How about your elf?

I have been reading Peter Elbow's Writing With Power on different occasions without ever noticing the typo which has caught my eye now and which by mistake is introducing a sprite or little creature; a mythological being, esp. one that is small and mischievous into the writing process.

The mistake is really quite insignificant: Elbow is summing up what he hopes to achieve with his book, and in stead of saying that the reader in the second person - and that's you! all through the book which quite a few students have found tiresome, but rarely without recognizing how much valuable advice is actually handed over in this undisguised friendly fashion - anyway, back to my original sentence: in stead of expressing the hope that you should become able to take charge of yourself in the writing process Elbow is actually expressing the hope that you should "take charge of yourelf".

And why is this significant after all? Well, Elbow is a sympathetic writing instructor who knows all about painstaking production of text that ties people in knots and makes them incoherent, and he is not afraid to discuss the somewhat magical aspect about (good) writing. Accordingly, a writers' elf is not really that strange a creature to come across in his pages. Actually Elbow is already explicitly speaking of both demons, snakes and steers to be dealt with:

To write is to overcome a certain resistance ... [But] somehow the force that is fighting you is also the force that gives life to your words. You must overpower that steer or snake or demon. But not kill it. (p 18)

I agree. A component of mysterious resistance and unpredictable challenge is a given when you're writing and it's okay like that. Especially in the self-indulgent types of writing that I'm exploring in this self-indulgent blog form. Over a solitary process of just me meeting myself and my own familiar phrases around every corner, I'd always choose collaborative writing performed by an unstable constellation of me, my elf and I.