I'm afraid Peter Elbow's little sketch is lost on me. I have not the slightest idea what he is getting at with the Happy Birthday Mountains. But... I think I smell what he's steppin' in when he says "Successful writers lead us on a journey to satisfaction by way of expectations, frustrations, half satisfactions, and temporary
satisfactions: a well-planned sequence of yearnings and reliefs, itches and scratches." Did he, like Boyce, work in a sex clinic? Or with a description like that, maybe a dermatologist's office?
Put in a little less disturbing and disgusting way, I recall what my Composition One instructor told us when I was a college freshman. She told us... or maybe she had us read something... about the cadence Jackie Chan's movie fights. If you watch his fights, you notice the stunts and punches don't come in a steady stream like dripping water. There are quick punches, pauses to build tension, and then wham, wham, wham....relentless smacking just for fun. You can't predict the blows, but you can appreciate and enjoy them. Our Comp One instructor told us that our writing should be more like that and less like a regimented five-paragraph essay.
I wonder what other metaphors we've learned about our essays. I've heard that writing an essay should be like a strip-tease: you don't want to give it all away at the start; you want to keep the reader reading. (And yes, that was super awkward to hear from my middle-aged male professor). Can you think of others?
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