By the time an author holds her published book in the palm of her hands, she has done the hard work of learning to write. If it's a particularly good book, she can then expect to hear questions from admiring readers: How did you learn to do this? What mattered along the way to becoming a writer?
Teachers of writing can be forgiven if they hope for the best—a kind word about a former teacher, praise for a wise mentor who brought out the gifts of the protégé. It's a story fit for Hollywood—Finding Forrester comes to mind (the Sean Connery role, of course, not the mean-spirited English teacher).
But what happens in real life? In a high school class of 21 students in Valier, Montana, the red-headed son of a ranch hand gets a strange notion in his head, and "makes up his mind to be a writer of some kind." As Ivan Doig recalls, the inspiration to write came from wanting to escape the drudgery of ranch work. He grew up to write Dancing at the Rascal Fair, This House of Sky, and other fine books that capture the spirit and people of the West. Writer Anne Lamott recalls in Bird by Bird how it felt to have her words read aloud for the first time. She was in the second grade:
"It was a great moment; the other children looked at me as though I had learned to drive... I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist."
Eudora Welty, in One Writer's Beginnings, reports of her education: "I was always my own teacher." Others recall classroom experiences that improved their craft, and some remember best the lessons they spent years unlearning. Stephen King, in On Writing, recalls an early encounter with a teacher who accused him of wasting his talent on writing "junk":
I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write...someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
The Northwest region is blessed with many fine writers, a few of whom agreed to reflect on the writing lessons they remember—for better or worse.
Sherwonit is an outdoors journalist for the Anchorage Daily News and editor Of Denali: A Literary Anthology.
In school, I was never much into writing, though I had good teachers who taught me the basics of telling a good story through the written word. I was more of a science and math guy and eventually got a master's degree in geology. But, after working awhile as a geologist, I decided I didn't want to spend my life doing that, so I returned to school and got interested in journalism—and discovered I loved it. Sports writing was my first passion, then outdoors writing. Nowadays, I'm increasingly interested in creative nonfiction, especially the personal essay. It allows me to explore my relationship with wild nature and better understand my place in the world.
Though I don't have vivid memories of learning—or loving—to write when I was young, I know that my teachers gave me the strong foundation that allows me to earn a living from writing, while also helping me, through my stories, to better understand my relationship with people and the natural world.
Author Of The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993), and other books of poetry, Haines is a fellow of the Academy of American poets and a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Library of Congress, among many other honors. He now lives in Missoula, Montana, but returns regularly to his Alaska homestead.
I did not learn to write as a student in a classroom or a typical "workshop." My student background was primarily in the visual arts, in painting and sculpture. My background in literature is founded on the reading I did as a boy and a young man. I was introduced to books by my father who was a good reader and who read to me from an early age. I had also one very vivid experience as a junior in high school, when our teacher introduced us to Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales—in Middle English, not translation! Those opening lines from the Prologue to the Tales have never left me.
It is true that my years of study and work in the visual arts had considerable influence on my vision as a poet and writer, in helping me to see, to define in a visual sense the physical world in which I was involved, whether in the Alaska wilderness or the social and political environment of the city and of people. As many of my later poems can illustrate, the art fed the writing and in one way or another continues to. I have for long understood the connection between our language, our use of words, as well as the forms we choose in our various arts, and the fundamental forms and movements of what we call Nature. I have over the years given a good deal of thought to the subject, and I owe to my years of life in the Alaska wilderness as well as the reading I've done, the understanding I've come to in my later years.
Great poetry, great music, great art take account of all the potential variety in nature: image, sound, rhythm, the play of mind, the play of ideas—all that is like the play of light, of shadow, of leaf and water in the great world. So that it becomes possible to speak of the mind as a kind of imitation, or reflection of the world.
Molly Gloss, award-winning author of The Jump-Off Creek, Wild Life, and many short stories and essays, grew up in what was then a rural neighborhood on the outskirts of Portland. She planned to become a teacher but bailed after a miserable three months in the classroom. Now, she teaches adult writing classes at Portland State University.
Growing up, did you dream of becoming a writer?
I never met a living, breathing writer when I was a kid. I thought all writers were dead. So it wasn't something that occurred to me to do for a living. When I was a girl—I'm almost 58—the smart girls could become either teachers or nurses.
I fainted at the sight of blood, so I planned to become a teacher. I was in my thirties before I met a living, breathing, published writer. Nowadays, it's really common for writers to be in the schools, teaching workshops, meeting with kids. But not when I was growing up.
What do you remember about being taught to write?
I know that I loved to write in elementary school. And I wrote a lot. I wrote stories, poems. I volunteered to share them with my class. I would enter contests in the Weekly Reader and Scholastic. I entered really bad poems about horses that jumped over the moon and things like that. I don't remember being taught how to write at all, not at all.
In high school, I had an English teacher I liked a lot when I was a junior. She was youngish and had trouble controlling the class. There was a lot of pandemonium, but I think she was very motivated. She had us writing a short story in collaboration, in groups of three or four. I was frustrated by the process, because I didn't have control of it. I felt like the story could have been a lot better if I could have written it myself.
Somewhere in there between sixth and eighth grade, I became very shy about my writing. I was no longer willing to share it or show it.
How about college?
I went to Portland State University and was studying to become a teacher. I took a beginning fiction class when I was a freshman or sophomore. The teacher tried to shape all of us into his own pattern. What I specifically remember, one particular thing, was that I had written a piece and, for the sake of the rhythm in the sentence, I had wanted to use a string of things and not use the word "and" before the last thing. For instance: red, white, blue. He wrote in "and" before the last word, with a note in the margin about always needing to use "and" before the last in a series. This was for fiction, mind you. When I took the paper up to him later and talked to him about that—don't I have some freedom here to experiment?—he said: "No. There are certain rules of grammar. You have to follow them. This is one of them." There were lots of incidents like that during the term.
How did you react?
That one fiction class pretty much stopped me from writing for several years. I felt, I must be wrong, then. My ear which wanted to hear this certain kind of rhythm must be wrong. It took me a long time—years—thinking back on that to figure out that he wasn't right. That I wasn't wrong. That I wrote well.
You really stopped writing?
I went underground. When I got married at 21, right out of college, I didn't tell my husband that I wrote. And I was still writing a little bit. I wasn't finishing anything. I would literally hide pieces in the underwear drawer. Eventually, I admitted that I was writing these little things. He wasn't appalled. He didn't say, you think you can be a writer? I don't even think I thought I could be a writer at that point.
You've written about teaching yourself to write by challenging yourself to finish a novel to enter in a contest. Was that how you learned?
I really do feel that I taught myself to write by writing. Not through my education. I think of writing that [first novel] as my apprenticeship.
Is there a lesson in that for writing teachers?
I don't think writing can be taught. But it can be learned. You learn it by the old-fashioned method of practicing a lot. But a teacher can provide the time and motivation, and a teacher can show you ways to get to your goal sooner. She will show you the pitfalls. The things you can avoid. Kind of steer you back onto the road if you're starting to drive off into the ditch. Teachers can be useful. I certainly benefited from one writing teacher, at least. In 1981, I took a writing workshop from Ursula LeGuin [acclaimed Portland author].
What did you learn there?
Ursula was a model for how to teach. I learned some things about editing and revision and close reading of work. I learned by the mere fact that it was set up as a peer critique group, so I was forced to try
to articulate what worked and what didn't work in other people's writing. That improved my own writing tremendously.
A lot of teachers, as early as elementary grades, are using the writer's workshop model. Do you think that's a good idea?
It's risky. When I was a teenager, I was really shy. I remember showing a story to a classmate when I was in late high school. And I was just devastated because she said, "Oh yeah, this is really good but..." I couldn't handle that. I wasn't ready for critique at that point. There's a certain risk attached to peer critiques. It could stop some kids from writing forever. Even in the classes I teach for adults, I make it optional if they want to share their work.
What other advice would you offer writing teachers?
I know there's a lot of emphasis now in teaching writing on the editing process. And revision. The idea is you should write a rough draft quickly. And then revise. That's fine. And kids need to know that you don't have to get it right the first time. But I'm the sort of writer who revises as she goes. I don't write a rough draft. I've never been able to do that. I revise every bit as I'm working so when I get to the end, I'm really at the end. I have a polished piece. So I think that teachers who emphasize so much the rough-draft process and then the editing need to make a tiny bit of allowance for a writer who's like me. Who may not be able to work like that. Teachers should keep that in the back of their mind.
You've written in many different styles, including Westerns, science fiction, and
fantasy. What advice would you offer teachers whose
students want to experiment with different genres?
Often, students writing in those genres are not writing original work based on a background in strong reading. Instead, they're writing scripts from television and film. If they're writing stories that look like they could have been ripped right off the television, they need to be drawn up short on that. You should be pushing books in their direction that would send them off in a literary direction rather than a media direction. There are lots of fantasy novels out there they would love,
if they knew about them. It's a big mistake to be afraid of the fantastic imagination. You can toy with metaphor way out on the edges of things in a way you cannot do in any other genre. It's why I write in that genre from time to time. I can say things and play with ideas in a way I cannot do in any other field. Even though there's a lot of bad fantasy out there, there's a lot of really interesting, good stuff going on as well. It's valuable literature. And to be a writer of fantasy and/or science fiction is probably the most amenable field for a new writer today. You can break in more easily. If you have a student who's an active reader of that field, and actively writing it and wants to be a writer, that's a student you should be encouraging. That student may be embarking on something that actually could lead to a career.
Any last thoughts?
As far as the few, the handful who are gifted, those students are going to be good writers no matter what, eventually. They just have to get a certain age before they have anything to say. Mostly, teachers need to be focused on the mass of students who need to be able to write a good paragraph. That's a skill they'll need for the rest of their lives. As for the gifted ones, they're going to survive all kinds of teaching and become good writers.
But at the least, do no harm?
Exactly! That's the moral of the story. 
|
This document's URL is: Home | Up & Coming | Programs & Projects: Northwest Education | People | Products & Publications | Topics © 2002 Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Date of Last Update: 1/30/2003  |
