When I taught writing, I taught writing at a nonprofit I used to run called 826LA, and it’s a writing center. It was in Los Angeles. There are branches across the country. And everything that we did was project-based, and I love project-based learning, project-based teaching. The key was that it would culminate not only in a book or a music magazine full of reviews or a newspaper with a food section, and kids could review candy.
Not only would we have that finished product, but we also always asked kids to read their work out loud. That always changed everything. I think writing, art, books – it’s just a conversation. It’s a conversation between me, the writer, and an audience.
And that can get strange, because this job is a lonely one. It’s sitting alone in a house, or you don’t feel like you’re talking to anybody when you’re there and you have 30 minutes and you’re at your desk in a classroom. But everything that we teach, clarity, sensory detail, the rules of grammar, the rules of usage – these are all things to make communication easier.
And they can seem like abstractions, but once you realize that you’re going to be up in front of people, that you’re actually writing for an audience, that your audience isn’t just somebody with a pen who’ll be marking the things that are wrong with it but actually that you are trying to create an experience, convey a feeling or convince a person.
And you are on the spot having to do it. That changes everything. It can be easy to get sort of distance from the fact that there’s somebody else on the other end of your writing. But I never trust writers who say, like, oh, I just write things for myself. Because there’s always somebody on the other end of a good piece of art.
And I think, you know, making projects and encouraging kids to read their work out loud – that hits home. Oh, this is why I should write this way.
