This article examines Donald M. Murray's ideas about what he considered the essential solitude of all writing and what happens within that solitude. Murray, a pioneer of the process and modern expressivism movements in composition, identified a number of forces that he felt were at work within his mind whenever he wrote; this complicated aloneness strongly influenced his model of writing and his pedagogy. The author links Murray's aloneness both to the rhetorical self theorized by Jean Nienkamp and to postmodern ideas about self and identity.