will start bossing me around. That’s when things start cooking.
Overcoming Avoidant Behavior
By all means, plan if it gets you started. Be aware of the dangers, though. Outlines and planning, in some cases, may be stealth writing avoidance strategies. They may be that old wolf, writer’s block, in sheep’s clothing. Time spent perfecting your outline or notes could be keeping you from dashing through the snow. As Lynda Barry says, “The thinking part of you is not the doing part of you.” For Barry, a key is to keep the pencil moving, even if all you can do is doodle or write out the alphabet. This is the paw prints in the snow part.
Just start writing. (By hand or maybe on a typewriter!) Likely, that outline of yours is bossing your writing around before you’ve even begun. It could be leashing your thoughts that keep straining in other directions hoping to follow different scents. As classical composer Robert Kapilow says, “Just when you create a pattern, the pattern changes.” Your pattern will change, too, if you’re listening, if you let it off leash.
Kapilow also says, “Everything begins with a detail, not a form,” which reminds me of Calvino’s “The image comes first.” (This will come up in future posts on images and description.) This means that as a way to get going, instead of yet more note-taking or outlining, you can simply describe an image or a scene or some random object you came across in your dashes through the snow.
Yes, your plan may be a thing of beauty, but it’s a potential trap that can keep you from noticing the better idea that might be one zig or one zag in a different direction. Do it if you must, but at least put it away for a while and spend some time writing freely before coming back to it. (You may find that you won’t come back to it.)
Yes you might get lost in your wanderings which sounds scary. Barry speaks of the benefits of getting lost: “To follow a wandering mind means having to get lost.” Next, she asks, “Can you stand being lost?” She argues that it’s good to get comfortable with that feeling. What you may find after experiencing that lost feeling a few times is that when you become lost again, you might stumble upon more important, more meaningful images and ideas. Like Calvino, you may find that while trying to concentrate on one thing, you “realize that what interests [you] is some other thing.” And whatever that is often turns out to be a much better thing.
Writing is that kind of animal. It mimics the learning processes of chickens and infants and other flying as well as creeping things. After all, isn’t that where writing came from? Maybe my professor was right. You don’t have to be very smart to be a writer. Play, randomness, bumbling folly, horizontal learning—this is how writers smarten up.
Notes
*This “knowing” theme, like all the themes I’ve used throughout my career, was a way to explore writing issues indirectly in the assignment sequence in preparation for later assignments that addressed writing issues head-on. This was my way of having students engage in Writing About Writing, but to do so with head fakes first, before they knew that was what they were writing about. By the time we switched the topic to writing, they had a wealth of knowledge and metaphorical concepts that they could transfer from other disciplines and synthesize with ideas from composition theory.
Next we’ll look at a parable about where ideas come from and how random images can turn into one of the most famous poems ever written