Just Write Words
I am incredibly grateful for every person who has connected with me so far since I announced I was publishing my memoir this summer. Someone recently helped me realize that marketing a book feels a little bit like being on a perpetual interview. As in all good interviews where both parties are looking to see if it’s a good fit, every person who interacts with my website or social media or reads a little bit about the book on sites where they can pre-order it is looking to see if we are a good fit.
I always want to share enough information with them so they can figure that out. I truly don’t want to just sell my book—I want to connect with the people who want to read it or who might benefit from reading it. I think that’s what all writers want.
Some of the people I’ve connected with to date are writers too, but some of them are quite hesitant to say that. They tentatively suggest to me that they might have a story they want to tell or that they have something written down.
What some of them don’t know is that I taught writing full-time for almost 20 years.
To some people, that sounds scary. Dozens of people in my lifetime, upon learning that I taught English, have said to me, “Oh wow, I better watch what I say!” or “Now I’m scared to send you an email because you’ll be critiquing it!”
For the record,
I have never sent back an email to a student, colleague, friend, or family member with corrections.
Although I love proofreading (true!), I do not proofread other people’s emails and if I notice a typo, I ignore it and do not pass judgment.
When people speak to me, I am not mentally keeping a tally of any grammatical errors.
I say things incorrectly all the time (and my mom still corrects me when I do).
Good writing teachers don’t fix our commas; they unlock our minds.
To be fair, I do love a good discussion about punctuation (I am Team Oxford Comma, for example), but I know that learning to write well doesn’t start with punctuation discussions. I didn’t always know that. I was a much better writing teacher at the end of that 20 years than I was at the beginning, naturally. We get better at everything with time and practice.
I hope that those students who worked with me towards the end of that part of my career know how much I wanted to encourage them to find their voices and share their thoughts, ideas, questions, and concerns. I wanted to unlock their minds.
During most of that full-time teaching career, I had the privilege of teaching people who didn’t like to write or who had been scarred or even traumatized by past writing experiences. I saw it as a privilege and a challenge: how could I change their perceptions of writing and themselves as writers?
I had two intertwined goals in writing classes. First, I wanted to build students’ understanding that writing well is a series of skills anyone can work on and improve. Second, I wanted to build students’ confidence in their identities as writers.
On certain days of my writing classes, everyone was supposed to come with their first draft. We would have read and talked about Anne Lamott’s classic and essential essay, “Shitty First Drafts” from her amazing book Bird by Bird, so students always knew that I was expecting the first drafts to be mostly horrible. Beyond normalizing how awful first drafts are supposed to be and almost always are, the essay reminds us to look for the golden nuggets inside, the ideas we can expand into a better second draft. Since sometimes we can’t see that in our own writing, it’s important to share drafts with each other.
Like most students who have never been praised for their writing in the past, despite Lamott’s inspiration, many of my students would show up to class on those days without a first draft. I was disappointed, but not surprised.
I knew that inside their minds there were so many negative messages, so much self-doubt, that it was hard to get words past them. On one of these days, like so many others, I decided to pause before they read each other’s drafts. “Let’s do some freewriting right now. For those who have a rough draft, read your last paragraph and then keep writing. For those who have nothing, start with the prompt we had yesterday in class.”
Some students did as I asked. Some did not. I approached one young man who was twirling his pencil around with well-practiced facility. “What’s got you stuck?” I asked. “What’s running through your mind right now?”
“I just can’t think of the right words to start.”
“Stop looking for the right words,” I said. “Just write words!”
His genuine and ready smile lit up my heart. “Fun word play,” he said. “You should put that on a t-shirt.”
“True! Now play with words yourself! I want to hear what you have to say.”
He put pencil to paper and started to write words. When I told a dear friend about it later, she reached out to her brother who could screen print custom t-shirts, and the next week I had my very own t-shirt I could wear to class on freewriting and drafting days.
I want to tell that advice to all those who are connecting with me who are thinking of their own writing dreams or their own stories to tell. If we spend too long looking for the right words, we never get a draft done. There’s a reason Anne Lamott’s essay is considered a classic. It’s true. About everyone. Everywhere.
When it comes to memoir writing, the structured telling of part of our life stories, it is incredibly true. Sometimes the right words spill out easily. Sometimes they hide until three drafts and six months later. The reason for this reality isn’t that our stories aren’t worth telling or that we don’t have facility with words. The reason for this reality is that as we write our stories, our truths emerge.
I used to tell students that the most important part of a piece to revise can be the introduction. When we draft it the first time around, we usually have no idea where we will wind up in our writing. As a result, when we’re all done, we have to go back and revise it so it matches where our writing journey took us. Many times, I saw a student take their conclusion, make it their new introduction, and rewrite a conclusion. It worked because by the end of their piece, they had opened their minds to the world, they had shared their ideas more freely, and they had written their truths.
I don’t teach writing anymore, but when I can, I still like to encourage people to see themselves as writers, to consider how they might learn new tricks and grow their skills, gaining confidence to share their ideas and experiences. When we step back from fear of judgment, when we worry less about where the commas go, when we think of ourselves as our only important audience, we can stop looking for the right words and just write words. On my best days, I take my own advice.