The toolbox method and the Osmosis method
How I've heard some writers talk about learning the craft vs how I've actually learned it myself
I don’t really believe in the “tool box” method of learning to write. Maybe “believe” is the wrong word. I don’t deny that it can work. I just don’t feel that it’s the way I’ve learned to write.
Toolbox writers read the writing of writers they love or are interested in learning from, and lift technique, quite deliberately, from what they observe in the language of those writers. Writer X uses language like so, and the toolbox writer figures out how to use the same technique, takes it for themself, and practices it in their own writing when an opportune moment arrives.
It’s a legitimate approach to learning to write. It’s a craft-oriented, hardhat and lunchpail approach to learning writing. I think I’ve done it differently, however.
I’m more of a believer in / practitioner of Osmosis. The ol’ Charlie Brown method of learning algebra. Charlie Brown puts the book under the pillow at night, and trusts that the math will somehow seep into his head, the way substances pass in and out of a human cell. I’m not a literal or fundamentalist believer in this practice. In my version of Osmosis, you have to open each book you hope to learn from, and you have to read it.
But the way of using voice and technique you learn from, say, many poets, as you further yourself reading and writing poetry, is not entirely conscious or deliberate in the Osmosis method. Like Charlie Brown does, I absorb a lot of poetry books – I have 6 full shelves of volumes of various sizes just for poetry, at home, and I’ve read them all. The absorption trains the ear, and trains the voice, and I find myself mimicking styles or sounding like this poet or that poet, but without the intentionality of toolbox writing.
In short, I don’t believe we have to be able to articulate what we’re doing in order to do it. As a songwriter can learn music without ever reading music on the page, a poet can learn technique without getting bogged down into the particulars of how technique operates. It might not be the best way. It’s just the way I think I’ve done it.
When what I’m doing when I write is a bit of a mystery even to me, it can be a great delight to surprise myself with what comes off the pen. American writers, I think Harold Bloom said, love surprising our readers, and ourselves, with what comes off the pen. To me, writing isn’t so much like constructing a table or chair or building a house. It’s allowing language to flow through you, and reading just lots of stuff, tons of stuff, that might help you absorb how to do it without losing the mystery of how it’s done.