In order to explore new ways of talking to and with composition students, an instructor might ask whether visual artists can teach college writing instructors about the composing process and, whether, by stepping outside the discipline, insights can be gained for more effective teaching of first-year writing students. For one instructor, interviewing artists allowed several relevant themes to emerge: visualizing the creative process, tapping the unconscious, and accommodating learning styles. The instructor realized that his unconscious goal was to help students personalize their own concepts of composing, to internalize some form of what Ann Berthoff calls "allatonceness." The discussions with the artists helped identify two fundamental notions of allatonceness: a holistic sense of the "what," a vision of a desirable end product worthy of expending time and effort; and a sense of the "how," an "inspired" glimpse of the process that will lead to that desired product. To take students beyond surface-level composing, strategies are needed for conveying and activating the deeper composing processes. Most curricula and textbooks are invariably promoting a conscious-based, short-term product instead of the opposite. Until students experience composing for themselves, no stage model or theory will convey the model-defying complexity of their individual composing processes. To accommodate the 20-plus learning styles in any first-year classroom, an instructor would be wise to develop a distrust of any pedagogy that does not engage students in as many ways as possible. (Contains 11 references.) (NKA)