Thomas C. Foster - How to Write Like a Writer: A Sharp and Subversive Guide to Ignoring Inhibitions, Inviting Inspiration, and Finding Your True Voice

[Writing] cannot be taught, but it can be insinuated.

THEODORE ROETHKE

C LANG! T HATS THE SOUND of a basketball hitting a rim. Hard. And clang again. And again. Way back in the mistiest of times, when I was a graduate student, several of us got together on Sunday mornings with a few faculty members, all of us from the English department, for pickup basketball games. To say that it was a group of disparate talents is an understatement. Some of us had played in high school. One or two had been college athletes in some other sports. Some had limited athletic experience. One of my friends, it turned out, had never played the game, and he taught me something I had forgotten: basketball is hard. For one thing, one team is trying to dribble, pass, and shoot while another is attempting to keep the first from dribbling, passing, and shooting. In addition, though, each of those offensive skills is technically challenging, shooting in particular.

Which is where Marty, the friend in question, comes in. His shooting technique consisted of launching the ball with considerable energy directly at the front rim. This approach, for those of you who dont know, is perfect for producing the loudest possible clang. And it did. So one Sunday I took him aside for a little quality time with the ball. I explained that in order for the ball to fall through the hoop, it had to at some point be above it and permitted a downward flight. He caught the idea of shooting in an arc instead of a line pretty quickly, and with a bit of practice, he began to make some shots. Now, he was never going to be Larry Bird, but neither were the rest of us, and thats fine. Shooting is only one of many necessary skills in basketball, but we can agree its a fairly important one.

Over the years I found myself thinking of Marty when student writers engaged in self-sabotage, slamming their verbal shots against the front rim. Watching their struggles made me consider how they got that way. Suppose that, rather than just celebrating the ability to drop a ball through a rim, Marty had needed to study the calculus involved in describing parabolas, had needed to work out the numbers on a ten-foot shot as against a seventeen-foot shot. Or that he had been submitted to a barrage of rules on all the things he wasnt allowed to do or was required to do before his shot would count. What are the chances he would ever see that first ball swish through the net?

Thats the situation most beginning writers have found themselves in down the decades: you cant write yet; first you have to learn the rules. And what a lot of rules there areno split infinitives, no ending sentences with prepositions, no fragments, no use of I or me, your introduction must be shaped like this or that, there must be this many paragraphs in the body of your essay, your conclusion must have X number of sentences in it, your research paper must be this tall.

How much anxiety have we burdened would-be writers with before anything gets written, even before such niceties as ideas are introduced into the conversation? And what effect does this freight have on those who need to write?

Paralysis. Insecurity. Inadequacy on an industrial scale.

Someone or somethingthe culture, the educational system, parents, teachershas so saddled young writers that they cannot communicate effectively with others in their native language. We have tied them in knots. Somewhere between their brains and the page or screen, something dreadful happens. Their fingers get all tongue-tied, and words stammer and stagger out disconnectedly. Or they rush headlong into stream-of-consciousness word salads where angels fear to tread. Or they throw linguistic spaghetti against the wall in hopes that something will stick, the results existing without, in the words of Agatha Christies Hercule Poirot, order or method. This situation is intolerable.

How did we get into this sorry state?

There are as many answering voices as there are observers and analysts. Listen and you will find a lineup of the usual suspects: the death of regular and sustained reading, too much screen time, bad instruction, social media (that root of all evils), a divorce between most people and the written word, the decline of newspapers and newswriting, maybe even poor potty training. I believe, however, that the main culprit is duress. Between the ages of five and, say, twenty-two, the only experience the vast majority of people have with writing is by coercion. Mostly, that force is imposed by schools, but sometimes it comes from familial pressure (Dear Aunt Mary, Thank you for the handkerchiefs I needed them very much. I am fine how are you? Love, Mikey). The result of all this compulsion is that most people never write for their own purposes, never find pleasure or joy or creativity through writing, never experience fun via playing with words. Is it any wonder their efforts sound like cries for help?

Nor does that requirement to write vanish because one turns eighteen. The world beyond high school is filled with required writing: lab reports, research papers, annotated bibliographies, analyses of Episode Five of Ulysses, job applications, engineering reports, soccer club bylaws, mission statements, performance reviews, obituaries, public relations releases, eulogies. The world, it seems, is crammed with writing that is no fun and not optional, that must be done no matter how the hapless writer feels about it.

Is it any wonder that any writing task fills so many people with dread? Its about time we brought them in from the cold and let them find fulfillment in writing from inside themselves. Better still, its time to produce a generation of developing writers with the confidence and ability to generate their own writing and believe in it.

We cant snap our fingers and eliminate the five-paragraph theme or the what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation essay or the report on soil samples, not to mention the obligatory note of thanks to aging relatives, but we may be able to invest them and other writing necessities with meaning beyond the assignment affliction.

More to the point, however, we teachers and learners and lifelong practitioners of written communication can begin to make onerous tasks a little less so by making the work meaningful for the individuals undertaking them, by locating the I at the center of writing. Just what does that injection of the personal entail? For one thing, it means that we create space for the intelligence and personality and the language of the writer to flower within the task. This re-centering often goes by the name voice, but the writers voice divorced from all else can become precious self-indulgence. Beyond that, understanding that there is an I responsible for writing a document, it becomes self-evident that there must be a thou out there somewhere who exists and whopossibly also under compulsionwill read those words the writer produces. Even essays on standardized tests or state assessments must have readers; a long-ago colleague had been one while in graduate school. When we look at it from this perspective, we see what we should know already: every writing act is at bottom an exchange between two persons, one writer and one reader. Even audiences of millions are simply audiences of one, repeated again and again.

Writing has too often been approached as a set of skills to be perfected or even formulas to be copied and applied as needed. The results, more often than not, are stale, pallid, and halting. Think of whatever version of the five-paragraph theme you were taught at school. At their best, those efforts produce perfunctory but rarely inspired compositions; at their worst, lifeless attempts to copy a pattern. In all its variations, the goal of the five-paragraph theme was never to encourage literary brilliance but rather to impose order on the adolescent brain. Yet many of us go through life thinking that such imposition is the only way to write and that we have somehow failed to grasp it instead of understanding that it was the instruction that failed us. Young people and adults alike deserve better.