The Courage to Write?

Today's activity of taking our personal narratives and (essentially) chopping them up was quite an eye-opening experience. I think, many times, people are so fearful of writing that they maybe don't know how to begin? Maybe they are afraid to write, for whatever reason: fear of failure, fear of exposing the private concept of "self" to others (which in turn may raise feelings of vulnerability/inadequacy), fear of being thought of having bad grammar (why does, seemingly, everyone feel that they shouldn't say this or that because "the English teacher" will judge them harshly?). Today, some writers felt great pain when completing this exercise; yet, others, had no qualms about the process at all.

For myself, I had no qualms about chopping my work up, at all. I knew it was a draft, and I was actually just writing down a stream of thoughts, memories, experiences as I remembered them. Be they good or bad. I never stopped to process what I was writing: I just wrote. I figured I'd sort out "all of that stuff" at some later point. Having another person help me with that was, as Don says, "all good."

Stepping back a bit, I have to say that I feel so sad when I meet someone for the first time, and then they find out that I teach high school English. Suddenly, what started out as being a promising conversation/dialogue, story-telling, etc - becomes a situation in which I am "perceived" as an expert on grammar - a "judge" (if you will) and then suddenly the person begins "policing" themselves in anticipation of what they think I may be thinking about their content. They begin to flounder and wonder HOW they should say something rather than just having their true voice(s) shine through and just - say - it (whatever it is).

Similarly, writing, I believe, is much the same way. We, as tentative writers, seem to have a certain level of discomfort in sharing our work with others. A certain fearfulness or uncertainty. But, as difficult as the exercise was today, it was a very valuable learning experience because if we don't challenge our notions of how WE should write then how can we help to foster the writing process amongst our students? I like what Chris B said today (and I'm loosely paraphrasing): "Doesn't it take a small amount of pain to grow, even a little"?