I love to write. Well, that’s not entirely true. I suspect that my relationship to writing is much like relationships with technology, driving, and golf. I suppose these relationships are more of a love–hate binary. Although many binaries tend to be quite destructive, others seem to provide the energy for things to happen, the creative energy. But, how I feel about writing all depends on the circumstances, contexts, and my immediate experiences.
Most of my writing has been more technical, although I have dabbled with poetry, non-fiction stories, and blog-ish writing. My two books, one of which has two editions, are educational in nature. One deals with teaching science in the elementary school: Creating Classroom Communities of Young Scientists. And, the other one provides an overview of science concepts elementary and middle school teachers are likely to encounter: The Really Useful Elementary Science Book. Writing the first book started out with the typical experience that felt like pulling teeth. But, the experience quickly became like driving with the windows open along an empty country road in the spring. Purring along on a bright sunny day. The first chapter I wrote — the chapters were not written in any particular order — took three weeks. The second one took two weeks. After four chapters, the rest of them took three or four days each. The whole book, all 450 pages or so, took about three and a half months to write.
The second book, which was less than half the length of the first one, took almost four and a half years to write. Writing this one was like pulling teeth for almost the entire time. The first book I wrote during a sabbatical and worked on it almost every day. The second was written while working, but I still tried to put in time on the book for two or three hours every day. While the first book flowed, the second was mired in a great deal of research. Probably 80% of the time was devoted to research on the second book, while only 5% was devoted to research on the first one.
However, I learned a great deal more from writing the second book. I had to question everything I thought I knew and every assumption I held about science knowledge. My publisher was not particularly happy with the time it took me to write this book, but I felt that the time was well spent. I not only learned science concepts more thoroughly, but I learned a lot about the nature of my own knowledge and assumptions.
Throughout schooling, I never liked taking tests, and rarely did well on them. And, I always felt like I learned more writing a paper than taking a test. Tests were exercises in memorizing and figuring out what the instructor was expecting. My memorizing ability was never very good. I usually started out trying to memorize, like all of my fellow students, but always found that I was getting “bogged down” wanting to really understand concepts and not just memorize some disconnected bits of information.
And, this point about learning by writing is where writing is powerful. When working on non-fiction, if we really want to produce a reasonably good piece of writing, we have to organize our ideas and how they fit together and relate to one another. We have to write in a way that makes sense. And, we have to create some sort of argument for the points we are trying to make. These points might involve providing new insights, new patterns, new relationships, or new perspectives about some particular issue or topic. When writing poetry or fiction, we still have many of these same concerns, but the ways in which we go about achieving these “goals” are usually quite different. In such cases, we may get at these concerns through imagery, through the tensions created by the way we play with words, or through the contexts, plots, and narratives in stories.
In junior high school, our writing classes required that we take notes on note-cards, which were turned in and graded. Then, we used the note-cards to make an outline, which was turned in and graded. And, then we used the outline to write a paper. It was a gruesome experience for most of us. I never liked the process, and as a result my grades in English classes were mediocre. Of course, part of the mediocre grades involved my inability to memorize much of anything.
However, as I proceeded through schooling, my relationships to writing and my writing abilities changed dramatically. I dropped the note-cards approach, but did continue to take notes. Outlines changed from the very structured to somewhere between lists of major ideas in a document to more fluid streams of ideas in my head. And, the more I read, especially of bad writing, the better my writing became. I still can’t remember most of the technical terms for parts of speech, sentence structure, and so forth, but I have gotten a better “feel” for the language. As I began teaching and then having to read student papers, and then, reading and reviewing papers submitted to journals, my knowledge of and feeling for writing took another leap forward. I discovered that bad writing was much more common than good writing. It became increasing painful to read bad writing. And, I did not want to be one of those writers who was painful to read. We certainly have way more pain than we need in this world, and I did not want to contribute any further pain. Fifty years ago, I would never have thought that I would become a strict traditionalist about writing. However, as many writers do, I try to purposefully break the rules at certain times. After all we can play with language. We can make up words, drop verbs from sentences, and do all sorts of things when trying to create a feeling, an atmosphere, a reaction, and so on. But, we should knowingly and purposefully break the rules properly.
It’s good to reflect on one’s own writing experiences and on the writing and experiences of others. We can improve our own writing, change our relationships to and feelings about reading and writing, and open up new worlds to explore. A nice way to expand some of our perspectives on writing can include reading about the writing experiences of well-known writers.
© 2021 by Jeffrey W Bloom First published in 2020
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Since writing this piece 4 years ago, I have come to appreciate even more writing as a personal process of learning. But, not all writing feels comfortable, especially when sharing my own writing. You can read more about this particular situation on Passionate Meanderings at https://passionatemeanderings.org/welcome-home/snippets/writing-learning-leaping/.