The Joy of Writing (or, the Tragedy of Learning to Write in America)

Very few subjects have suffered as much at the hands of the American educational system as writing.  With the possible exception of math, writing is probably our generation's greatest intellectual sorrow.

Reading, writing and arithmetic.  As dreary in their rhythm as one footfall after another.  Learning these subjects is a necessary slog, a long-suffering trudge.  A lot has been done to reclaim the joy of reading.  But the thing I bemoan, the thing I regret, is that we have completely lost - if we ever found - the joy of writing.

As a child, cycled like recycled air through one magnet and IB program after another, I learned a great many things about writing: that is is purposeful, that it is possibly a superpower, that those who practice it effectively are geniuses and savants, that it must be learned, that most people are bad at it.  I learned that we should be "functional" writers, and our highest aspiration as writers is to construct essays that were likened by our teachers to hamburgers - five paragraphs exactly - essays that were about as exciting as the white sesame buns they were metaphorically constructed upon.

I learned a great deal about logic and argument from the five-paragraph essay.  But I didn't learn a damn thing about writing.

In a letter printed in the Washington Post, a high school Government teacher from Maryland (my home state) writes: "My students did well...because we practiced bad writing."  She goes a step further than I would.  I wouldn't say that the basic, barely leavened prose of the five paragraph essay is bad writing.  But it isn't good. It isn't nourishment.  And there's nothing joyful about producing or consuming it.

The most powerful writers in history disturb, arouse, inform and disarm their readers -  all without touching them, all without speaking aloud.  And most of these writers would have failed the average high school functional writing test.  (Can you imagine the way a grader, rubric in hand, would behave if a student responded to "What were the primary disadvantages of life in the 1960s?" with "Rabbit, Run"?  The grader would savage it.  Perhaps not deliberately - their hideous rubric, insensate yet all-powerful - would leave them no choice.  Or perhaps the grader would call Child Protective Services.  Either way, not the desired outcome.)

Writers - great writers - were able to do what they did because they embraced the joy of writing.  They embraced writing at its most creative, cathartic, lovely and insensible.  They knew that sometimes a sentence is an ordered march, but sometimes it is a trackless wilderness.  That writing is a place to explore, to be surprised, and to be forgotten.  It is Narnia and Middle Earth at once.

I have a friend who was dyslexic as a kid. Like a lot of dyslexic kids do, she embraced photography and painting to express herself in images.  But one day when I read one of the poems she'd written - one of the few, I'm sorry to say - I saw something I still haven't forgotten.  I saw how she'd combined words in ways I could not have imagined, into pictures as beautiful as those created with paint and lens.  And this is someone who has spent her entire academic life thinking of writing as her greatest weakness.

There is a time and place for functional writing.  Powerpoints. Inventories. Memos.  But writing doesn't live in memos, even if memos are what we are taught about writing.  (We are not taught to love writing, because honestly, how could we, under those circumstances?)  The worst disservice we do to writing is reduce it to rote, and then pretend that rote is all there is to it.

One of the highest compliments I can ever pay a written work is that it inspires me to write.  Not because I think I can do better than the author, but because I want to start trying.  Because I see how vast the power of words, and their perfect ability to say what is in fact inexpressible.  There is no right way to say what can't be said, and there, in that acknowledgment, you have the joy of writing.  The joy arises from trying, as Anais Nin famously said, "to taste life" (once, twice, or an infinite number of times.)

I shudder to think what most students would produce nowadays if allowed to roam free in their writing.  If I saw the word "Lolz" in an essay I might not consider it art, I might consider it blasphemy. But that's my right as a reader.  The right of a writer is to create.  And sometimes, more often than now, it would be nice if students in American public schools were encouraged to taste that pleasure.  And if the results of those efforts were treated as important and valid, rather than as some kind of concession.

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Note that I'm not talking about individual teachers, but rather about a system that devalues any writing that falls outside the scope of the mundane and conventional.