I recently attended a conference about teaching writing and heard a keynote speaker invoke the familiar mantra that writing teachers must be writers themselves. The speaker extolled the many virtues of the writing life: you feel better; you put life in perspective; you don’t miss anything; you practice what you preach. As a writer, I know these results are true, but as a teacher, I know how busy I am and how difficult it is to carve out time to write. Looking around the room, I saw audience members diligently taking notes. But I wondered how many of them would actually start writing if they were not regular writers already. In the blog conversation that followed the keynote, my question was confirmed: some teachers asked if it was truly necessary to write, to live the life of a writer, in order to be an effective writing teacher.
The answer, possibly, is no. One can be effective and not write—or, I should say, one can be effective and only write what is required during the course of a school day (such as plans, reports, emails, proposals, and so on). One can be effective. However, if you want to be more than effective—if you want to teach within the highest realms of effectiveness, passion, presence, connection and enthusiasm—you must write.
The obstacles are many and large. As teachers, we simply don’t have enough time, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting any more time soon. We’re being asked to do more with less. We’re tired. We’re stressed. We have families and hobbies. We need to exercise. These are all realities.
But after years of teaching, I’ve realized the biggest truth of all: many teachers, English teachers, are scared to write. We think we can’t do it. We think it won’t be good. Maybe, because we spend our lives teaching the masters, we have forgotten that all writers, even the greats, wrote discombobulated notes and bad first drafts, and had many more false starts than masterpieces. We think anything less than genius is embarrassing. We think we will be exposed as frauds.
But of course all of this is not true. Writing for the sake of writing, for the sake of attempting to live the writing life, is the reward in itself. When we write, we realize what we didn’t know we were thinking: writing is an extension of thought, not just a record of it. Writing helps us quiet our minds and focus. Writing makes us pay attention. Plus, we ask our students to do it! We must jump back in the trenches with them, not only for our own personal growth, but for our credibility and utmost effectiveness as writing teachers.
But how? Where will the time come from? What should we be writing? As I thought about these questions, I came up with some ways that teachers with busy lives can act like writers. Even trying just a few of these will enrich your life and make you feel more of a connection to your students and curriculum.
- Don’t write a masterpiece. Get it out of your mind that you must “produce” anything. Don’t set out to write the next great novel, drama, or book of poems. You’re not going for the Pulitzer. No one will even see your writing unless you choose to show them. You’re just putting words on a page, and the whole thing can be thrown in the trash any time you want.
It is true that we make our students produce, and in class, we emphasize the ends as well as (or unfortunately, maybe more than) the means. It is also true that many professional writers are given assignments and deadlines. But to really understand the writing life, try to focus on process at first. Later, when words are flowing, you can set goals for yourself. For now, though, begin at the beginning.
- Start carrying around paper. This could be a notebook, a small pad, a post-it pad, or even a fresh piece of loose leaf folded in your pocket every day. Just something. (And I recommend it be physical paper and not your phone: if you say to yourself, “I’ll just use my phone for notes,” then nothing has really changed on your person and it will be easy to forget your new mission.) Many writers take small notes throughout the day—a word, a phrase, an idea—about the world around them, a memory that suddenly surfaced, or a potentially fertile topic. Sometimes, the notes become nothing, or get thrown in a folder for years; sometimes the notes become a larger piece. Either way, note-taking is its own end. It is a way of paying attention to the world, of teaching your mind to notice things both without and within. What should you write? There are no wrong answers! Write what you see in front of you. Write what you feel. Write what you remember from the past. Anything. Just be specific—name things. Describe. Go deeper. Once, after I jotted the phrase “my son at the piano,” I looked closer and wrote, “his bare feet dangle from the bench… crossed at the ankles… frayed jean hems…dirty soles.” That’s all there is to it—look, and then look closer. This is the writing life.
Keep a notepad open at your desk; have one in your purse or pocket; have one near your desk at home, or by your bed, or in the bathroom. Have several cheap ones—an expensive, fancy notepad might seem too special, like it’s meant to hold the next Great Novel. But that’s not what we’re doing here; we’re just making notes of thoughts that pass by. Dr. William Carlos Williams wrote on the back of his prescription pages between visits, which not only illustrates the need for available paper, but also illustrates the next point:
- Realize we’re all in the same boat. Very, very few writers write full time. Most writers have other jobs, like us; they have families, like us, and commitments, like us. Thinking you couldn’t possibly write anything extra outside your normal workload is false. Real writers do just that. They make time, sometimes sneaking in writing whenever they can. I’ll never forget a day in grad school when I popped in on a writing professor during his office hours and saw him scribbling on a desk full of drafts of poems. I guess I thought he’d be perusing a classic work, or at least grading papers. But no—he found himself with a couple minutes of quiet time, and whipped out some drafts. That’s what writers do.
- Get up just ten minutes earlier. Just ten minutes! It would be enough time to write a page about something. The early morning, when our minds are fresh and recently back from sleep, is a special creative time. Don’t know what to write? That’s how our students feel! Be patient. Write about anything—a memory, a dream, your room, or the first image that arises. You could even begin an assignment you gave your kids. (If that sounds too boring or tedious, you should think about that.) Just keep the pen moving for ten minutes. This activity alone will prime your brain to think more creatively during the day and you will feel more aware of what’s around you. After a couple weeks, you might enjoy these effects so much that you wake up twenty or even thirty minutes earlier, because the rewards of writing outweigh the pain of waking up earlier.
- Keep lists. Not to-do or grocery lists, but lists of details or ideas. Make lists of the sights, sounds, or textures around you. You are rooting yourself in the present moment. You are noticing things. This is what writers do.
Make lists of what you know about for sure: the sport you played for nine years, the backyard of your childhood house, your first car, your grandmother’s hands. Make lists of the places you’ve seen, the moments you’ll never forget, the people you laughed hardest with. Writing can be found there, if you look closely enough.
In your notebook, dedicate pages for other lists: “Ideas for a story,” “Ideas for an essay,” “Ideas for a letter to the editor,” or “Classroom lessons that could be articles.” Who cares if the ideas are bad? No one is going to see them but you. Let the flow be open, because once it is, good ideas will come too. Envision the “bad” ideas as necessary stepping stones to the idea that could become a finished piece.
- Collect the ideas of others. Francis Bacon kept a notebook with topics on each page like “Love,” “Truth,” “Travel,” and “Envy.” Whenever he heard an interesting quote or idea, he would copy it to the appropriate page. To these, he added his own thoughts and anecdotes. Eventually, this notebook became his famous book, The Essays. Writers are collectors of ideas, images, feelings, colors, and moments—both our own and others’. The entire world is potentially usable. Collect, in words, anything that makes you curious in any way—a quote from the novel you’re teaching, an image from a painting, a line from a poem on your colleague’s wall. Cite it, react to it, question it, star it—interact with the work of others.
- Steal school time. Yes, I know: there is none! That’s why we have to steal it. You should be doing something else. You should be grading, planning, filing, contacting, meeting, asking, going, cleaning or copying. But instead, you’re going to take ten minutes to write. It feels wrong. Deliciously wrong. Try to find the same ten minutes each day—routines of any kind generally help writers. Maybe it’s the first ten minutes of your prep or lunch, or the first ten minutes after the last bell, when the school clears out. Write about an incident from the day, with details. Too tired? Then just make a list. List the colors around you, or the shapes, or the smells. Do not make a to-do list. List the present moment instead.
- Go on a lunchtime writing adventure. Once a week, take half of your lunch period and find somewhere new or unnoticed in the school—a bench outside you’ve never actually sat on, the swimming pool on the lower level that you’re a little bit afraid of, the stage in the auditorium that you’ve only seen from the audience. Or even just stop in the middle of a hallway that you usually speedwalk through. Anywhere will work. Take your notebook and write what you see. People might notice you and think it’s strange; ignore them. You’re a writer.
- Write when your students write. Every now and then there is time when the students are writing and they don’t yet need you. Yes, you could be doing something else (see #7), but take this time to write. Maybe you write what you’ve assigned them to write (and later, you should show it to them, to model brainstorming, drafting, and devoted, ego-free teaching). Maybe you write about something you notice in the room, or flesh out something you noted briefly earlier in the week. Maybe you’re exhausted and all you can do is list what you see. It all counts.
- Write in your mind. There is a story that once, while standing around at a party, James Thurber’s wife turned to him and said, “Stop writing.” Writers write in their minds when they’re not writing on paper. Maybe these ideas will become pieces of writing; maybe they will be nothing more than mental calisthenics. Wherever you are, you can notice details, imagine characters and play with language in your mind. I once heard the poet Robert Pinsky say that when he’s waiting in line he likes to take the first word that comes to mind and think of as many rhymes as possible, going through the alphabet mentally. You can do this! Here are some other mind-writing ideas:
–Stop Sign Similes: At each stop sign, think of a simile for something you see: lilies stooping like old women; a telephone pole like a tack stuck in the earth.
–Stranger Sleuthing: While you’re sitting in the doctor’s waiting room or standing on the subway platform, look at the people around you. Pick one. What would her story be if you made her a character? Why that jacket, those shoes, that hairstyle?
–Think in Haiku: This one is my favorite. Sure, it’s fun to shape images into a 5-7-5 syllable structure while I’m, say, sitting at a little league game. But the haiku does more than that—it makes images play off each other; it deepens reality. Whenever you have a minute standing, sitting, or waiting, try a mental haiku: notice an image, and then find another image to interact with it. Here’s my little league one:
In the morning sky
Above the little league game
Wild geese return.
That’s it: just three images in a moment that now speak to each other and have a life together. See what you can link in 17 syllables.
Of course, if you like any of your ideas during these mental exercises, you should write them down!
- Go back to something you wrote. This act is what makes writers writers. Writing is not just about finding and capturing inspiration. It’s about adding, deleting, waiting, staring, and thinking. Take something you’ve written—a note, a paragraph from your ten minutes in the morning, a phrase from one of your lists, a sentence from your lunchtime adventure—and revisit it. What should you do to it? I don’t know; each piece has its own ends that only are revealed when we give it attention. Writers are waiters—we wait for that inner push to tell us what to do next. If you quiet yourself, if you think about your note, paragraph, phrase or sentence, something will come. It always does. As I tell my students: our minds are smarter than we are. Give your ideas attention, and they will direct you.
This does not mean that all of a sudden you must start writing for two hours each morning. You could take some of your ten-minute segments and devote them only to “revisiting.” Just chip away—but be prepared for pieces to begin to take shape and develop a momentum of their own. Maybe, after a month of revisiting, you finish a letter to the editor and send it. Maybe you complete an article about your favorite lesson and submit it. Maybe a phrase becomes a character who becomes a story, and you carve out even more time for it, not because you’re forcing yourself, but because you’re genuinely excited about it. Revisiting is the magic of writing.
- Form a Group. Get together once a week with some other teachers and do something with writing. I say “do something” because I want to keep it low-stakes; if you think someone’s going to be reading your notes, your inner critic might rear its ugly head. You might want to each share something you’ve been working on, but if that seems stressful, do some writing on the spot which no one expects to be “good.” The group could do a writing exercise together—something from a book or website, or even an assignment one of you gave your students. If your group can’t meet in real time, perhaps you could meet online or via email. Working with others gives you motivation, ideas, feedback, and a deadline, all of which most writers need.
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How wonderful would it be for students to catch glimpses of their teachers jotting down observations, sitting on a bench with a notebook, or writing the same assignment they themselves had been given! Imagine how you would feel telling a student, “I know it’s difficult starting a piece, but just be patient; try; something will come, I promise,” after you had been through it yourself that very morning. You would be a true coach and collaborator, not just an authority in English doling out assignments.
At the conference mentioned above, I led participants through a Character Sketch—a writing exercise I do in class. Afterwards, a woman said, “Wow, so this is how kids feel doing this!” We should understand the effort we are requiring of our students, as well as the anxiety, patience, process, and rewards. Saying “I wrote papers in college” or “I write emails all day” is not the same thing. The writing life is not just about producing words; it is about paying attention, slowing down, appreciating, being curious, trusting, and understanding the world more deeply. It is a practice for living.
What you’ll find with the small steps listed here is that once you start using your writing muscle, the writing-for-creativity’s-sake-and-not-because-I-have-to-muscle, it immediately starts to become stronger. Before you know it, ideas will pop unbidden into your mind, you’ll take them to the blank page, and you’ll trust the process. Yes, it requires effort, but like physical exercise, it feels so good once you’re in the habit of it. You’ll start to notice that your life seems fuller, richer. You’ll speak to your students with more conviction about the writing process; you’ll speak with more enthusiasm about life itself. And isn’t that why we became teachers in the first place?
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