It is September, the new term and all that.
I love September with its promise of new notebooks and pencils, maybe new shoes, and a coat that we will grow into. I prefer the beginning of a new school year to the New Year that begins with an evening of fireworks and Auld Lang Syne and a list of resolutions that are often abandoned within a week. The new academic year allows for resolutions that can be quietly listed without a great hue and cry. They often carry on through the whole year and if we fail, then no one need know.
I am thinking that it is a good time to resolve to write more regularly. Don’t make it too big a task – just five or ten minutes a day or one sacrosanct hour a week, with a friend, maybe, or alone, at home, or out somewhere that makes you feel happy. Don’t make a fuss about notebooks. Natalie Goldberg recommends cheap notebooks that you can fill easily and don’t need living up to. Michael Atavar suggests an A6 notebook; just 50 – 100 words a day. Any words.
I have been reading a lot recently about why we write. There are many good reasons, and most of them imply that writing can be good for us, enjoyable even. Is that why teachers tend not to make time for writing? We feel that we have too much else to do? That we shouldn’t be doing something that makes us feel good. It is, of course, like keeping fit, we don’t always feel like it and can make any number of excuses not to run, go to the Zumba class or sit down and write for ten minutes. However, when we have done it, we feel good. Why is feeling good not acceptable for the beleaguered teacher? There lies someone’s doctoral thesis.
So let’s look at it slightly differently. Whenever we write, we are adding to our deep knowledge of writing. We learn how to beat the demon blank page; we simply put pen to paper and discover something we didn’t know we knew; we find a way in to what seems an impossible starter; we are dissatisfied with a word or phrase, leave it, circle round, come back with something better; or we simply leave it and know that we may think of something we like better while we are doing something else; or we let it go, it’s not important just now; we discover that writing in a particular way leaves us feeling lighter, happier. These are elements of subject knowledge that are not written down but which are more powerful than much that is listed in the Framework for Writing.
You probably will rarely teach any of this directly, but you know it and it will be there in how you approach young writers. They learn from your behaviour, from your orientation. Sometimes you mention it to them. So write for yourself each week. It is great professional development if you prefer to think of it like that. What I hope is that it simply can become a fulfilling part of your life.