accessing the writing inside

I love the moments when my least confident writers discover that the liability they thought they had when it comes to formal writing is actually a strength when applied intentionally. 

It's the golden hour, not some immediate cure all. In no way does this new found knowledge rehabilitate the deficiencies that have accrued, sometimes over years, in these students' writing. This isn't some Hilary Swank movie after all. 

Rather, there is the glimmer of a desire that wasn't there a moment earlier coupled with a hope that hasn't been part of the equation. I had this experience with one of my students in the fall. He hated writing. By all accounts, he still does. But, if his word is to be trusted, he hates it a little less than before. Here's how that happened:

In preparation for the term research paper in that class, I ask students to create an organizational device that plays to the way they are most comfortable working with information. The device need only organize the their key research and interpretations in an order that aligns with the demands of the assignment. The form and function is completely up to them.

Here's what he came up with:

In many ways, this is exactly what the assignment exists for. Nowhere is this type of thinking privileged in the traditional writing process. And yet, it is exactly what we should be calling out in students - a correlative frame of reference bridging concept from one articulation (the way it is processed in their heads) to another (the way it is processed, here, in formal academic exposition). 

The result was a student who likely would not have met minimum competency requirements using the traditional methods of organization doing so using his artistic ability to guide his written work. 

 

Howard Gardner knew this when he started theorizing multiple intelligence types more than 30 years ago. Traditional measures only measure abilities traditional to some. Couple the work that goes into digesting new information with the way a person is most comfortable doing said digesting and the outcome is greater fluency and use.

From this, I can't help but think that this is what should be guiding the work we do in helping students who process the world digitally use their digital sense to access and perform the information they study in our classes. 

In other words, how we can use more technology to make their writing less technological. 

sleep depravation

I don’t sleep well. Never have. Mind turns faster when it should be slowing down. Thoughts multiply when consciousness should be subtracted. Pillow a brick rather than a pad.

It’s been this way for decades. Sleep comes when I can’t physically get enough rest to make it worth my while. Wake up with an upset stomach and two briquettes of Coleman charcoal for eyes. Repeat.

I don’t have much of an explanation. Started when I was eleven for no reason that I can recall (though it may have been my grandfather’s death that started it). There are times when it happens less, others more, neither predictable. No trigger without a plural. No rhyme to find in a reason. Stopped trying to figure it out awhile ago. Figure it’s just the thorn in my psychic flesh.

Or something along those lines.

Heard a song recently that comes pretty close to capturing what it’s like. Maybe Jon Foreman gets it. Maybe I’m not losing sleep but sleeping on loss.

Remember that kid with the quivering lip
Whose heart was on his sleeve like a first aid kit
Where are you now? Where are you now?

Remember that kid, didn't know when to quit
I still lose my breath when I think about it
Oh, where'd you go? (Oh where'd you go?)

Oh oh/I feel like I'm dreaming
Oh oh/Staring up at the ceiling
Oh oh/It's four in the morning
I can't sleep and it feels like a warning

Oh oh/You wouldn't believe me
If I could say it just the way that I'm feeling
Oh oh/The words that I wanted to say
I feel them slipping away

I know this isn't what you wanted
Past words in the present are haunting us now
And on and on and on and on
My heartbeat could tell you it's urgent
I try to shout but the words don't come out
I feel I'm slipping away

“Slipping Away” Jon and Tim Foreman

I can’t tell yet what I’m supposed to do with this perspective. But I’m likely to have time to think about this when I should be sleeping.

existential crisis, no waiting

As long as it is, the Ocean Beach pier comes to an end. Sometimes, the end
of one part of life and the beginning of another feels like climbing up on the
railing and deciding whether or not jumping in is the best option we have.

One of my students has been wrapped up in a very necessary and necessarily unproductive dialogue about productivity and skill recently.

As a senior, he's experiencing that crushing convergence of the future becoming the present as college comes to an end before it has actually ended (read: every day brings a new question about what he's going to be while there's still a lot of heavy lifting left to do in the classes he has left).

That moment. It hits us all at some point, whether or not we went to school. In an instant as short as a minute or as long as several years, the potential of our future moves, almost instantaneously it seems, into a much closer orbit with our present reality, upending those tides within us that we've grown accustomed to. We've learned their rhythm, their cadence, their constancy.

But the end of college, like other ends we have or will experience, presses against our shores insistently. All seems immediate, seems pressing, seems imposing. And this, I believe, is where my student is treading water at the moment. Between now and then, awash in the lack of either.

And what I want to tell him is to stay there as long as he can. Because, if what he's discovered recently is any evidence, there is something in the discomfort that is preparing him for what comes next.

An example. Recently, he tweeted me the following: "The biggest thing I learned from our department was producing good writing instincts/habits can't be quantified, only shown."

This sounds like a small discovery until you realize the arduous road young writers travel to find their voice and purpose. Unlike math, where the proper formula likely exists for the work you're doing, in writing there is merely the desire, not an established path, to become what you will.

A comparison - a degree in accounting, when discovered, never leads to the question, "So, what are you going to do with that?" A degree in writing is, in itself, an open question that, in some ways, will never be answered. At least, never in convincing fashion.

So, for writers, the first existential crisis comes early. What can I say? We're precocious that way. And the discovery that my student just made - that the internal measures of a writer's work come before the external - is one of the most critical steps forward in the face of so much uncertainty.

It's also, in some ways, a form of bravery to admit so much depends upon our red wheelbarrow. Here's how I responded. I'll paraphrase a bit to compensate for Twitter's character limitations.

Learning to write works best when conceived as a long, solo hike in the wilderness. We are alone until we meet others on the trail. When we do, we should walk a ways with them, talk with them a ways. But we also need to part with those we meet regularly, intentionally taking in long stretches of the trail alone in communion with our own experience.

Blogging After Blogging

So, I shut it down in terms of blog posts in December as the end of the semester crush dumped on me like a full set of waves. The intention, as it always is, was to get through the break, paddle in and rest a few weeks, and then start up again with the new year.

Someday, I’m going to learn that resolution writing is for suckers.

Anyway, here it is, almost February, and I’m finally getting back to blogging in a consistent way. And it’s not that I have nothing to write about. There are a bunch of great conclusions I’m drawing from my hybrid class in the fall. Additionally, the Writer’s Symposium is a month away and there are exciting talks from Anne Lamott, Jeannette Walls, and Samuel Freedman coming up to look ahead to. And, I have some announcements to make about publications in fiction, nonfiction, and a book I’m under contract on as an editor to discuss.

Beyond this, I’m looking at a few guest posts I’m looking forward to putting up, along with the work of some talented young writers I’m working with right now. I might even have some new original material of my own should I get a couple minutes to work on it.

In short, it’s time to get at this again, and I hope you’re ready and willing to catch up with me.