To Get Better at Writing You Must Teach It
In 2012, my first son was born, and my pursuit of novel publication came to a screeching halt.
I had a lot to learn while I understood my role as father. I kept writing, and began dabbling in other forms of storytelling. I didn’t think I would ever go back. In fact, I told a professor in 2015 that I was done writing novels.
I was wrong.
This year, 2018, I found my dream again.
And it was all thanks to Jackie.
“Novelist? That’s an identity I’ve not heard in a long time.”
I teach ninth grade English, which is a fun position for high school. You meet them when they’re still children, and then get to watch them grow up into young adults and graduate. If you’re lucky, you can grow from being a teacher to a mentor.
I met Jackie when she was in the ninth grade. She graduated about a month ago.
I took a partially out-of-classroom position last year, so I had a cramped little cubicle at the end of our office work area. Jackie had a free period and so we spent a lot of time talking about her future, her college applications, her dreams and goals.
One day she said to me “I feel like you need to write a novel or a play or do some great work.”
Which was a little strange, because I had never told her I wrote novels. In fact, 9 years before, I had gotten pretty far along in publishing one, but it didn’t work out.
So I told her. She read the almost-published-novel, told me that I needed to try again, and then asked me to teach her how to do it.
So I did.
As a result, I wrote the first novel I had written in 5 years, and I did it in record time. Jackie also wrote half a novel, which is very impressive given that she was class president, going to prom, juggling a boyfriend, and dealing with her college acceptances all at once. Now I’m back on track to pursuing my writing dreams, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t taught her.
Here are the benefits of teaching another your skills.
You Have To Get Honest About Your Process
In my 20s, I was obsessed with trying every writing method I could get my hands on. I had internalized a lot of the practices, and mix-and-matched the pieces of my favorite methods. But it had been a long time since I had gone through the exact steps of each process.
When it came time to teach Jackie, I had to go back and look through my old notes and think through all the articles and methods I had learned. It made me re-examine my fundamentals.
Fundamentals are the key to everything. Practicing my fundamentals meant I improved my writing.
Teaching forces you to move slow. Teaching forces you to make order out of the chaos that is your creative process. Teaching forces you to make definitive statements about how you do things as a writer.
And as writers, we know that clarity is everything.
You Get To See How Far You’ve Come
These are all of my writing notebooks from 2011, onward.
I wish I had done more, but I used to do a lot more brainstorming on post-it notes, which were then thrown away when I was done with them.
In order to get honest about my process, I had to go through all of my notebooks to see what I did. It astonished me some of the exercises I forced myself to do. I made the standard plot-arcs, I made detailed lists of character traits, I made mind-maps of every plot variation possible over and over again.
I don’t need to do this much legwork anymore; I know what works and what doesn’t without experimentation. But I had forgotten how painstaking my process used to be, and how new I was to so much of the craft.
There’s a kung fu parable a teacher told me once. A rich man wanted to learn the art of kung fu, so he paid a master a great sum of money. The master sat the man down with a bucket of water and told him to punch the water for several hours a day. For a whole month, the man punched the water, until one day he got fed up with the master.
“You have taught me nothing! All I have done, every day, is punch this water!”
The master got a heavy brick and set it before the rich man.
“Strike it,” he said. When the rich man struck it, he broke the brick in two.
We get better at writing every single day. But it’s hard for us to realize that we are improving. Teaching another shows you how far you’ve come, and bolster our spirits for the journey.
You Can Marvel At Their Talent
Jackie’s name will be on the cover of a book someday, if she wants it. She’s that talented.
Yes, there are some craftsman problems with her writing, but she’ll fix those. Watching a young mind spin a tale that captures your heart and imagination is a marvelous thing. They need to be told that they are painters with words. They need to be told that they have a gift.
They need to be nourished so their talent can grow.
How many of us never had that guiding voice in our lives to tell us to keep going? How many of us had to boostrap our way through self-doubt and insecurity?
You could change that for someone else, and marvel at the stories they create.
Go teach someone. Pass on what you have learned.
It will make them better. It will make you better.
It will make the world better.
