I taught writing for 36 years. I was taught how to write by 3 or 4 very good teachers including colleagues. I learned most about it by teaching it.
I cannot imagine my life without writing.
I worry, as only a teacher can worry, that the ability to write will slip away from kids as they rely more and more on AI and ChatGPT to do their thinking for them.
For me writing is the creation of something from nothing, the most wonderful magic trick I know. The something that first emerges on the screen or the legal pad is chaotic, a jumble, my monkey self one finger pounding a keyboard or drifting unpunctuated clauses and words and images across a page. After the lawlessness of the initial effort, the writer-killer comes to eye the scene and choose what, if anything will be spared – two words here, a partial sentence there, the beginning thread of a thought, of a scene, of a moment pulled into clarity.
The writer-killers must kill. Writing does not work without this persona coming out from the shadows. Sometimes, not one syllable is spared. They disappear.
Revision proceeds by a type of clairvoyance, a second sight that listens to a sentence, that tries to see the effects of each noun and verb, that looks at how images and stanzas and paragraphs dovetail. The process strives to see that spectral quality of what is true, what is authentic as opposed to what is cheap, sentimental, a cliche. The very best writers are the most intuitive. They can most often discern what is real.
I understand the limits of my talent, but for me, the act of writing is everything. When I am in the flow of creation, I can compare it to the feeling I had while climbing. One’s focus narrows to the task, only the task, to the cliff face, to the rock above and the moves one must take to keep going up – the body becomes a compact, isolated bundle of muscles, eyesight and flickering, mercury-quick judgments. That’s a pretty good description of what it also feels like to write.
Writing has taught me to treasure the clarity of expression and ideas, the compression of thought, the discipline of staying with something inherently frustrating. It has taught me to trust my own mind. It has shown me again and again and again, the benefits that come from struggling to help another see what I see and feel, because if I can do that as a writer, then I know that I’ve made a thing that tells the truth, that ephemeral, maddening, momentary and essential, absolute rendition of the world as it is.
