The old wheels in my head kept turning last week when I walked into a middle school classroom and remembered a time, long ago, when I was an English teacher myself. The lights were dimmed. The students were scattered — some leaning over notebooks, some staring off in the way writers do when they are wrestling with words, some hunkered over a keyboard because that felt better, some drafting fast and loose as though the page might run away. Candice (not her real name), the teacher, was moving gracefully around the room, floating between students. She’d bend low at one desk, crouch at another, kneel beside a student sitting on a rug. She wasn’t hovering; she was joining. That’s the mark of a good writing teacher. You don’t just watch. You want to join.
The scene reminded me of when I first took writing as more than a “have to” situation. I began writing seriously in college, though to be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. Everyone else seemed to. Back in high school, I had cobbled together essays by longhand, only to have my mother type them up whenever that was called for by my teachers. I made it to a name-brand college that way, but once I arrived, I felt exposed. Writing, for me, was torture. I thought it had to come out fully formed, like Zeus splitting his head and Athena appearing in full armor. No drafts. No mess. Just finished sentences or worse, failure. That clunky manual typewriter I used in my dorm room was always paired with gallons of White-Out to wipe across the pages, and even then, there was very little flow.
What I see now — what I saw in Candice’s room — is how wrong I was. Writing isn’t the miracle of sudden creation. It is a process, alive and full of stages. It was the Teacher Writing Institute at UCLA, one I was “voluntold” to attend as a first-year middle school teacher, that began to unhook me from my perfectionism. There I learned that drafting was sacred, that the real miracle is allowing students to get something — anything — onto the page without the judgmental voice in their head shutting it down.
That is exactly what Candice was teaching. She carried a mug of tea in one hand ( I don’t ever remember that degree of comfort in front of students from my high school teachers), offered quick nudges to students in passing, and when she saw a girl, let’s call her Sonya, stuck, paralyzed in front of the page. Candice crouched to eye level. She filled Sonya’s tank with presence, with calm, with encouragement. “Just a little more,” she seemed to say. “Keep going.” And Sonya did.
When I stopped by earlier that day, Candice had come into my office for her start-of-year check-in. She has been teaching for only five years; she was a property manager before that, but she teaches writing like someone who has known its struggle all her life. Watching her class, I thought about how far I have come, too. I could never have written like this in college, let alone high school, what Candice taught her students in the comfort of her classroom. Back in those days, I could barely silence the inner critic long enough to put down a single unbroken paragraph.
I remembered distinctly that the best students from prep schools back in college knew how to draft. They sketched long outlines in their own hand, moving ideas around until a seed grew into something worth planting on the typewritten page. Me? I leaned heavily on the likes of Kate Turabian when it suited me. Her Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (which morphed into The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition, for high school students) was gospel for my peers. I used it, but I never internalized it. Writing seemed like something that I started anew each and every time I attempted it. Back then, it still seemed like something that belonged to other people, until I started journaling every day, thanks to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I know I mention Cameron’s book at least once a month, it seems, but it still deserves more credit in the annals of understanding how to draft. The Artist’s Way and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life should be required reading before you get your adult card. Until I started teaching writing to a group of middle school girls back in 1990, they were the ones who showed me that the process itself was the gift.
We often think of writing as a private act, but it is profoundly communal. We learn it together. We test our voices in classrooms like Candice’s. We sit side by side with teachers who crouch next to us and whisper permission to keep going, get something, anything, down on paper, bird by bird. We practice in messy drafts until we hear something that sounds like truth.
People say that no one reads anymore. Maybe. But I would argue: if more people wrote, maybe more people would read. Because to write is to know what it costs. To write is to understand how much courage it takes to put down a word and then another. To write is to see, as Candice’s students see, that writing is not just a school skill—it is an act of creation, a conversation with the divine.
It can happen at a desk, or sprawled across a sofa, or with a teacher’s quiet encouragement. “Go ahead. Create more. I am here with you. I always have been. I always will be.”
May it always be so.
Curated Listening:
I think about what students love to listen to today — usually songs they can relate to, often well-written, running the gamut from the music their parents once imbibed to something more soulful, more angsty. I’ve liked mxmtoon (Maia) since she was a kid. Years after mxmtoon was thirteen, I heard her most well-known song sung by a seventh-grade middle school girl at a lip-sync contest seven or eight years ago. Now, Maia is an accomplished young artist with a voice all her own. Inspiring young women and men around the world. Listen to mxmtoon sing her iconic hit, Prom Dress, HERE.