Great v Best

The original impetus for creating Teach Writing like a Writer was that I deeply believed there were some better ways to teach young writers the craft.

(I apologise immediately for how much this is going to sound like a wanky LinkedIn post, but away we go.)

I knew that there was more to writing than the templates and same-again structures we were currently teaching. I wasn’t seeing the results I knew young writers were capable of.

I also knew that the passion and creativity just weren’t there, weren’t able to thrive, when young writers were pressed into the style of writing that was easiest to teach and assess.

Writing is a bit more of an art than a science, and I wanted to build ways to teach that authentic practice.

Having finally sat down to try and nut out how that works, I’ve immediately hit the roadblock of what we’ll call Great v Best.

There’s a reason why we do things in the classroom the way we currently do them. The modern classroom has remained relatively unchanged since the industrial revolution, specifically designed for teaching as mass production. We teach writing in terms of use these words, don’t use these ones, paragraphs should go here, no more or less than three sentences here, because it’s the fastest and easiest way to achieve an acceptable result.

Only problem is, the pieces young writers produce using these established methods are like a loaf of bread from Coles, rather than artisinal sourdough. That might sound harsh, but I can’t remember the last time a student produced a genuine piece of writing in spite of being told to use a proforma.

Today’s challenge, specifically: some writers are “planners”, while others are “discoverers”.

Stephen King has famously compared writing to uncovering a fossil. George R.R. Martin calls himself a "gardener" rather than an "architect," planting seeds and seeing what grows rather than working from a blueprint. (And at the rate the Winds of Winter is coming, he must be planting oak trees, amiright?")

John Grisham has said he outlines his legal thrillers thoroughly before writing the first page. Brandon Sanderson is another well-known outliner who creates detailed plans and magic system rules before drafting.

I myself am probably a discoverer. What I really like to do is just write all the cool fun bits first, then go back and try and string them together in something resembling a structure. A fair criticism of my work is that there’s no room to breathe between sequences, and that’s because I find breathing boring and deliberately write as little of it as I can, even if it’s for the worst. But this isn’t about me.

But how do you teach someone how to go with the flow? Let alone how to teach another teacher to teach this?

Teachers love a planner because outlines and templates keep things within the margins, making it easy to create a rubric around. It also means young writers produce something that can be marked at the end of the day, rather than a collection of fragments. That’s not laziness, that’s just a pragmatic efficiency.

There’s probably room for improvement in the templates we use, and I could probably take those from good to great.

Yet truly teaching writing like a writer would involve teaching teachers how to create an editor/writer dynamic.

We should be focusing on how to run a writer’s rooms, how to provide feedback loops specifically tailored to each young writer, and how to create and present a range of exercises that gently guide experimentation and creativity rather than rigidly enforcing a style.

That would be the absolute best version of this idea to help teachers develop young writers. It’s the way “real” writers work.

It would also be incredibly difficult for teachers to implement, which, as one of many design considerations, potentially stops it from being practice. Although I do think it would be closer to best. Better.

To be clear, neither method of approaching writing is more right than the other.

As above, both schools have produced plenty of successful authors.

I’m also not against it as a teaching methodology. It’s why, when teaching multiplication, we start with a series of equations, and tell students how to solve them.

Only later, once they’ve mastered the core skill, do we provide worded questions, which challenge them to think first about how they’re going to solve the problem - which tool is right for the job - before then utilising the skill to complete the work.

I don’t think we do enough of the second part when teaching writing.

The challenge in teaching “planning” exclusively over discovering, in relying on templates and scaffolding, in espousing specific story beats and established ways of using language, is that all of these rules and structures are restrictive of true writing, not just for the discoverers, but even for the planners who want to experiment within the structure.

Teaching someone the best way to copy Picasso is not teaching them how to paint, though it may form a foundation.

I’m not sure there’s really a solution to this. Maybe true art (/writing) is actually unteachable. Maybe all we can do is use rigid structures to teach the skills, then hope the young writer has it within themselves to go and apply what they’ve learnt in a separate, freeform environment.

But I can’t really agree with that. Not only because then this whole project falls over. It feels a little too much like passing the buck onto the writer themselves, the ones looking desperately for the mentoring.

It also doesn’t make sense when everything else we teach can absolutely be placed within a real world context.

If you have any suggestions or insights, let me know.

I’ll keep working on it.

In the mean time, get in touch for PD on how to Teach Writing like a Writer, or let’s work together to Get Your Students Published.