Peter Elbow

Peter Elbow expresses his special ways of writing for a catch-your-attention kind of paper. When he first started out in grad school, he realized his writing wasn't college material. He would try anything he could to improve his papers but it never succeeded; therefore he was kicked out. Eventually he came back to grad school to become an English professor.
To get to where he is today he mentions how he learned from failure. For 3 yeas he wrote letters and notes to himself about how he was writing at the time. As 3 years passed and reading as much as he could from the letters, it made him realize where he was strong and weak at in his writing. He uses the phrase "making a mess" as his way of planning what he is going to write. Clearly, he was not an outline-type of person and left him in knots. He takes about 5-15 minutes to write down his thoughts on a certain assignment or randomly jot down an idea about the topic. Later he would collect all the ideas and consider that his outline.
He also mentions "creating and criticizing" is important. Creating means generating ideas or taking anything that comes to mind. While criticizing your writing can be known as a picky job; such as spelling, and correct word use.

Questions:
1) How did he develop his writing skills, was it all on his own?
2) When did he consider writing a passion of his and how?