NWP Director Jeni Smith reflects on the ownership of writing:
January has ended and I have not yet wished you a happy new year. So here we are: Happy New Year! I hope that the year ahead is good to you and that you have left behind all those early January resolutions and are forging ahead into an interesting February. The sun is shining through my study window, calling me to be out walking, reminding me that the windows need washing, making me think about all that I have not written in the last few months. And all that I have written, for my own eyes only.
In my last post, all the way back in October, I wrote about Writing Club, attended by some of the youngest children in the school. We are still meeting every week and our numbers have grown a little. It is a relief to have some older children in the group who can help with spellings and be, quite unselfconsciously, good examples of what a writer might look like. We can become very tangled up in thinking ourselves not proper writers because we have not published or appeared on anyone’s bestseller list. It seems presumptuous to call ourselves writers. But we do write. And it is a pleasure and a solace. Writing alongside each other, whether adults or children, reminds us of the many ways we can be a writer and we learn from each other. Writing Club is a highlight for those children who attend. I imagine that might be something to do with washi tape and stickers and watercolour pencils, but it also is bound up with making, composing for ourselves. Making a mark.
Everyone has the capacity to write and to use writing for their own purposes. Not everyone feels that. I fear that the seeds of self-doubt are often sown in school. Writing can all too often be connected with failures: to spell, to punctuate, to form letters beautifully or to choose words that the teacher considers sufficiently wowish. Writing is rarely easy and all those secretarial skills can present real challenges for the young writer. When young children are asked what is hardest about writing, they are more than likely to say that it is getting the words right, ‘trying to think about the words that match’. However, writing is also a feeling. I think we all need to feel we have the power to use our writing in any way we choose, and to shape it accordingly. As a Year 3 child told me recently: ‘Just be yourself and don’t worry if anyone else judges your writing bad; you are never wrong, it is your writing.’ There’s an echo of Peter Elbow in there. The reader and the writer are always right and always wrong. They are right about their own responses and intentions, wrong about the experiences and intentions other writers and readers bring to the work.
When we feel we own the writing, we can feel more open to changing it, to shaping it more carefully. We may also feel more nimble, more able to adapt a task and to take risks. We can choose when to keep our writing for ourselves and when it is for sharing. It can be a joyful thing.
What, for you, is the best thing about writing?
Here is a four year’s answer:
Because I wrote some things. I wrote “I love you mummy.”