Writing Is Not Magic: It’s Routine
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I hate the way writing is shown on television. It seriously instills a sense of false expectations in college students. College students expect to be inspired by some muse and then put down a brilliant burst of analytical thinking on the page.
My students expect magic. When I assign them an essay, no matter how thoroughly I’ve gone over the rhetorical pattern, no matter how long I’ve had this paper in workshop, no matter how many example papers from students they see, they want the magic. The magic is something they have seen on television. A person who is dressed in smart clothing (and they always wear glasses), shows up in Starbucks, orders some kind of unpronounceable latte, sit down, open their Mac Books, and churns out thirty pages of genius over a cup of overpriced coffee and alternative music.
If they don’t want magic, they want a formula. One of the most frustrating things about my composition classes, my students tell me, is that I do not give topics. Students want that topic. No, they need that topic. A given topic is like a fast-acting anodyne for a toothache. Me with-holding the topic is contributing to the pain of a psychological root canal. In order to mitigate their pain, I do what is call a topic lottery. Together, we put 20 topics on the board, and these topics come from our readings, songs, movies/documentaries, and class discussions. Once we do this together, students are often awed by how much ground we have truly covered and how much work they have actually done.
After students hesitate, baby, and nurse their first papers, I explain to them that I am a published writer. Many of the things that I teach them, I have to do in my own career. And writing is not some kind of magic, it is routine. It is something we practice, something we read, and if we hope to get good at it, we have to keep doing it. Writing is another form of reading, writing is a way to understand what we have read, writing is a disentangling of our own thoughts, writing is imposing order and discipline on thoughts, and learning to impose discipline on our thinking process is something that we need to do as adults.
In fact, the analogy that I use is basketball. We are now teaching an age group of students who are post-Jordan. They have never really seen him play in live time, but they are left with highlights from ESPN and various sports documentaries. My problem with these outlets is that they never tell the real story of Jordan and the “magic” he possessed on the court. They make him appear as some kind of supernatural phenomenon with preternatural reads of the basketball court and an almost superhuman ability to jump and dunk. Between the music and the glittering monologue in the background, we KNOW that Jordan was something the Lord made. And he was and is, but these glittering media presentations are not exactly honest and sometimes, they diminish the result of a relentless work ethic and push to be the best as a team. As I explained to my students, Jordan’s ability to play was partly due to innate ability, but also due to hours and hours and hours of grueling practice. Students are utterly shocked when I tell them that Jordan and Pippen often practiced for hours before real team practice even started. They wanted the chemistry between them to be fluid. When Pippen bounce-passed the ball to Jordan or vice-versa, it needed to be flawless and they didn’t need to look at one another in order for those passes to be successful. It took an enormous amount of physical AND mental practice.
When basketball teams (or any team, for that matter), want to win, they sit down and study tapes of themselves and tapes of the opponent. They look at what they did well and what they can improve upon. Sadly, we are teaching an age group of students who cannot sit down long enough to read for about an hour. We are dealing with an age group of students who are almost never alone with themselves, and who have not been afforded the privacy of children in previous generations. When we grade papers, they do not read the comments that we put on them: they simply flip to the last page, get the grade, and toss the paper. They do not realize that writing, like any sport, is an on-going process. Deep revision is about more than just editing, but it is also re-thinking, re-writing, and sometimes removing. If you have followed my blog, you have witnessed my typos here and there. Honestly, I do edit, but I have a bad habit of reading for ideas and glossing over the writing mistakes here and there (I’m working on it people)!
Inevitably, students ask me about my writing routine. It’s this: when I am heavy in a project, I wake up at 3:45 a.m. I brew coffee, sit down, open my laptop, and begin by no later than 4:14 a.m. If I need to put my proverbial hamster on the wheel, I have a particular Earth, Wind, and Fire song that I just love. To me, this song is the sound God makes early in the morning when all of creation is just waking.
When I really want to write, I MUST LEAVE THE HOUSE! When I am sitting at home, I am tempted to cook, clean, call my Momma, chat with my husband, run behind the children, go to the store and buy tonight’s dinner ingredients. Sometimes, the destination is right outside my kitchen door to the unfinished patio area. Sometimes, the destination is away from ArkaMemphiSsippi. I live here. I work here. I get angry here. I rue the day that I moved here. Sometimes, I just need to get away from here and clear some mental space.
In that case, the destination is New Orleans, where I spend a weekend with my cool cousin, Curtis. But there are times when I just cannot write at Curtis’ house. He is called “Cool Cousin Curtis” for a reason. Hanging out with Curtis is just plain fun. Who wants to write when we can make an adventure of going to Rouse’s? Who wants to write analytically when the bars never close and Curtis cracks you up just people-watching? I just can’t write in those times. There are times when I need a vacation from my New Orleans vacation!
Because we only see Mississippi through the filter of Hollywood, we often forget that Mississippi is a coastal state with hundreds of miles of beaches! As a matter of fact, there is an island off the coast of Mississippi that serves as a sanctuary. Each year, hundreds of birds, writers, birdwatchers, painters, and photographers descend upon the gulf coast of Mississippi. The birds nest for the winter, and the artists produce a copious amount of material.
I found these little cottages, Beachview Cottages, that are affordable and walking distance away from the beach. There are front porches and I can people watch. And since I am on the I-10 corridor, I can get to New Orleans and all of its archives fairly easily. Furthermore, there are at least SEVEN major universities, public and private, between Louisiana, South Alabama, and Florida that are 90 minutes away at the most! The libraries, because they are coastal libraries, are EXCELLENT and the staff is accustomed to out-of-town researchers.
My students ALWAYS snicker when I tell them that I have to leave town in order to avoid distractions. So, I KNOW they are not putting their best efforts into any kind of study when they are watching reality television, checking Twitter and Snapchat, texting, working, and hanging out with friends. Good writing is not the result of a million distractions! At some point, it takes focused concentration. But honestly, I cannot expect my students to leave town every time a paper is due. The point of my story is this: writing is not magic. It is practice, study, and concentration. You cannot write well if you do not read often. You cannot write well if you do not write often. You cannot write well if you expect magic and fail to set a routine where we can be alone with ourselves and with our own thoughts and understand that ourselves and our thoughts are worthy to be read.
Last year, around about September, I was writing like a madwoman. I procrastinated for a year and the editor called looking for his encyclopedia entries. There were days when I woke up at 3:45 a.m., started writing at 4:30 a.m. and did not finish until 9:00 p.m. Thank goodness my mother stepped in to help keep my children. The results were amazing, but I will never forsake my writing routine again. Yes, I got my entries and the introduction done, but it was through Herculean effort.
Now, how to avoid writer’s block is another class for my students. It is another posting for you, dear reader. Let me just take time to thank you for reading and/or following me. You all do not know how much I appreciate it and am honored by you. I am an English professor. We do not get much respect these days. I am a part-time English professor: we get neither respect nor pay. But, I never became an academic for the Awards. I am not known for winning. I kept going for the reward. And you reading my writing is well worth the sacrifices! Thank you.
As always, if you like this post, you can clap back (press the hands) or enroll in one of my classes.
