How to Teach Writing

Writing has long been one of the most feared and most hated subjects in school. Honestly? I think that’s true for public, private, AND home educators. I believe part of the reason for this is a hyper-focus on grammar & punctuation balanced by only a vague picture of what makes good writing good. Properly placed periods never made bad writing good, and good writing is only improved by such formalities. I love perfect punctuation & clear grammar, but it is no reason to make a student cry.

Writing is about two things: vivid detail and strong voice. My two older children and I finished reading Across Five Aprils today, and while we already knew the ending–that President Lincoln would be assassinated and would not in fact be the beacon of hope for the wounded nation that the main character so longed for him to be–the actual description of the loss made it so much more personal, so much more devastating, that my son and I wept for a loss we had known but never tasted. The detail was vivid.

In students’ writing, we must remind them to use all of their senses, or they will forget that the greatest beauty of homemade bread is the smell of it cooking and the way that its smell reaches inside you and grasps your heart like the hand of a loved one. They will forget that its taste is not flavor alone but texture, and remembering the airy lightness of a special bread made by Grandpa, who passed last year, can be like suddenly smelling his aftershave on the air. Remembering the sticky hardness of a bite taken before news of sudden loss, the feeling of it sticking in your throat as you struggle to swallow it past the grief brings back so much more than just the taste or the texture of the bread.

Strong voice is not as simple as reminding students to use their five senses. This aspect must be developed over time by asking students, “And what do YOU think about that?” It’s not that our personal opinions are more important than facts but that our opinions, feelings, and reactions are human, and ultimately, when we read, we are looking for human connections.

One of my students once wrote about how he decided to become a dentist, perhaps an unusual career ambition for a sixteen-year-old kid, but otherwise a typical writing assignment with its mundane response. Except his wasn’t. He wrote about being in a car accident, regaining consciousness, and immediately feeling for his teeth. He wrote so passionately about his teeth that I was laughing out loud, and I will never forget his essay.

When the humanity of the writer, with all of his or her foibles, eccentricities, pain, rage, laughter, and passion, comes through on the printed page, this is strong voice. Leave the reader laughing or leave him crying, and your story will never leave him.

Teaching the humanity of the voice of the writer and convincing a student that the image in his head is not on the paper of course is more blood, sweat, and tears than it is lovely philosophy.

One way to begin this process is by listening—let the student read his work to you, so that you are not distracted by his spelling or grammar errors.

Focus on content and big ideas the first time through, and immediately find something to praise, preferably two to three things. Give concrete examples of what the student did well—I like how much detail you gave about the dinosaur! This kind of compliment sits deeper with anyone, as it comes across more sincerely and serves as a measuring stick by which the student can remember that he is a good writer, but it’s also a subtle example of how to write. In your praise, you are demonstrating vivid detail.

Next, ask the student if there’s anything he’d change about his finished product if he could. Mine usually take several minutes with very serious faces to read back over what they’ve written while I actively bite my tongue. Listen, and either agree or disagree with his assessment, but remember that his feelings are involved. Writing is personal. You will always have greater success teaching a student who believes he can complete the task you’ve assigned than one who’s convinced he’ll fail before he even starts, so be gentle!

Finally, add a suggestion of your own. This is different from a correction. It’s an interested request for more information or guidance in reading. For example, you could say,

“I sure would like to know more about that dinosaur. I wonder what color he is. Imagine what he smells like! Try to use ALL five of your senses when you’re describing. Except…don’t lick the dinosaurs!” (See—no hurt feelings here.)

Never give more than two or at the most three suggestions. It’s overwhelming, and it’s too much information to remember anyway. The goal is to give the child a sense of pride in his work and the feeling that he’s good at this and can do even better next time. The simple change between believing that one can write and believing that it’s too hard produces dramatic results in itself.

Suggestions should be given according to importance. The most important thing about a piece of writing is NOT punctuation or grammar but coherence. After all, how long can you continue reading something you don’t understand? It’s a painful activity! If the writing is incoherent, ask the student questions to try to draw him out, and make notes of his answers, so that he can see how he might compose a better response in the future.

Second in importance is how focused & clear the writing is. Does the student respond to the assignment? Does he stay on topic? Does he support his ideas well? You may understand all of his ideas, but if he jumps around from one topic to another so much that you feel as if you’re suffering from mental whiplash, you might want to spend some time talking to him about his main ideas, making outlines, and filtering supporting details from rabbit trails. Again, though, be gentle:

“Wow! That’s really interesting information you included here about Australia. And I’d love to know more about the House Finch. But…I’m wondering what those have to do with dinosaurs?” There’s usually a silent pause here, followed by laughter as the student realizes his own mistake. If he defends his choices, though, be prepared to hear him out and offer suggestions for either writing separate papers about Australia and House Finches or changing the topic of the paper to illustrate the student’s understanding of the connection between these three topics. You may just be lucky enough to get a rare and beautiful peek into the mind of your child.

Only after the big things listed above are in order should we worry about grammar and punctuation. The good news? Some of those grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors will likely be self-edited by the student along the way.

This is where you could tell a student to watch out for sentence fragments or explain comma splices, my personal favorite piece of punctuation. However, if you see that basic grammar and punctuation are a problem but the big issues are not in order, you should make a note of the grammar problems and address them in grammar class, when his feelings and writing are not at stake. Teaching grammar within the natural context of writing can be overwhelming if approached too soon. I imagine that it feels like juggling to the student–remembering good spelling, punctuation, capitalization, topic sentences, content–it’s enough to leave grad students in tears! I think it’s best to keep the grammar separate from writing until the writing is so good that the grammar IS the biggest issue.

One final note. It’s easy to get bogged down with writing and feel as if you’re slogging through endless trenches of Nowhere, whether you’re student or teacher. Make sure to keep samples of students’ work so that you can both go back and look at the progress you’re making together. The difference between a piece of writing produced at the beginning of the school year and one produced in the middle or especially at the end, is the best piece of encouragement anyone can offer.

Ode to Old Green Beans

I have loved thee long, green beans, though not well,

Since thy days in darkness I have squandered,

Seeking other, fresher goods from the dell,

While thou, waiting, hoping, my love pondered.

Long hast thou lived in the stank repose of death:

Thou hast seen holidays and merriment

Beyond the fleeting dreams of life’s stale breath,

More than legumes before you ere they went!

But today the dirge is finally sung,

Thy plastic coffin I joylessly rend:

It looks as though thou wilt again be young

In the fungal afterlife without end.

Green beans, string beans, I will remember you

Until trash be taken, whilst your smell I rue.

The Gift of Story

I'm a story-teller—a reader, a writer. While Prufrock is measuring his life with coffee spoons, I measure mine with stories. The ones I tell, like birth stories and the loss of my father, and the ones that I read, from Mrs. Piggle Wiggle to Faulkner.

For a long time, I looked forward to having and homeschooling children because of the stories we’d share. I remembered the deep-down rapture of Charlotte’s Web and the magic of Narnia, and it was like the smell of baking brownies inside me—the tantalizing aroma of a good story waiting to be shared in a way that you can’t as a child, when language is still relatively new and in a way that you don’t in college classrooms, where E. B. White and L’Engle are too humble to grace the pages of a syllabus.

My oldest is nine. He’s read a lot, and for the most part, it’s been of a higher quality than what I’d read at his age. I haven’t read most of the books he’s reading, and he’s just on the cusp of the ones I remember loving most. Next year, I’m planning to give him A Wrinkle in Time because I read it when I was ten, and I think it has been my favorite story ever since.

We have not yet shared stories in the way I’d always imagined, and my son is old enough that this has recently begun to bother me. I read Charlotte’s Web aloud a couple of years ago like my second grade teacher read it aloud to my class when I was a child. I pre-read Carry on, Mr. Bowditch and then challenged my sensitive son to read it despite the grief and loss within its pages.

My husband and I have each taken a turn reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I finally found a copy of an out-of-print mystery that was my mother’s when she was little. Three generations of my family have loved The Ghost of Dibble Hollow now.

My point is that we do share stories. The Secret Garden, Peter Pan, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to name a few more. But the sharing that has happened? It reminds me of sitting on the back porch with my dad when I was a little girl. I’d catch frogs while he looked at the stars, and he would tell me, “Listen.”

“Listen to what?” I’d ask, but he would only say, “Shh. Listen.” And I would listen to the sounds of the night, straining to hear beyond them to whatever deeper thing it was that Dad was listening to, until I became distracted again by frogs and we were called in from the supernatural to the mundane.

I’d expected sharing stories and midnight talks with my children to feel like that, but I hadn’t seen it yet through my dad’s eyes. I’d expected to feel the magic the way I’d felt it as a child and to experience my children’s reactions to it firsthand.

Whatever is going on inside their brains and hearts, though, is theirs. It comes to me in bits and pieces, as they try to patch together the words I insist they share, but their feelings are filtered through language that is fresh. Instead of the child enrapt in the wonder of a brand new story, I am the teacher now, the parent, the voice pleading under the stars that little bodies be still for a moment and listen.

Mersong

It was a blue watercolor dreamscape, shades of cadet and steel and midnight swallowing one another alternately, endless night. And she was blue like the waters that held her, blue like the sea above and sea below, blue like mother and father and home, forever the same shades without mercy, forever the same pressure, holding her down, holding her in, and even buoying her up.

But she had heard the sapphires, the dazzling cerulean, and oh! the turquoise. Up, up, till she’d almost broken sky, some promise of something, of light. She dared not touch it, lest it scatter her like the dingy shades of blue, into sparkling bits of something better than herself, something unimaginably other.

It haunted her, that light she longed to listen to, that light that liquid lingered in the jewels of the sea, in the depths of her own blue heart. But more…it was that she listened and loved alone, that they never spoke of the sapphire song or the turquoise harmony. Only the darkness, and then not the darkness of the deep but the darkness of the mystery that lay upon this world like a heavy body, dead, and breathing decay down into the sea.

Day after day she floated beneath the turquoise stars and wondered at the vast world beyond her, the world with other shades of blue. Then she would flutter gracefully home, leaving a wake of cloudy blue behind her.

When she reached her blue home, the door was ajar, the effects of a younger sistser, and deep in thought, forgetting her mersong, she slipped in and up to her room. By dinnertime, she heard her family congregating and swam slowly down, melancholy, and forever blue.

They did not speak to her, and she served a plate and sat down in her place in silence, picking at scallops and frowning at seaweed. At last one of them asked of her, whether her younger sister had heard from her. And then her older brother. The conversation continued between her worried parents as if she were not there, and they did not sing to each other as they sang. They sang at her as if she were empty chair only.

She felt as if the blue had swallowed her at last: body unbearably blue, she had become completely camouflaged by her surroundings, nothing but blue at last. And she began to cry quiet blue tears that were swallowed by the vast blue sea, but when she sniffled them back, her mother gasped, her father listened to her with wide, glassy blue eyes, her sister let out a squeal, and her brother beside her jumped back, knocking his chair to the woven seaweed floor.

“Valleria?”

“Daddy?” she answered from her blueness.

“Have you been there the whole time? Where is your mersong?” he demanded.

“Daddy, couldn’t you hear me? I’ve been right here in front of you--”

“How can I hear a silent mermaid?”

“But…I hear you, Daddy, always. When you wake in the mornings and swim down--”

“Because I sing!” he bellowed.

“Not until you reach the kitchen,” she answered. “And Mama in the garden--”

“I sing in the garden!”

“Sometimes you get lost in the anemones and forget, and there is only the memory of your song.”

“You imagine it! No one can hear a silent merman,” her father objected as her mother wept.

“With your other ears, of course you can,” she answered in surprise.

“Other ears?” Her father’s face turned toward her mother, but his gaze missed her by a head. He rose then, and swam over to his daughter, and put his hands a the sides of her head.

“Two ears. As I remembered. No more of this nonsense now. Mersong at all times, child, or you’ll be kept to your room, so we’ll know where you are!”

“No, Daddy, not those ears,” she reached for his hands and moved them to her face. “These,” she sang softly.

She closed her face as he felt those other ears. Then he moved his hands to his own face, and at last, softly, “Daughter, these are not ears. These are dead orifices for tears. Mermen do not hear sadness; their tears become one with the sea.”

She thought of the other blue, the mystery and shattered gems. She heard them only with these ears, she realized. Perhaps they were tears then, the bright blue baubles that contrasted with the boiling sea. Perhaps they were being drawn up and out, sadness swallowed so that the mersong would go on.

But they did not sound like sadness to she who could hear them, and so she took her brother with her to hear the sapphires sing like silver bells, for his curiosity was piqued by the ears in his face.

But the other blues did not sing for him. There was mersong for him only, for him only endless blue.

“These are not ears,” he concluded, “for mine do not hear.”

“But it is a different kind of hearing,” she said, closing her face-ears to try to explain, but when she closed them, the song was gone. The sapphires and azure illuminations did not just stop their song, they stopped altogether. They were not. There was only deepest, saddest blue, and that without tone or melody. No steel, no cadet. Only midnight forever. Only endless eve.

She opened them again and listened to her brother--not his mersong only, but his blue fins streaked with violet, his strong blue form, his lavender hair flowing behind him. She heard it in his fins, just a snatch of the turquoise melody, just when he swam near the surface song. As if a piece of heaven, a bright star were buried there in him. She looked at her own fins and saw the same: cerulean sparkles that did not belong to this blue world.

“Open your ears!” she cried, swimming toward the surface at last without fear, for she was made of the stuff above, and as she swam she realized the great blue tragedy of her people: they who sang the mersong were deaf.

Who Am I as a Writer?

Thanks to Robin, I came across this Wanna Be Writers Meme, & it looks like fun! I tend to be very solitary in my writing, am shy about discussing it, & don't pass it around to even my best friends until it's finished. I've been thinking of getting out of the cave, & this seems like a good place to test the waters.

Who am I as a writer? I'm currently working on a young adult trilogy that is probably the truest work I've ever written, the most me. But I'm also working on a sci fi trilogy that's FUN, interesting, all the things that good fiction should be. I love what the Matrix should have been (don't quite understand what it is), & I am always drawn into thought-provoking works in the vein of 1984, I, Robot, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, etc. I'm also working on a series of fairy tale rewrites, a Bible study on faith, & I keep poetry going to rotate through everything. Ideas are never short around here.

Where I am in the writing process: I've been writing since 1989. I was 10 years old & finally *got* it. Writing was nothing more than a drawn out description held together by a plot. I'd never been able to do description before because I had this idea that it had to fit into a paragraph. Actually describing everything in real detail was overwhelming, but when I finally let myself go & tried it, the words just poured out. I became a weapon of mass destruction with my ability to gross my husband out. No, that came much later. I was very lady-like with my powers until I met him.

I have long wanted to be a writer & have been pretty steady in writing over the years, but I had this idea that to BE a writer, I needed someone else's say-so. I think I'm mostly past that, but I've also started writing smaller things to help with that self-image, & I've started actively sending out my mss. Okay, it hasn't actually been active lately, but that's because I've had another idea....

My current problems: I've decided that the books in my YA trilogy don't stand alone, so I'm smashing them together into one great big work that I intend to begin sending out (again) as soon as I'm done w/ the polished version of book 3. I'd finished book 1 & started sending it out while I worked on other things, but this epiphany has brought me back to finishing (completely) this set of books. I'm very, very happy with how they are turning out.

My question(s) this week: I guess my question is about consistency and/or staying connected in the real world. It seems like I can do one or the other well but not both. In other words, my head is in my fictional place, & I'm getting a good bit of writing done consistently, or my head is in homeschooling my four kids, keeping house, tutoring, & being in this world, & then I'm not writing consistently.

On Hope

I read a book review recently which concluded, "Books like [this] make you laugh and cry and ultimately leave you feeling happy and hopeful."

You know that nice, warm, after-a-movie feeling when the world is almost-right and you can do anything. You even look like the heroine of the film until you get to the bathroom and have to stand under the garish movie theater bathroom lighting.

We call that "hope." We like that feeling, fleeting as it is, and sometimes we chase it like an exotic butterfly because we're so desperate to feel hope.

I do not want to feel hopeful. I do not want to be full of hope—not in the emotional sense of the word. Not in the synonym-for-optimism sense. Feelings are far too fickle for me, and like a drug, I find that they leave me feeling emptier when they're gone.

I am a confirmed pessimist. I lose fights in my dreams, but worse, I lose them in my imagination, when I'm fully awake and fully in control. Give me a few minutes to discuss your problems, and while I can encourage, I can really discourage. I can suck the optimism from an entire room with the precision of a government-designed weapon.

Not that I've ever tried.

But if I'm going to deal in hope, it's not going to be trite. It's not going to be sticky stuff that comes from a tree. Hope is not the ephemeral sense that "everything will work out."

I'm discouraging partly because I'm so hard to encourage.

The problem with this kind of hope is simple, though. It's a feeling. Real hope—the kind that is the marrow of the human race—is not an emotion. It is a tool. It is an engine, a generator that spurs the human heart onward when all else has failed.

Sometimes it's only an oar, and you have to pick it up and push back the sea with all your strength until you want to weep with exhaustion. For the sake of survival, though, you pick up the oar, you choose to hope, and you press on with all the determination and fortitude you can muster.

Hope is a powerful force—one to be wielded, not merely felt, not merely enjoyed at the end of a good book.  Hope is a lifeboat, and when your boat sinks, it will get you to that distant shore.

Keep it close. Use it well.

Snow Day

I imagine it's Spring Cleaning in heaven. You can feel the peace coming quietly down with the snow, which must be bits of angels' wings. It's so hard to watch everything turning quietly white and imagine that it's actually wet and cold.

We've done the snowy things you do. We made snow-cream at lunchtime, and the kids are outside now with dad, building the biggest snowman ever. Baby is standing stock-still, crying, "NOOOOOO!" Which actually means "snow," but he refuses to walk in it. Until dad moved him, he simply stood in the doorway, where he got dragged out with everyone else. Now he's sitting happily on a dry porch chair, swigging hot tea from a sippy cup & watching everyone else roll, flop, & fall in the mysterious stuff he happily licked out of his bowl earlier.

On a day so full of good will toward men and peace on earth, how can there still be so much angst, even in my own household?

We've been sick for a week, and the house shows it. We've got that cooped-up feeling going, and the remainders of head colds that can bring short tempers. But it's something more.

It never snows in Texas—maybe an inch every three years here in DFW. We've got close to 4" today. It's the most snow I've seen in Texas in my life, and I've been here the whole time. A neighbor walked by, full of the joy of the miracle, and grinning, he told the kids, "Better enjoy it today! Because it won't come around again any time soon!"

I think that's exactly it. It's the pressure of a once-in-a-lifetime snow. It's the same pressure that we get raising kids. How many times have you heard, "They grow up fast—before you know it, they'll be gone!"

And I have taken the advice so seriously, that in trying not to miss anything, sometimes I miss everything. The pressure of tomorrow, of today being gone, becomes so much that I miss today as much as the person who forgot to look at all.

Sometimes a snow day needs to be just a snow day. Maybe it will be the only one like it in our lifetimes, but that is food for reflection on another day. Today is for snowball fights and strangely shaped snowmen and the icy, crunchy, shapey feel of snow and its limitless possibilities.