How I Learned to Write
I apparently began to write soon after I began to talk. My parents love to explain how I made up stories from toddlerhood, inventing long tales of my stuffed animals’ origins. I spun yarns over dinner, even before my parents could fully recognize all of my speech. Those elaborate ramblings were the start of my creative inventions. That thought was writing, even if it would be several more years until I could hold a pencil and record my words.
I became physically able to write at age five. With predictably atrocious spelling, I wrote plays for my Holly Hobbie dolls to perform. Can you tell I was an only child until I was 10? I needed the dialogue of my imagined siblings, and for that, I wrote. I crafted whole worlds of language, conversations both secret and public. Before I knew the terms dialect or diction or style, I generated the individual voices of my inanimate playmates. I invented the backstory and future for the present of all my toys.
At school, I practiced my letters with the fat pencils and writing tablets of all kindergarteners, with dashed half-lines to guide the curves of d’s and b’s. I gradually learned to draw out the words I could already read — “cat” and “mommy” and the ever important “Mandy,” with my technical ability forever lagging behind the paragraphs in my head. It would be years before I’d learn the distinction between the act of marking paper with pencil lines, and the act of composing. As a child, writing always seemed to be the chore of penmanship, never the creation of what to say with those words.
I’m not sure if anyone ever told me how to write. I know my memory is full of rules about things not to do and choices not to make — “never write essays in the first person,” “don’t ever begin a sentence with ‘but’ or ‘and’”, and “you have an over-reliance on the word ‘that’”– but knowing rules does not make art, does it? I suppose for that reason, I had considered myself a writer. I am a reader, certainly, and a collector of phrases and lover of words, but I can’t write. I can even see what it is I am aiming for: a simplistic, Nikki Giovanni style of writing that is so pure in its obviousness, without the pretentious metaphor or the kind of word choice you know came straight from a thesaurus. Yet I can’t create the proper vocabulary; the elegant expression eludes. I see it, the words I want to put on the page, and they don’t come out right. I inevitably start to quote someone else, because without effort my mind forms around the other sentences I’ve been accumulating for 32 years. Unfortunately for me, writing is not collage.
Well, I can functionally write. In those corporate years before I decided to teach, I was the best at creating technical requirements documents, and I could compose the clearest fax broadcasts to the agent base. Coworkers had me edit their emails if the CEO or VP level execs had to be cc’ed. Before that even, in high school I did well at the required standardized writing tests. I was graded as above average at writing tasks. But somehow all that seems functional writing, the stuff of use when you need a letter of defense drafted to the Homeowners’ Association about your unpopular choice in paint color. None of that has any grace or art, and none of it is the stuff of beauty, and none of my words are things I’d collect and script into calligraphy to hang framed on the wall. I somehow separate the creative fiction from the writing of function, as though art is only inherent to things created for pleasure instead of for purpose.
And isn’t functional writing what I am supposed to teach my students to do? As an English Language Arts teacher, I am supposed to teach my kids to write the dry stuff of writing on demand essays, the 5 paragraphs that will ensure their high school graduation. The boring stuff, the stuff of SATs and the 11th grade Graduation Writing Test — that is what I am urged by administrators to teach. So considering MY personal struggle, my feeling that performing well on those tests is completely disconnected from being a true writer, how can I expect to instill a passion for writing in my students? If I continue to distance the writing of essays with the writing of novels and short stories, how will my kids ever believe that any of their writing has merit beyond a standardized test? Or that the writing they produce for those tests doesn’t have to be formal and static, without the grace or art of literature?
Sure, like all other angsty English majors who linger in coffee houses to write in their journals, I’ve penned the occasional poetry and short stories. Maybe one or two pieces I’ve even been proud of, and let others read. That was never written for an English class, though. I did not take creative writing, and I never had an English teacher who encouraged personal writing as a bridge to the essay. I suppose the Kirbys and Liner were before my secondary teachers’ time, and fluency in any form had not yet been touted as the answer to getting reluctant students to write. I learned the classic assembly of the topic sentence and supporting details, with appropriate transitions between paragraphs. Static and boring as it was, it was never a problem for me to produce the necessary number of words to adequately address the assigned topic, and I hated every functional word.
Even today, without any assignment, I can sit at my computer screen and compose lines upon lines of thought. I am a prolific blogger, a producer of many pages of personal journals. But I hadn’t considered that writing, or at least, not good writing. How can you expect your diary to be considered writing?? NOBODY CARES, is the chorus I’d expect from anyone I asked to read my writing. It’s too irrelevant; it doesn’t have resonance. And so I am back to feeling disconnected, not seeing how the words I put together, for whatever purpose, could be considered writing.
Perhaps I’m wrong for thinking writing (in italics) should be something greater than the random thoughts you have while picking up your dry cleaning. A greater perhaps might be that I am wrong altogether in thinking I am not a writer, or that I can’t teach students to write unless I teach them a strict essay form. Posting entries to a publicly accessible blog is writing. I somehow am a writer because I engage in the act of writing, however good or bad I consider the finished piece. Likewise, my students, with their journals on MySpace.com and Livejournal, are writers. The process, the journey, the creation is the thing, not the product. The more my students practice writing in any form, the more they learn their own voices and the more readily they can complete the dreaded essay. Every piece of writing increases vocabulary, increases understanding of usage and structures, and personal writing is certainly more palatable to 16-year-olds than grammar worksheets. I don’t have to write literature to teach writing, and my students don’t have to compose formulaic essays to learn writing.
