Perhaps the most appropriate way to begin this book is by asking what it means to begin, because in many ways this book is about beginnings, about why and how writers begin to write, and about the ways we in composition studies imagine, study, and teach how, why, and where writing begins—the subject of invention. It attempts to locate and describe where invention takes place and what happens to writers when they begin to write. In so doing, this book extends the question, “what do writers do when they write?” by asking, “what happens to writers that motivates them...

At the beginning of A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke wonders: “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” (1969a, xv). Burke describes and locates this question of motive in a dramatistic pentad made up of scene (where an action takes place), act (what is taking place), agent (who is performing the action), agency (how, through what means, is the action carried out), and purpose (why is the action being carried out). Motive, he explains, does not reside in the agent alone, a romantic concept, but in the relationships between all five...

The above observations by Genung and Bazerman, made more than a century apart, represent two possible ways of imagining the writer-as-agent in composition. Genung locates agency within the writer, whose self-motivated, private intentions guide his or her processes of invention. Bazerman locates agency within a larger sphere of social motives, which orients and generates a writer’s intentions to act. In both cases, Genung and Bazerman acknowledge that intention “belongs” to the writer and shapes how he or she begins to write, but they present different visions of where intentions come from and how and why they are acquired, leading to...

We cannot understand genres as sites of action without also understanding them as sites of subject formation, sites, that is, which produce subjects who desire to act in certain ideological and discursive ways. Genres are defined as much by the actions they help individuals perform as by the desires and subjectivities they help organize, which generate such performances. For example, the genres D. H. Lawrence writes in not only help him organize and articulate different desires, especially in relation to his mother; they also, as the Latin root of the word genre suggests, help generate these different desires to enact...

Reflecting on the concept of invention in the classical rhetorical tradition, Jim Corder writes that “inventio, by its nature, calls for openness to the accumulated resources of the world a speaker lives in, to its landscapes, its information, its ways of thinking and feeling. . . . Inventio is the world the speaker lives in” (1994, 109). Similarly, Sharon Crowley writes that “invention reminds rhetors of their location within a cultural milieu that determines what can and cannot be said or heard” (1990, 168). Invention takes place, which is why classical rhetoricians recommended the topoi or commonplaces as the sites...

So far, I have argued that genres maintain the desires they help writers to fulfill, and I have analyzed how, through genres, writers position themselves within, negotiate, and articulate these desires as recognizable, meaningful, consequential actions. Because they situate writers within such positions of articulation, genres, when analyzed, contribute to our understanding of how and why writers invent—how, that is, writers participate in and become agents of the agency at work on them when they write. In previous chapters, I have examined genres in this way, as sites of invention. In this chapter, I speculate on what it would...