4. "All Writing is Autobiography"

Donald Murray's "All Writing is Autobiography" calls us to doubt the importance one writing construct often stressed by teachers.  That is the idea that it writers should remove their own visible presence from their work in order for the content to have a more universal appeal to it.  Students are often told that they should refrain from constructing their arguments, assertions, imagery, and what have you in terms of their own opinions and feelings.  We are often directly taught that self referential language in general should be avoided unless we are specifically writing a personal narrative.  Murray feels that this is a very unnatural and constricting way to write simply because it is impossible to completely escape your own perspective and it tends to just alienate the readers when you try.

Murray points out that the reason good writing happens is that the writer is at the very least interested by the subject matter.  He states "My pages reveal my obsession" (59) as he recounts all of the growing experiences that have shaped his own interests.  He gives examples in his writing of passages which are clearly the product of his pains, losses, and misguidances of his past.  He says that it doesn't matter whether the writings are fictitious, poetic, or meant to be taken quite literally; the content of ones writing the exactly what that persons mind was focusing upon and concluding during it's being written.  This not only implies that the text itself will be substantially shaped by the predispositions of the writer, but also that the writer's own thought processes are greatly changed by the things that that writer has written in the past.  Writing is a very focused process, and to be comfortable with something that you have written you must have a certain degree of confidence in the conclusions that your writing illustrates.  Murray even gos so far as to say "We become what we write.  That is one of the great magics of writing.  I am best known as a nonfiction writer, but I write fiction and poetry to free myself of small truths in the hope of achieving large ones."