



From the first paper I was assigned in middle school until now, I have gone through the same thought process of completing the project. The teacher presents the prompt, states the requirements, and gives helpful tips to incorporate in our final drafts. For each paper, I initially think to myself that this is considered an easy task; sitting down for a couple of hours, typing one single draft and turning it in the following day. However, after being assigned many papers from middle school until now, the toughest part of this whole process is sitting in front of the blank page at the start of every project. At this state in the assignment, similar to the page itself, my mind goes blank and I fully experience complete isolation. Through the years, I have come up with different methods to fight this mental block only to find that using the isolation to my advantage is the best approach. In Donald M. Murray’s “The Interior View: One Writer’s Philosophy of Composition,” he discusses the truth about what it means to be a writer and how one can get their message across most efficiently. In order to effectively develop a message and get a point across to an audience, writers must utilize their time alone during the writing process and focus their attention on retrieving the writer’s own thoughts without outside influence in constructing their work. This is important because even though writers tend to feel alone when writing, they still have to isolate themselves in order to get the most out of discovering their message and using language to translate into text.

Similar to my encounter with the blank page, many notable authors undergo the same experience. Murray shares his own personal writing experience by stating “At the moment of writing the writer has a fundamental aloneness. Although I have written in the city room, suffered group journalism at Time, worked with a collaborator, I have always found that at the center of the process I am alone with a blank page, struggling to discover what I know so I can know what to say” (26). Murray, and those who have ever had to write anything, have experienced the ultimate feeling of aloneness in writing that he describes in “The Interior View.” One of the main obstacles in drafting any document is transcending past the mental block of being alone within process, and taking advantage of using your mind as a resource and referring to your own experiences to create authentic writings.

In the event of conquering the negative connotations of aloneness when writing and attempting to use isolation as an effective writing tool, writers must use this opportunity to be self-centered. Murray includes insight from writer, Andre Gide, who mentions “’Do not do what someone else could as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else – and out of yourself create … the most irreplaceable of beings’” (27). In other words, Gide and Murray are trying to portray that a writer must be alone for their writing to be purely their own. Therefore, writers must use experience, voice and language to their advantage in making the piece their own because everyone experiences things differently. Within this idea, Murray reminds writers “The writer’s basic job is not to say what he already knows but to explore his own experience for his own meaning” (28). Although two people could be witnessing the same event, how each of them view the occurrence and put their visions into words is what sets them apart. 

 In the passage following this phrase, he uses dialogue and excerpts from other writers to further his point of helping the reader “…discover meaning in experience” (Murray 27). By adding input from other writers that support his message - that writers should write to clarify their stories for themselves not with the intent to please the audience -, strengthens his argument. Murray adds a quote from Edward Albee “’I write to find out what I’m thinking about’” (27). This proves that not only Donald M. Murray agrees with writing to better the writer’s understanding but other notable writers do as well. Overall, one can take from his philosophy that writing for oneself through experience that is understandable to the writer will be understandable to the reader as well. Donald M. Murray helps the reader take away the important aspects of what his sentence symbolizes and its true meaning, which is “If the writer does not feel that through writing he will discover something which is uniquely his, he may soon concentrate on craft rather than content and speak with tricks rather than truth” (26). In other words, his overlying goal of primarily writing for self-comprehension rather than to see it through the reader’s eyes, will help not only to clarify the writer’s views but let the reader understand the writer’s authentic thoughts and experiences. In search for the perfect sentence to perfectly define the writing process, Murray states “As I have written about the process of writing my main resource has been myself” (25). This goes to show that after being able to overcome mental block of being alone when writing, writers’ best results come from being in isolation.  

Although I still fear the sight of a blank page, I have learned methods to avoid endlessly staring into the white abyss and to jumpstart into conquering the paper. After reading Murray’s insight on how to address taking advantage of isolation while writing, it has helped me focus my thoughts and translate them onto paper. Through the writing process and experiencing isolation as a writer, Donald M. Murray, Jane Austen, Andre Gide support the idea of aloneness being a valuable tool when writing by stating “When you sit at the writer’s desk, in the writer’s skin, you discover his feeling for language as a living tool” (Murray 27). In order to effectively develop a message and get a point across to an audience, writers must utilize their isolation in the writing process and focus their attention on retrieving the most authentic components in constructing their work. This is important because although writers tend to feel alone when writing, they have to isolate themselves in order to get the most out of discovering their message and using language to translate into text.