How to Write Like Stephen J. Valentine, heroic high school teacher and author of Make Yourself Clear
This post is part of my ongoing series on how great writers write. Subscribe to future posts here.
My co-author Joe Lazauskas says that Stephen J. Valentine was the toughest teacher ever — and also the best one he ever had. That’s why I was so excited to get my hands on Steve’s new book, Make Yourself Clear, which is about how learning to be an amazing teacher can make you better at business — and in other areas of life, too.
Steve is the Director of Academic Leadership at Montclair Kimberley Academy in New Jersey. He is Coordinating Editor of Klingbrief, author of Everything but Teaching, and co-author of Blending Leadership and Make Yourself Clear, which is co-authored with Reshan Richards, founder of Explain Everything, which happens to be my favorite whiteboarding and video explainer tool.
I encourage you to check out their new book if you want to get better at teaching. Check out my interview with Steve below if you want to get better at writing, too!
What’s your process for putting together a big writing project like Make Yourself Clear?
I love my job — teaching and school leadership — but it doesn’t allow for much writing time. So I try to write a little bit most days. I define writing quite liberally; it can be generating words or moving words around or removing words. I’ve published three books in ten years and a bunch of essays and interviews and blog posts. Mine is a boring, plodding approach, but it works. For me.
If I’m working on a big project, like my recent book, I tend to add a second writing session each day. Again, even when I’m writing a book, I’m holding down a very attention-intensive job, so these writing sessions are as short as they can be. A typical rhythm looks like this: writing by hand in the morning and then typing and tightening at night. This process forces drafts and allows me to work quickly — I get an idea down before the day gets serious, and then, when I type it much later, it’s immediately improved.
I’ve written my last two books in collaboration with pretty much the smartest person I know (Reshan Richards). That also helps. We liken our working method to a tennis game. One of us bounces the ball for a while on one side of the court, and then, when ready, he hits it to the other side. (We documented the process here.)
We have different skills and interests and a very similar sense of humor, so the game is enjoyable. I enjoy writing sentences more than Reshan does, and Reshan excels in thinking about the shape of books, design, illustrations, chapter breaks, and things like that. He’s also a very, very talented project manager.
Regardless, the tennis analogy gives us everything we need as writers. If one of us is tired or busy, we knock the ball across the net. If one of us needs feedback, which of course we always do, it’s built into the game.
I also love the surprise, the unplanned direction, that your writing can take when you pass it back and forth with someone you trust without keeping track of prior changes. You open a piece of writing that you worked on and ask, “where’s it at today and how can I advance it again?” It’s awesome to think something and then send it to a trusted ally and have it advanced and shaped in some way that I never could have expected. When it comes back, I’m usually excited because Reshan either deeply understood what I was saying and added an interesting nuance or saw a new way forward on a route I might not have seen or selected.
How did you use any principles from the book itself during the process of working on it?
SV: The great meta-question. I love that.
My latest book demonstrates why and how teaching practices can be useful outside of classrooms and schools. My co-author and I believe that most people can transform their work for the better by approaching it with a teaching mindset.
So right away, first paragraph, we had a problem. A book is like a long lecture, and if you study teaching, you know that very few lectures are effective. They feel great for the lecturer, but unless the lecturer is very gifted, he or she is not doing much for the brains of the learners in front of him or her. Teaching as theater — as monologue — is not teaching; it’s entertainment.
To work against the inherited teaching defects of our chosen medium, we tried some unconventional book design moves. A couple times in the book we invite the reader to skip over entire chunks of the text. Essentially, we’re telling people that they have grasped enough of an idea to move onto the next one. If they want to go deeper, they can continue to read or dive into the references. If they’re a little bored or in a hurry, they can advance rapidly and still level-up appropriately when they move onto the next chapter.
That’s a move inspired by the classroom, by the great teachers we’ve know. Teachers are constantly thinking about pacing and segmentation and depth levels. And so as a teacher, if you’re presenting a lesson, you know there are certain non-negotiable things that you have to convey and instill. But you also know that you don’t have to go into extreme depth on everything all the time. It depends on the students and the setting and the goals of the class.
Which points to another thing. . . . Even if you just flip through the book, you’re going to see that there are multiple ways to read it. This choice architecture comes from a deep principle present in master teachers — they provide appropriate choice and/or multiple learning pathways. When teachers provide choice and various learning pathways, learners gain more agency. Even better, they often access internal motivation, a.k.a. rocket fuel for learning. We want our readers to experience some of that. It’s good for them; it’s good for us. And, you know, I don’t want to give away the ending, but we do close the book by trying to encourage reflection in the reader, another move that we ported right out of the classrooms of the best teachers we know. A good teacher leaves time, and makes room, for reflection and synthesis. For meaning making.
What rituals, if any, do you have as a writer?
SV: Not to be a wise guy, but I often don’t have time for rituals. If I have time, I write to collect my thoughts, to advance a project, to energize myself for the next thing that’s coming at me.
When that time is up, I put the writing away and look at it later (often making a note on my calendar to prompt me to do so if something promising or promised is happening).
This may be a work fate that I created for myself due to excessive early worship of William Carolos Williams. I remember reading stories about Williams at his day job, where he was a busy doctor in Patterson, New Jersey. In his office, when he had a moment, he would whip out his typewriter and type out his poems as fast as he could. He was operating, no pun intended, in what today we might call interstitial time. That’s what I do, too. I write in moments that appear. In the cracks.
I also use a technique that I call “frame swapping.” If you think of your words like a photograph or painting, and then you drop them into a new frame, you end up seeing different things in the work, often rather quickly. I frame-swap my text constantly when I’m writing.
As an example, the last essay I wrote (about being a teacher-writer) started as something I said into a phone. I clicked a button (the Rev App) and it arrived in my email inbox a few hours later.
I moved it into Google Docs and started working on it, but then I knew I would be traveling and not have guaranteed, consistent access to WiFi, so I moved it into Word. When Word started bugging me, I moved it into Text Edit. At one point, I printed it in order to edit it with a pen. In every frame, I saw something new.
Last: I try to publish a blog post most week days at www.refreshingwednesday.com. This practice has very little to do with writing or audience. It has to do with the time when I’m not writing. If I know I have to produce something for an interested public each day, then I become better at observing and noticing when I’m not writing. My eyes and ears stay hungry.
What’s your writing toolkit?
SV: It’s not that interesting. I usually start writing on paper of any kind — an envelope, a yellow legal pad, a paper plate, whatever’s in reach. Or I use some kind of recording device on my phone for dictation.
Everything finds its way into my MacBook Air, where I use Text Edit, Word, or Google Docs, depending on my WiFi access and what program I intuitively feel like writing in.
Where do you go for inspiration?
SV: I don’t go looking for inspiration anymore. To me, it’s a reward of my commitment to a process. So I go to work — writing work — in order to earn inspiration rather than the other way around. I think a lot of people want to be inspired in order to work; then, instead of working, they watch Netflix or go to a baseball game. As a result, they’re always behind or grouchy about their writing, which gives them something else to talk about. This, too, is a process, just not mine.
When I’m really locked in on an idea, whether that’s an essay I’m writing, a blog post, a book chapter, whatever, I find that my life sticks to it. Things that I read, things that I experience, adhere to the concept that I’m working on, creating a “bisociation” between the idea that’s being developed and the life that I’m living. When two unrelated things become one, through an act of concentration or reverence or awe, that’s inspiring. What inspires me is the way the world looks and feels when I’m actively writing. So I write to get there.
Who is your favorite writer, and why?
SV: My favorite writer is an untrained non-writer: John Cage. I find his writing (especially the book Silence) to be endlessly surprising, wide awake, and inventive. It’s as if a very curious and mischievous person started from scratch, without many rules, or without reverence for the rules, and asked, “what would it mean to write something down for a species that deserves to be surprised and nurtured and encouraged?”
He accomplishes so much on the page. You don’t have to leave his writing to understand it. You don’t have to go through any kind of separate, interpretive phase. I mean, you can do that if you want to with Cage, and many people have, but everything that’s supposed to happen in a
Cage text happens right on the page, as you experience it.
All in all, in a way his music really doesn’t, Cage’s writing wakes me up and creates alertness in me that wasn’t there beforehand. If I read some Cage, it can change the entire course of my day in terms of what I notice and the permission I give myself to be spontaneous, to find places to play even in the most restrictive, tight spaces. What did you do in school before you knew you could doodle in the margins? What did you do after that? In typical fashion, Cage is not a cage at all.
What’s your favorite thing you’ve ever read in your life?
SV: When my daughter was about 7, we were sitting on our porch swing, and for once, we were both quiet. As my mind started to fill up with some adult worry or another, she asked me if she could borrow my phone to write something down. She pecked away in the Notes App until she was finished, and then she handed me the phone. I read the little poem that she had written and it washed my mind clean — still does.
Birds chirping in my ear
But lots of other sounds I hear
Wind whistling, happy kidsTrees blowing in the wind
Sun setting, hear my poem
“Love this world
It’s all our home.”
What’s your best piece of advice for writers?
SV: I have several paired concepts that I offer as advice when asked. In each case, you shouldn’t have one without the other.
First, when possible, ask for a deadline, and then be the type of writer and person who meets deadlines. Writing doesn’t happen because you dream about it or because you have some kind of romantic notion about what it means to be a writer. Writing happens when you make a personal commitment to carefully move thought and attention through your and onto a screen or page. A deadline externalizes that commitment. And then, being somebody who can meet a deadline, who takes that seriously . . . that means you're a committed writer. That means you’re really doing it and putting yourself in a position to improve. The writing game has few, if any rewards, except the chance to be an honest craftsperson and to continue to produce and improve.
Second, I’m a big fan of acknowledging that a piece of writing is never finished and yet must be called finished at some point. So, once you have a deadline, your job is to situate your life in such a way that you give the promised piece as much intense, concentrated energy as you can.
You’re going to throw yourself out of balance probably, so you should warn those people you live with or who care about you. (Or you can be grouchy, as described above. Your call.) You bring the piece as far along as you can. You polish it. You make it presentable, and that‘'’s it. You throw your absolute best pitch into the hands of your editor or your publication or your blog and hopefully it finds some readers. And then you move on to something else.
Write the page, deliver the page, turn the page.
The final conceptual pairing that works for me is: make sure you're spending time both woodshedding and shipping. In the woodshed, you practice and stretch and play with your language. You get — and stay — in shape. You reconnect with the primitive sense of fun that made you want to play with words in the first place. Then, every once in a while, you have to make sure to step out of the woodshed and actually perform. You have to ship, you have to put yourself in front of an audience, and before that, hopefully, a tough editor, in order to learn anything permanently.
One more, a bonus that breaks my rule of paired concepts: It took me over a decade to become this non-famous and this unsuccessful as a writer. May you be so lucky.
What do you want written on your tombstone?
SV: He shook off the self, finally.
