What's right with writing?

What have we learned about writing and the teaching of writing?
It’s been said that “creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training” [Anna Freud], and I guess that the same can be true for no training. Until attending NIWP SI, I had been assuming that I was a lucky mind who have survived no training. Writing instruction during my high school experience included one 50 minute session during ninth grade in which the teacher projected another student’s essay on the wall while we picked out mistakes and made suggestions. It was helpful, eye opening, civil and I think we managed to finish without hurting the girl’s feelings. It only happened once.
For whatever reason, our teachers were under the impression that writing instruction consisted in crafting the perfect prompt. They believed that given enough models in our reading, we students would develop our own unique writing style and excel.
After the first two weeks of SI 2011, I was wondering how I had any sense of style. And then I remembered. Remembered all the hours of reading, all the books we rushed through, all those genres the teachers were so anxious to expose us to. Without studying the research, they knew that reading was the key ingredient to writing well. They never audibly made the connections and so I did not notice that I was actually receiving an education in writing.
Looking back both on my experience and my development as a writer, I think that the one big lesson I have begun to tackle in the teaching of writing is that we need to read and we need to read for pleasure.

Why does writing matter?
Why does writing matter? It is the question we writers ask ourselves daily, sometimes twice an hour. It is the question our students ask us every time a new task is assigned. Why does this matter, this act of pirouetting our pen nibs for protracted periods? Or why should we commit the creations of imagination to the virtual page? It is not a question with a pat, an easy answer, but the answer does lie somewhere in the human inclination to pay tribute to beauty and truth. In order to be connected to the rich tradition of history and of art, we recognize the necessity of participating in it. It is a lofty goal, this participation. Sometimes the goal seems pretentious, prideful, ridiculous, or [and this is how our students often see it] unattainable. But every writing assignment is the beginning of this participation. Every letter, every sentence is an exercise in perseverance, in persistence.
The answer to “why does writing matter” is poignantly expressed by young adult writer Clare Dunkle, in her book Close Kin. Toward the middle of the story, [which is inhabited by elves and goblins], a young goblin man, Seylin, encounters an elf camp and is allowed to stay, due to his good looks. He is well educated and rather sophisticated. The elves are living in squalor, barely able to survive the winter. During the scene in question, a young elf girl, Sable, brings out a book in which the camp chief used to chronicle the events of the camp’s inhabitants. The elves no longer know how to read or write. Seylin reads several stories to Sable, realizing how much he takes for granted…realizing how much of the elves’ recent history has been lost forever.
I set Dunkle’s book aside and realize with a pang that the reason I write…the reason writing is so important to me is that I am terrified of being forgotten.

The Writing - Family Connection
The first time I wrote about my family I was a junior in college. I had just moved out of my parent’s house, my brother had just cured himself of cancer; I was lonely and homesick and relieved all at the same time. I held our relationships up to the light from a distance and began to author a profile of each of us. I felt guilty at first, felt like I was putting words in my siblings’ mouths. I realized that we have a lot of flaws, too many for the perfect family our friends make us out to be sometimes. But discovering those flaws wasn’t a depressing thing. It was more of an exercise in becoming aware of them for the first time and suddenly finding myself to address at least a few of them. By the end of the essay process I had learned more about our dynamic and the magic that held us together than I had ever appreciated. Two years later, I look back at my writing and feel as if a second chapter is needed. We have all changed, mostly for the better. New problems have cropped up and new blessings. SI 2011 has brought another dimension to my retrospective glance. I see the importance of telling our story, not only for myself, but for my family as well. By giving me publication as a goal, NIWP SI has helped hone my confidence and plan my second chapter.
Not every student will want to write about their family. Some do not even want to think about their close relatives. For students who suffer from emotional neglect or a broken home, school is a place to escape and dwelling on problems does more harm than good. For a lot of students, however, a long, close look at their family is the perfect antidote to teen-aged egocentrism and complacency. Writing about family can make students realize how lucky they are. It can give kids a reason to reconnect, a project for their siblings to gather around. Writing about family can help tease out their own shortcomings, can help them see for the first time how they affect their family: how they count, how they matter.

What do our students need to help them write well?
Routine
Every veteran writer talks about the necessity in writing every day. There are books written about the rituals writers go through before putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. By giving students a routine, a length of time that they can count on being set aside for creativity, we can take some of the angst out of free writing and revising. We are creatures of habit. As much as some teachers, well-meaning and young teachers, get excited about having something new and exciting to do every day, teenagers thrive on their routines as much as adults do. Students’ lives are hectic, scattered and over-scheduled. If we want to keep their writing from reflecting those characteristics, then it is very important to establish a writing routine that is sacred and realistic.
Opportunities to take risks
Looking back on my development as a teenaged writer in high school, I have often wondered why I ever did my homework…why I spent upwards of 6 hours on every writing assignment. I have wondered because the grade that we would receive would not count. It existed, but not in our GPA. Without getting into the unwritten grade for good attitude, let me hypothesis for a minute why I did those assignments. I think that it was because the assignments were a safe place to take risks. I could write a poem instead of a traditional expository essay and not worry about doing a perfect job. I would still get a grade, but if it was bad it didn’t count and if it was good the comments still stroked my ego and helped me gauge my skill. I never took risks on test essays, the only essays that counted.
With this experience in my repertoire, I know the benefits or risk taking as well as the pitfalls. If students know that they have a few assignments that “don’t really count,” the more motivated ones will use the occasion to push their writing. The risk taking will develop there style and pay dividends that we can never really measure. At the same time, unmotivated students will see assignments that “don’t really count” as an occasion to slack off or not produce at all. The other pit fall is that any assessment that includes a timed and focused write will elicit from students their safest work. I want to remind myself that when setting up “don’t really count” situations I need to build in some kind of incentive, be it bonus points, publication, stickers. In the perfect world, top notch feedback would be enough. I also want to remember that the essay tests of my high school memory are really in a genre of their own, and while a good writer will be able to sit down and formulate a formal essay in two hours and fifty-five minutes, it most likely will not be the kind of writing that rocks the world or changes a child’s life.
Recognition
As a student, I thrived on recognition. Alright, you are right, I still thrive on it. In middle and high school, there was a certain type of recognition that I believe I wrote every paper with the intention of achieving: getting your English essay read aloud to the class. The readings were always done anonymously and only the best papers received the recognition. It was a type of publication. If the teacher handed back papers without reading one or two, we all wondered what we had done and worried we had failed.
I believe that there are only a handful of students in each classroom that are truly uncomfortable with publication and recognition. Most students thrive on having a moment when everyone is focusing on their writing, on them. They drink in the focused energy and turn it into motivation and creativity. I want to be sure to include a variety of modes of publication in my classroom. Recognition is one of the driving forces behind our willingness to improve as writers. The silent Emily Dickinsons are few and far between. We writing teachers need to give our students the force they need to write well.

What stands in the way of powerful writing instruction?
The attitude that some students are good writers and others just aren’t. I have seen this destroy not only a writing career but students total sense of academic self-confidence.