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Letters on Writing
Letters on Writing
By Jane Tawel
March 4, 2020
I work with a young writer who, like all young real writers, angsts over everything. I have only known her a short time and I adore her. Maybe because I am an old angst-er myself. She is, I am sorry to report, typical of the average American student today, in that she gets excellent grades and learns little. She, as so many, tragically learn precious little except what will take them any further than the next A- or the next school year and eventually the next job.
My dear student has been taught to write with great form and no substance. Or rather, she has been conditioned to ignore the substance she wants to write about, and to shove her writer’s dainty Cinderella feet into the huge ugly shoes of the Stepsisters of five-line paragraphs and “active prose”. So, I cheer her on with counterarguments to the propaganda that many poor unwitting, hardworking teachers of writing have been led to believe themselves. And I help her swim against the current of her own “shoulds”, until she can find the right way to swim with the currents of her ideas and imagination.
When writing, at any age or for any genre, one should not reach for the buoys and lifeboats of form until one has found one’s own strokes of function. Maybe a good writer has to even be a little afraid she will…
