"Writing Is Just Thinking on Paper"

I spent yesterday morning revising a writing sample for a job application. As usual, I found myself struggling to keep my word count down. Wordiness is my great flaw as a writer; I tend to compose long complex sentences with too many words and too many ideas. I know, now, to be wary of my own prolixity, to be generous with my periods and quick with the delete button, regardless of whether I'm writing a blog post, a poem, or a cover letter.

Every writer has something they struggle with, no matter who they are or what they're writing. I think that the first step to being a good writer is psychological: it's accepting that writing is always a struggle and knowing that you have weaknesses as well as strengths, bad writing habits as well as innate talents.

Most beginning writers don't understand that writing is hard, hard work. The 18-year-olds I taught at Penn State liked to believe that writing was anything but struggle and revision and an uphill battle against language itself. In my composition and creative writing courses, there were a few expressions of this resistance that I heard again and again:

1) "Writing cannot be taught." Usually, this one reared its ugly head in creative writing courses and was used as an excuse to ignore constructive criticism. Because my writing has been wonderfully improved by reading great writers, listening to the advice of my brilliant professors, and scouring pages and pages of feedback from my workshop classmates, I'm almost offended when students tell me this. Not only does it devalue my teaching, but it seems to insult the many people whose knowledge, time, and generosity was invaluable to my development. In a classroom, learning how to write happens slowly, it's true, in small, nearly invisible increments that never seem like much on their own, but these changes add up over time. Besides, talent is just a starting point, not a free ride to success; you have to develop what you've been given, not stubbornly refuse to get better than you already are.

Maybe it's true that writing cannot be taught, at least not to an unwilling mind; it has to be actively learned by a dedicated student through practice, close observation, and the awareness that they can always be better.

2) "My writing is personal, and critiquing this poem is like criticizing who I am." People get all upset when you say critical things about their writing. I do it, you do it, we all do it. This happens because writing so often reflects our thoughts, and our thoughts are, in some way, ourselves. This means that our writing can sometimes feel like ourselves on paper. This thinking is natural, but it's also not true. Words are just words, and the way we put them together is a matter of instinct and accident and choice; our ideas can be expressed in a million different ways, and good writing is about finding the best possible way to do this. So if I tell a student that their story's plot doesn't make sense, that doesn't mean that they are illogical and faulty, just that their words aren't yet doing the work they were intended to do.

3) "Good writing just happens because of inspiration. If the writing isn't good, then I wasn't inspired and it's not my fault." First, "inspiration" can apply to ideas, but not to the medium expressing the ideas (in this case, words). If the sentences and images and paragraphs are crappy, you can't blame that on a lack of inspiration, just on a lack of revision. Second, even ideas usually need mental "revising"; that's what brainstorming, outlining, and thesis-writing are for: to take an idea from a hunch to a cohesive and persuasive argument. Do you think Shakespeare's plays just sort of happened? Or that the Declaration of Independence was knocked off in a half hour? Or that Descartes got to "I think, therefore I am" one afternoon while paddling in his bathtub?

That being said, there are a few instances of good writing spurting forth naturally. It happens to everyone once in a while, but even Allen Ginsberg spent months revising Howl and Jack Kerouac tinkered with On the Road before he published it. Anyone who's written for any length of time will tell you that revision is far more important than inspiration. I've revised this post about four times before I published it, and this is just a rant for a blog. So there.

4) "Judging writing's quality is subjective and based on personal opinion; therefore, no one should grade another person's writing." Most students who say this have never read really bad writing. In English classes, students are usually exposed to the best literature ever written, so they don't understand how difficult it is to read shoddily constructed, grammatically confusing, logically flimsy writing (only English teachers and publishers have to do that). Sentences with faulty grammar, paragraphs with convoluted structure, and essays with no clear message are all difficult to understand and remember. Any practiced reader can tell the difference between good writing (which calls little attention to itself because of its orderly, logical, elegant construction) and bad writing (which requires a furrowed brow and much rereading to understand).

I agree that preferring Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner is a matter of taste, but preferring Faulkner to the average freshman student's essay has nothing to do with opinion.

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I once got a fortune cookie that said "Writing is just thinking on paper," and, by God, I wish it was (wouldn't my life be easy then!). What this fortune cookie and most beginning writers don't understand is that writing is not quick or easy or a mirror-like reflection of the self. Heck, it's not even about pleasing oneself. Public writing (meaning classroom papers and published articles and creative writing) cannot be judged solely by the standards of its author. Writing is a social task, one that is dependent on the reader's comfort and understanding. No one would consider themselves a good conversationalist if their small talk amused them but always left their partner confused, annoyed, or bored, and the same is true for writing. Learning how to write well is not about practicing direct personal expression; it is about learning how to let go of your solipsism, to gain awareness of the world outside of you, and to express oneself carefully so that your readers can really hear what you have to say.