If You Want to Write Well

Note: For readers especially pressed for time, key takeaways, action steps, and additional resources for this post are provided at the end (and this is an especially long post).

There is an old line that gets floated in writing circles that goes something like: you can’t teach writing.

This may sound droll and pithy for a moment, especially sage if the person speaking it is smoking a pipe, but then you realize how inane it is. Like saying, you can’t teach people to talk or to read or listen. Everyone is taught to write. 

Presumably, the line is about gifted writers and teaching what they have. But that isn’t much of an insight. You can’t teach everyone to write like Virginia Woolf anymore than we can educate everyone to paint and sculpt like Michaelangelo.

And, for that matter, you can’t teach just anyone to conceptualize the universe like Albert Einstein, or have the courage of Amelia Earhardt, or achieve the crazy physical alchemy of Fred and Ginger.

My great aunt Brenda taught a writing class in the 1930s at her local YMCA. It was filled with very everyday people, and she was continually inspired by the level at which they all came to communicate powerfully through writing.

She ended up writing a book about the experience, If You Want to Write, in which she concluded: This is what I learned: that everyone is talented, original, and has something important to say. 

Brenda’s book, which was published in 1938, was republished in the 1980s and went on to inspire a generation of aspiring writers, as well as a sea of other like books on writing and creativity.

Going back to the question of whether writing can taught, I lean toward Brenda’s view, to the point that I wonder if the suggestion that writing can’t be taught wasn’t all just some big, tragi-comical misunderstanding.

Because it could be that many years ago someone said it to a writing teacher, but they were emphasizing the you, as in you-specific-writing-teacher can’t teach people to write. As in: you are not good at teaching writing.

But that teacher failed to pick up on the dig, and in turn the teacher started telling others, you can’t teach writing, spreading misinformation about the teachability of writing that has been discouraging would-be writers ever since. Whoopsie.

It is irrefutably true that it is difficult to teach writing well. That is clear. I look back on my ELA classes throughout K-12, and eventually to professional writing classes I took, and it isn’t pretty.

There are three or four gems who had a gift for conveying certain elements of how to write, but that is it. And none of those teachers communicated some big holistic understanding. Instead, they each had their thing.

Strange as this may seem, the lesson that we possibly all should be taught as we are first learning to write is a caveat emptor message that the person teaching them to write may or may not actually know what they are doing.

It is with all of this in mind that I sat down to do some reverse-engineering: looking back on decades of my own ugly process of ending up as a working writer, what were the lessons that in hindsight I wish I had been taught early in the process, before all the bumps and bruises?

What I came up with is mostly not the inspirational messages of Brenda and the authors she inspired, and it also not the in-the-weeds writing advice at the level of meticulously clean style and perfect grammar (no my fortes) that is generally well taught and documented in books.

Instead, what follows is the middle ground between those extremes—nine big meaty lead-domino lessons about the psychology and real-world mechanics of writing that I don’t think are often expressed and, if absorbed, could help with a transformational shift in anyone’s ability to write well.

I will add that I am as adamant as ever about the value of learning to write. Decades into working as a writer, I still have the enthusiasm to spread the word about the benefits of writing in the same way that your friend who just went vegan or got into Crossfit wants to tell you all about it.

(Or a racier version of this line—with the enthusiasm that a teenager first experiencing sexual intimacy would like to be talking about the exciting new discovery, though they in the end opt to keep their cool, talk instead about the weather).

And this is despite the looming prospect that the need to endure the struggle of writing will increasingly be viewed as unnecessary, given how rapidly AI engines have revealed they will be able to do the work for us (in split seconds, as opposed to the weeks I have been wresting with this piece).

The reasons for my enthusiasm go back to Brenda’s quote, which I think is hard to appreciate for those not actively working on their writing, but I believe will come through in some surprising, eye-brow-raising ways for those read though the post, long as it is.

There are also the more practical reasons I am a cheerleader for learning to write. Given how much work continues to revolve around text (emails, presentation bullets, Slack channels, marketing pieces, white papers, strategic plans), a way with words can be a force multiplier for any career. (Parents, do you hear what I am telling you?)

It is funny, until I went to graduate school for writing, no teacher ever reacted positively to my writing, and there will be readers who scoff a the idea that the person writing these words is offering any sort of lessons on writing, as they spot what they view as painful transgressions in my prose.

And yet, somehow, I have continued make a living writing. A writing monster that cannot be stopped.

My words (and those of teams I assembled), have driven sales of over a half billion dollars in contracts, and CEOs have had turned me to be their Cyrano to pen some of their diciest communications, and at least one entertainment company messengered me a six-figure check to my house for the rights to my words (sadly, the dollars are long gone).

The fact of making a living as a writer despite it ever being suggested by anyone that this would be in my best interest—that is another lesson for a would-be writer, though I am not sure exactly what the lesson is.

Lesson 1 - Getting in the reps

The main path to learning to write is no different than it is for learning to listen to the language, or speak it, or read in it: we do it. A lot. Just think of all the talking, reading, and listening we do every year. It is little surprise that we can do it without even trying.

For anyone looking to learn to write well, whether child or adult, it is going to help to find ways to simply write more often—emails, journal entries, essays, etc. For confirmation of this point, just read letters of the average person back in the days when writing letters was as common as texting is now.

Back in the days when a young husband away on a trip might write to his wife daily letters, letters of the average Joe often read like those of a seasoned professional writing now. It was all of those reps. Needless to say, we are all at a disadvantage today, especially kids.

In a previous post I touched on this topic (see Time to Write) and had suggestions about using writing prompts to help kids get in more practice, but I should admit that my kids and I are still struggling with how best to consistently get them writing more, and it is clear to me the amount they are writing is not going to get them where I think they need to go, so we need to keep finding ways to up those reps.

My go-to in my own life has been keeping a daily journal, which is something I have done for decades. I also obsessively take notes whenever I am in a meeting. And then there is the reality that most of my jobs for decades have centered on writing. It hasn’t always been deliberate practice, but the volume has been there.

(Brenda estimated that she wrote some six million words in the course of her life and career).

In desperation, I have even searched online to see if there is yet a good AI app that engages kids in a way that gets them writing back and forth, while somehow coaxing them to write with more color as it goes. I assume that is coming, and it will be version of AI that helps writing, but as of yet I haven’t found a great option).

Enter an innovation my 11-year-old stumbled onto as one possible solution. We are calling it: boredom writing. She came up with the idea while at school and, yes, feeling bored. I don’t know if she was consciously trying to help me solve this issue, but one day she just writing in her composition notebook when class instruction ground to a halt, which typically happens because a fellow student is getting in trouble.

The writing went something like: Teacher X says she is going to do something fun with us at the end of class…now she says we are not going to do the fun thing. She says this is because she was in a good mood and now she is not. She says that is what always happens with our class.

We have all been in particularly excruciating meetings at work and found some small relief by pretending to be focusing deeply, while surreptitiously writing: when will so-and-so ever stop talking…. As long as my kids are picking the moments when learning really has gotten sidetracked, and not during instruction, I think it is great. Something as simple as writing a play by play of those boring moments is absolutely going to increase their fluency.

My son also provided a potential additional strategy for kids when he emailed me from his homeroom to provide an update on some of what he has been learning lately in school.  Not surprisingly, this email was accompanied by the sweet sounds of angel’s singing. A child writing to a parent! Sharing insights into what was happening at school! All in one unicornic moment!

And then his homeroom teacher, who had inspired this euphoric moment of writing practice and kid sharing, went off to Columbia to study murals on a grant. This seems to happen with educators who are inspired to teach outside the box—they are whisked away on prestigious grants.

So, no more emails from homeroom. But I think this idea of getting the kids to write emails goes into the toolbox for getting the writing reps, that along with boredom writing. I will take whatever we can get, whatever works, because there is no writing well without first accomplishing the surprisingly challenging goal of writing more frequently.

Lesson 2 - This is going to sting

No one’s feelings were ever hurt because they made a mistake while working through a math problem. You may feel frustration if you get the wrong result when solving for X, but that feeling typically doesn’t cross the line into the personal. We don’t feel like damaged goods because we forgot to carry a one.

Writing is different. Just about any writing we do that we put any effort into brings with it feelings of vulnerability. Even today for most adults. Get tasked with writing something up at work, email it to your manager, and within minutes you are wondering why she hasn’t responded.

Did she like it? Or was it lame? Was there some gaffe in there? Why hasn’t she responded—its been three minutes!

Writing is a bit like standing up in front of your peers and having to sing a cappella for those of us who are non-singers. We can’t help but feel exposed. It calls to mind the religions that believe you shouldn’t have your picture taken because it is stealing your soul; putting our words down on paper, or into an electronic document—those are manifestations of our minds suddenly fixed in place for others to judge.

Seen in this way, it is a bit cruel that, when we were learning to write way back when, or when our kids are learning now, no one ever mentions this odd reality of writing. If we all understood upfront that this is the nature of it, that it comes with the territory, and not some weird quirk of our personality, then a lot fewer writing students would throw in the pencil so early.

I wasn’t thinking of myself when writing those words. I was thinking of working with others on their writing, including my kids, and how emotionally fraught it can be. But then my subconscious just brought back a memory I hadn’t thought of in years, reminding of how much I am writing about my own experience.

I was in the 10th grade, in an ELA class. The assignment was to write a personal essay. I chose to recount a scene in a small old hospital room where by grandfather lay dying. From the room, he could look down on a quaint old park, which happened to be where young male hustlers would congregate under lamp posts as possible clients would drive by and scope them out (this was the 1980s and how these things were done back then).

My grandfather had lived a good long life, which was coming to an end. His body was slowly shutting down. As he went through the process, he seemed to be time traveling, which was possibly aided by morphine, thinking he was at different moments in his life, and then suddenly being back in the room, experiencing the present, referring to the boys down in the park, under the streetlights, doing their dance, as he put it.

I was trying to capture some of this in the essay, using my teenage writing skills. I apparently described something in the color of the room’s walls as being sad. This set the teacher off. In red pen, he corrected me, explaining that colors can’t be sad. There was not much other feedback beyond a few punctuation corrections, and then the passive, damning comment that it is hard to write about sad things. It was hard not think that by hard he wasn’t saying I had failed at it and the grade backed up this interpretation.

It is embarrassing to admit, but this experience was likely why I didn’t write anything personal, or willingly take an English class that wasn’t mandatory, for years—through high school and four years of college. That comment, and my general obliviousness to understanding that feedback on writing is inherently personal and can easily sting, especially when we are young, had me steering clear of writing.

And then one day years later, after trying other pursuits, it occurred to me that the thing I was avoiding, writing, was what I really wanted to do and life was too short to do otherwise, so I enrolled in a graduate writing program. It was in that program, participating in one writing workshop after another, that I learned that almost the entire purpose of a writing MFA or a graduate program is to break students of this sensitivity.

Each time it is your turn, you spend 20 to 30 minutes listening to your peers hashing out what they thought worked about your piece and then what didn’t, the latter usually getting more attention. Go through that enough times, and the sensitivity vanishes.

You know that everyone has an opinion and that opinions vary. You take it all in, paying most attention to issues on which the class agrees, or when something rings especially true.

(The other primary benefit of these writing workshops is that through all of this reading the work of others, reflecting on what you as a reader think is working and what needs work, and then having your writing subjected to the same process, eventually you start to be able to perceive your writing as others do. Or at least that is the hope.)

Or course, most people, especially kids, haven’t had that experience. Haven’t developed those very helpful emotional callouses about their writing. And so, in addition to finding a way to write more frequently, anyone learning to write, or to improve their writing, needs to try to make peace with the fact that writing feedback seems so incredibly personal.

Just keep in mind, those who are reading our writing, they really aren’t stealing our souls. It just feels like it.

Lesson 3 - In praise of plagiarism

I owe a career in writing, I suspect, to an eighth grade English teacher at Valley View Junior High who I can barely remember. Her name, as a fellow former Cougar recently confirmed for me, was Mrs. Rebholz.

Interestingly, it wasn’t Mrs. Rebholz’s teaching in general that changed things for me. It was one specific unit that she taught that made all of the difference—a unit on sentence writing.

Most middle school English teachers will spend some time on sentence structure, with modest ambitions being to get kids to know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon. Maybe in the old days things went further and kids learned to fully diagram sentences.

Mrs. Rebholz did something different. She put on a sort of sentence writing boot camp. She taught us how to write all manner of sentences, to understand ways of working with different clauses, to work with emphatically short and dizzyingly long sentences, to pay attention to how different types of sentences could be used to different effect. And she had us practice variations, over an over.

Part of what strikes me now as so interesting is that Mrs. Rebholz seemed to know that what she was teaching—and how she went about teaching it—was both rare and valuable. At the start of that unit, she challenged us all to wake up and pay attention to what she was going to teach.

She explained that she had developed the training as part of some consulting she did for corporations aimed at teaching employees to improve their writing. And what we were about to learn could make a difference in our lives, she confidently claimed (at least this is all how I remember it now).

An often indifferent student, I was struck by her self-assurance and managed to tune in.

Unfortunately, I can’t fully recall many specifics of her method. I only know that those of us kids who did pay attention and did the work she tasked us with acquired an atypical fluency with the variety of forms that sentences can take and how they can be used.

In hindsight, I can appreciate how savvy it is to really zero in on this aspect of writing. Learning to master sentences and their variety is like learning a wide range of tumbling tricks in gymnastics. Once you have an array of tricks, you have endless options for mixing and matching in order to create a great floor routine.

Unfortunately, I have a horrendous memory and don’t remember many of the specifics of the training. In lieu of somehow unearthing the lost Rebholz sentence system bootcamp (and I am holding out hope some other Cougar, who is also pack rat, will come across this post and then send me their yellowing old notes), I think there is another way.

The alternative involves looking to great writing and plagiarizing the sentence types and structures that you come across, which of course isn’t exactly plagiarizing at all. This is simply a matter of studying writing that has stood the test of time and learning from it—but particularly in order to learn sentence construction.

The great thing is that studying proven, effective writing is not like studying something elusive, not like studying wolves. Wolves are miraculously stealthy, almost supernaturally able to elude human efforts to track and study them. Writing, contrarily, sits there. Just open a book or magazine. It makes no effort to hide.

Because of this, you, or your kids, can pick any writer whose writing you admire and see in black and white how the writer did what they did, anything from the famously economical prose of Hemingway to the wild variety of Dickens. And appropriate it. Consider the following two well known Dickens quotes:

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and touch that never hurts.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

What makes those sentences stand out? It is clearly not all about an advanced vocabulary. Instead, it is the ideas they express and how the sentences are constructed to achieve their timeless ends.

Creating a sentence writing bootcamp for your kids, or for yourself, can have a transformative and freeing affect on writing. Study the many different ways they can be constructed and then, ideally, practice them as scales, expressing different sentiments using different patterns, eventually being able to improvise with them.

Developing this fluency with sentences in all their variety—this ability is one of the core secrets to being able to write well. That is it. Everything else is in a way all gravy. Master sentences and you are set. Mrs. Rebholz knew it.

That all said, I need to add the ironic note that kids who do model the Dickens examples above in their own writing may be surprised to see some red pen in response. Many teachers will, for example, be dying to strike the initial ‘and’ from the first quote, and the second sentence structure will receive the recommendation that the comma be turned into a period.

Of course, Dickens was largely self-taught, only experiencing intermittent schooling and spending some of his childhood in the workhouse, so he didn’t have the benefit of such professional feedback.

Lesson 4 - The unconscious and flow

Charles Dickens didn’t consciously devise that famous opening line, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. He didn’t sit down and reason the whole thing it all out. Writing the sentence wasn’t the result of analysis, of weighing options, figuring that the first line should be efficient, but also manage to be sweeping, and so on.

Instead, he would have been working his methodical 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. writing schedule (with break for lunch), writing away, and at some point, there it was, flowing out of his goose quill pen, suddenly created, probably surprising him, causing a brief smile.

This is another odd, difficult to articulate aspect of writing, and one that is not often clearly conveyed to students who are learning to write: Like most creative efforts, as well as much of inventing and innovating, it is our unconscious minds—the much more powerful but mysterious region of our brains—that do much of the real work.

Writers know this. They are well acquainted with the fact that there is something deeply mysterious about the whole process. More than a few writers have been said that writing is like taking dictation from the unconscious. Dickens didn’t know that that opening line was lurking around in his mind, any more than he knew that he had fifteen novels in there.

This idea can be confusing and difficult for kids and people who aren’t actively writing to appreciate. It is why people can hear that quote of Brenda’s and not fully appreciate what it is implying—that writing is a tool through which we can all access the original and creative within in us, but only if we do the work.

There is the no better or more vivid illustration of this reality and how it works than in a beautiful, much discussed moment in the Beatles Documentary Get Back. It is the moment we can all watch Paul McCartney struggling to write a new song. You seem him strumming in a way that is totally unmusical. Just strumming, strumming. Humming a bit. Trying some random notes. Working to no avail.

And then, magically, you start to hear something emerging. Ringo and George suddenly perk up, stop yawning, and pay attention. Paul keeps strumming, but it is increasing around a melody, as the hit Get Back starts coming into aural focus. Watch the video and see someone tapping into their unconscious.

Writers come up with very idiosyncratic processes and rituals to try to get the unconscious creating. For convenience sake, I can offer a picture of my current reality.

As I type these words, there is a yoga mat taped over the window making my small office. There is is repetitive electronic music playing on repeat in my earbuds (Fade Away by H.U.V.A. Network). I am wearing a baseball hat, pulled low, even though I am already in the dark. These steps all to help tune out distractions and increase the chance that I will get writing.

Initially, there is always a strong pang if resistance to starting to write. It is an unpleasant I-want-my-mommy moment. Many writers trick themselves to get past this by just writing some nonsense, or maybe engaging in a bit of journaling. And then they quickly switching over to the project at hand.

(Hemingway’s recommendation to other writers was that on the previous day you leave off at a point where you are still going, a point at which you know the next sentence, and thus theoretically at a point such that you can start right up with that the next day).

If all goes well, the mental switch gets flipped.

Suddenly, you are writing, writing like surfing, words are flowing, not consciously generated, and awareness of everything is falling away. Even consciousness is going for long stretches. And you may have moments of being pleasantly surprised at what is springing to mind. This is how writers can be laughing or even crying as they write. They don’t know what is coming.

Still more mysteriously, they may have a phrase come to mind along with the odd awareness that it is not to be used yet, but will be relevant in a few paragraphs, though the writer doesn’t yet know what what they will be writing few paragraphs, so how does the mind know the phrase will be useful?

And so it goes, this bizarre, altered state of creativity and focus. And then it starts to slow up. Words start coming more slowly. Self-consciousness returns. The rollercoaster ride is getting close to the end. That period of writing may have lasted an hour or two. Maybe more. You can’t account for where the time went. It is truly strange. And, if you are me, you are perspiring.

That all sounds odd, and apologies for the oversharing at the end, but it is arguably every bit as relevant to learning how to write as the learning about topic and transition sentences. That description of writing will not be detailed in textbooks, and yet that it is how it works.

Many readers will also recognize that what is being described, in addition to the experience of tapping into the unconscious, is a description of a mental state that is known as flow.

Flow was defined and popularized by the psychologist and researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, especially through his 1990 bestseller Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Many readers have probably heard the term flow, and even more know of the colloquial notion: being in the zone.

Flow refers to the mental state where we are involved in an activity that is sufficiently challenging and we are sufficiently skilled that we can become engrossed to the point that our sense of self and time drop away—not unlike what happens to children when they are deep in play.

This state of flow can kick in for athletes, gamers, coders, painters, knowledge workers, and definitely writers.

Given the degree to which the state typically comes with some proficiency in these activities, it may be down the road for student writers (though readily accessible to young kids telling stories). But it should help them to know how dramatically the experience of writing can change over time, and it is in this future state that this other level of ideas and creativity can be accessed.

With this in mind, students may want to experiment with a different approach to working on nonfiction papers and other writing involving research. Instead of the traditional way of student writing by flipping back and forth between the writing and the research, they should consider trying to first absorb the research, read over their notes, let it sink in. And then give the writing a try.

Don’t look at the notes or the outline, if possible. Maybe listen to Fade Away with a hat pulled low. At least try it for one draft, because this can be the path to writing a paper at another level up, on that might surprise the student and their teacher.

Because you never know what is in there and what will emerge once in flow.

Lesson 5 - You are here

So far, we’ve presented a cocktail for learning to write that involves getting in the reps, understanding that writing can be sensitive work, building up our sentence writing repertoire, and then finally understanding how we can tap into our greater mental and creative strengths by working with our unconscious and in flow.

What is missing at this point is any consideration for the reader—the individual who is presumably the primary purpose of any writing we do (other than journal writing). Which is actually fitting, because a big part of being a young or student writer is having a tendency to almost completely forget about that aspect of writing. Reader who?

This issue relates back to how personal writing is: the idea that through writing we are capturing a bit of our selves. Young writers often have an intense pride in anything they produce (which likely goes back to our parents gushing over our first efforts to use a potty chair), to the point that the reader in the early days is barely in the picture.

For our writing to develop, we have to recall this reality that writing is actually a form of communication. And thus writing without concern for the reader’s experience and the degree to which the communication is landing is the equivalent of the guy pacing at a bus stop, wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes, and shouting about aliens and George Soros.

Much as we want to bask in the glory of having created something, there is little point to exulting if it doesn’t register with the reader. So, learning to factor in the reader’s understanding and experience of our writing is another absolutely bedrock element of writing—and another element that is not always taught as clearly as it should be, if it is taught at all.

There is a metaphor that can help illustrate this lesson, which has to do with the kiosk maps you see in malls. Shopping malls can be disorienting spaces, to the point that we find surprising relief in finally finding one of those kiosks and then, some seconds later, or maybe minutes, locating the yellow dot with the reassuring words: you are here.

You are here. So comforting. Panic averted.

We want to avoid readers feeling lost in the mall. Doing so at the most basic level begins with many of the writing mechanics that we first learn as kids, from punctuation, to paragraphs, to topic sentences, to transition statements, and conclusions. These tools only exist to try to help package our words in a way that the reader can readily process what is being said and where it is going.

Too often, though, the reason for these mechanics is glossed over and educators go right to the granular details, skipping that fifty thousand foot view. They don’t mention that the conventions, some of which seem so odd to kids, are all about: you are here. Helping kids to understand this lesson can lead to them more quickly write in ways flows more organically.

Until kids get this insight at a basic level, they are also prone to drop information into their writing that blindsides the reader. They will write book report that begins by referencing Joe, without even first explaining that the name is a reference to the character in the book they are reporting. The reader is lost. It is a simple fix. And they will get it if they are reminded to help the lost reader.

In academic papers, the process of orienting readers is done bluntly, without any effort at artfulness; the writer just states: in this paper, I will do x, y, and z. It is at least an efficient method and allows them to move on to making their case or presenting their research.

Other forms of orienting the reader can be more subtle. In a detective novel, for instance, the detective will at some point just happen to want to sum up all the clues they’ve encountered so far. This is not really for the detective’s benefit, but instead to keep the reader from tossing the book in frustration.

Still another example of the ways in which writers help readers is through the use of examples themselves. Human understanding may struggle with a concept that is new and possibly challenging. But provide the reader with an example with which they are familiar—like me offering the example of detective novel above—and the reader is back.

As is hopefully increasingly evident, this lesson about the need to orient the reader, to hold their hand and lead them, is a far-reaching one, explaining everything from the point of a question mark as well as far more sophisticated techniques.

Think of the The Sixth Sense. It is because M. Night Shyamalan so totally tuned into the audience experience when he was writing the screenplay that he was able to manipulate them in such a shocking way. The movie was suggesting you are here throughout the film, only to completely upend our experience at the end, reveal we were were looking at the map but totally misreading it, despite what the kid was saying (Bruce, I see dead people; you’re dead! How much more clear can I be?)

Still another illustration of the power that writers gain by understanding the reader’s experience is illustrated in the difference between writing a suspenseful story and a thriller. Imagine reading about a hero walking into a dark abandoned building, and both the hero and you, the reader, know: the lead suspect in a murder may be lurking in that very building!

Now, if the writer wants to transform your experience into that of a thriller, they indicate to the reader that, not only is the suspect in the building, but he has a giant knife, which he has raised menacingly high in the air—only the hero doesn’t see him! You do, but not the hero.

As you read, you see him right behind the hero! Turn around, you want to shout. He’s just about to get you!

You are here. Another single lesson that can make all the difference in one’s writing.

Lesson 6 - Subtexting

Is this coming across as I intend it to? I am hoping that you are getting a sense for how these seemingly disparate topics—increasing reps, understanding the emotional side, the need to master an array of sentence types, the surprising role of the unconscious, and the power of orienting the reader—are all foundational and learning them can transorm writing.

If that is at least roughly coming through—say at a level of 75 percent clarity—then we are ready to fire up the light saber and get into some real Jedi writing territory. (Side note: for grammar sticklers possibly questioning the capitalization of Jedi, I am relying on something called Wookeepedia: Manual of Style as my style resource.)

This next lesson is about written communication’s version of the force. It is about all of the messages and ideas and other elements that are communicated in our writing—without actually being stated in the text. There but not there. Subtext, about which you now learn.

These extra-textual messages are something we all learn about in relation to reading from an early age. We read stories like Jack London’s To Build a Fire and are asked to write an essay describing what we think is the central theme, based on some themes that the teacher gives us—man versus nature, man versus himself, man versus…I can’t remember the others.

Themes are just an example of what we learn to look for in our reading. Readers’ minds, we learn, are picking up all sorts of other messages and meanings outside the text, which is one of the brain’s amazing gifts. Students who go on to study literature in college, and possibly beyond, spend years developing and writing about all they deduce beyond the text.

(For a very vivid, but unsettling, lesson in how far the interpretation of themes and underlying messages can go, the documentary Room 237 provides an amazing, head-spinning illustration, diving into a variety of disparate theories about the meanings underlying the film The Shining, but, as such, it is not for most kids.)

What isn’t taught, or is taught far less, is the degree to which developing writers can start playing around subtext and make it part of their repertoire of tools and strategies, This is unfortunate, because these subtextual communications are integral to increasing the interest level of our writing and eventually elevating it in possibly profound ways.

For a simple example, we can look back to the opening of this section your are currently reading. The second and third paragraph make Star Wars references to try to illustrate the point about how writing can communicate outside the text, and then the last sentence adopts Yoda’s distinctive backwards grammar.

The great 900-year-old grand master isn’t mentioned by name, but a certain number of readers noted the sentence structure, realized that he was being alluded to subtextually, and then experienced a moment of communication outside the text, a sort of winking between writer and reader—a simple, goofy moment of subtext.

This example is not quite on the Jack London level of sophistication, but that is partly the point: playing around with messaging outside of your text is a tool that is available to all writing skill levels and the sooner writing students understand this, the sooner they can start adding that additional level of appeal and engagement to their writing.

Subtext has broad applications, too, beyond the very literary and the Jedi. It can, for instance, be a powerful tool in business writing. For a quick illustration, consider the fictional Acme Bank. A large prospective client has asked Acme and all the other leading banks for proposals making the case for why the client should pick them as their new commercial bank.

Acme plans to differentiate their offering by the degree to which they serve a consultative role to all of their commercial clients. But because Acme assumes that the other competitors will have a similar message, they take the step of including interesting business banking insights throughout their proposal—information that is the type a consultant would provide.

So, while the proposals all have similar stated messages in the text, it is the Acme proposal that gives the prospective buyer a visceral sense for being true. The reader is actually experiencing Acme as consultative, not just seeing the claim. In fact, the buyer, after notifying the Acme salesperson that they had won the account, mentioned as an aside: that was the first time I actually felt like I learned something from a proposal!

Subtext is everywhere in the text we read. If we are just taught to tune into it, think about it, realize its power, we can start to view our own writing through the lens of what it is communicating beyond the literal meaning of the words and how we might play around with adding more layers to our writing without adding any additional words.

Funny enough, kids learning to write are already communicating subtextually to their teachers from their first assignments, though they rarely realize it. Their writing communicates whether or not they waited until the last minute, whether a parent had a heavy hand in editing the child’s work, whether the child cared enough to reword the information they found on Wikipedia, and so on.

Those messages are all there, all outside the text, Since they are there anyway, best to learn to control it and use it in our favor.

Lesson 7 - Drafting

We’ve covered a lot and now arrive at a topic that I wish I could skip. But we can’t. We have to delve into what is in many ways the real work of writing. Which is bit heartbreaking. If only writing were a matter of tapping into our unconscious, blocking out the light, going into a writing trance, and then calling it a day. But it is not. That is the fun part. Then comes the work.

This is a tricky point to make, so I hope you will hang with me for a moment. Earlier in this post, I tried to make another slippery point, which had to do with the degree to which we all have amazing ideas, thoughts, and potential creations that we are oblivious to, unless we sit down and engage in some writing.

What wasn’t mentioned then, though, was that the actual ultimate version of those ideas, thoughts, and creations may only be discovered after going through the process of rewriting, and editing, and throwing out, and trying again. To illustrate, the first draft of David Copperfield began with: Things were going well, but also not so great.

Kidding, but even that line may well have taken a number of attempts to get it right. Dickens was constantly revising and reworking his drafts, giving evidence in his terrible handwriting that an essential aspect of writing is the journey through versions to get to the ideal end destination.

And he was Charles Dickens. For the rest of us who are writing, the need to go through drafts is far more extreme than can easily be believed. To help drive this home, I will engage in some embarrassing sharing about my own cluelessness.

When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I was living in Los Angeles, pursuing various possible avenues to earning a living as a writer. These efforts included screenwriting, which was, to put it generously, my least successful writerly pursuit.

At the time, the reasons for this were mysterious. It would take years before I would understand.

It was only with the arrival of podcasting that I got it. I stumbled on a podcast featuring successful screenwriters talking about their early struggles. The stories were harrowing. They often told of writing draft after draft after draft of 120-page screenplays to try to get them to work. Maybe a dozen drafts. Even then, they might opt to chuck the project and start fresh.

And like that, the lights came on. I understood my error from all those years earlier. While it seemed like I was screenwriting, the sad reality was that I had unknowingly never actually started. The successful screenwriters were ruthless and going through massive amount of work after finishing their first draft, while I made do with little edits.

I get it now. Years of work writing has made painfully clear that first drafts are often just a tool. They are necessary to actually start the process, but they often bear little to no resemblance to the final product (Kylie Jenner before and after whatever all was done to achieve that transformation).

This lesson is hard to absorb. I obviously didn’t get it as young adult in LA. And I know well that most kids don’t begin to fathom it. K-12 teachers try to introduce the idea of revising to kids, explaining that an assignment will start with a rough draft and that the teacher will provide some feedback on the draft, and then the kids are to address the feedback.

Kids respond to the minimal feedback their teachers provide in the same way they do to parental insistence that they eat some soggy mystery vegetable we put on their plates and they artfully shift the food around in such a way that it looks mostly eaten, even though not a bite was taken. In the case of those first kid revisions, a word is changed, and sentenced moved. All done.

If we really want to help kids understand the drafting process, what teachers should do is to print out those precious first drafts, then douse them in gasoline and strike a match, using some OSHA-approved essay burning contraption, after which the kids would be sent back to their seats to start on their second drafts.

Given the writing sensitivity business mentioned earlier, it is possible this would be a bit scarring. Somehow writing students need help understanding that there is usually a far better version of what they are trying to write within them, but to reach it they need to learn to see their first drafts differently.

First drafts are an important starting point, but also often something that bears little to no resemblance to the final product. William Faulkner famously said that writers would need to kill their darlings as they revise. Kill your darlings—that is all that drafting feels in the early days of learning to write (to help ease the pain, you can put all the writing you cut into a separate document, just in case).

In terms of how to revise, that is a skill that is mostly learned through practice. A lot of rewriting is a matter of just reading each sentence closely, paying attention to whether one flows into the next in a way that seems inevitable.

That is a central lesson of revised text—one sentence seem to spring from the preceding sentence. Where that isn’t happening, scratch the sentence and write something that does.

A lot of revising is effectively asking questions as we read through. Which words can be eliminated? Where are the cliches that should be eliminated? Much of these lessons are the sort that writing teachers excel at pointing out and are learned in ELA and writing classes.

Applying the lessons learned from several of the previous lessons from this post will also help with revisions. We can revise with an eye to improving the reader experience or to expanding upon some opportunity for subtext that is hinted at in the initial draft.

Some of revising is akin to the games we play with kids to help them find something we’ve hidden, only you are playing the game with your unconscious. You are reading over the text, making revisions, sort of asking the unconscious—hotter? colder? hotter?—as the draft gradually morphs and improves.

Another revision trick is simply letting the first draft sit. Maybe for a week. Maybe a month. Something about the passage of time reduces the preciousness that we might attach to text and helps see the initial effort in a different light. What at first seemed so inspired, with a bit of time, something that makes one cringe.

When working with kids, asking them to read their essays out loud is another effective tool to help illustrate the need for revision. You can see the discomfort on their faces while reading as it starts to register that they really do have more work to do.

That revision is so necessary, so unavoidable, is unfortunate. Painful, even. But once you understand that it is inescapable and there is no getting to that desired end state where we have created something that we confidently feel is not terrible, possibly even surprisingly strong, the discomfort and time hopefully seem wortwhile.

Lesson 8 - Writing across domains

There are a variety of reasons that most of us don’t come out of K-12 writing particularly well, to the point so many colleges acknowledge the need to teach basic writing to the freshman class. While I have already pointed fingers in some of the previous lessons, one surprising central issue remains.

I think it has to do with the type of writing that schools focus on teaching. Describe Shakespeare’s attitude toward love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Write a persuasive essay for why the cause of the civil war was either economic or political. Illustrate the use of irony in Madame Bovary.  What really is the point of learning writing through these sorts of essays?

Okay, I know the point, and also acknowledge the value, but should this type of writing be the focus at the exclusion of so many other types of writing?

The style of writing that we learned and most kids today are learning is academic, which is not surprising. The academic standards driving what is taught are established by academics. And they prize a type of writing they know well, the type they learned, which is well suited for kids looking to do increasingly sophisticated academic writing, presumably in college and possibly all the way up to the ultimate instance, the Ph.d dissertation.

I am not suggesting that this type of writing can’t help students develop their skills as writers. It obviously can. But there are so many other writing disciplines and there are some compelling reasons to at least give them equal time.

As an example, students could learn copywriting, which is the writing domain underlying any text you encounter today that is crafted in a way that catches your attention and tempts you into some action. Learn how to write economical and compelling copy, the sort that convinces people to open and read an investing newsletter, for example, and you can earn six figures a year (because, in part, relatively few people have learned to do it well).

That is just one example of the alternatives that exist. Teaching it would not only make sense because it has such wide applicability in life (we would all benefit from being able to efficiently compel with our writing), and because it in demand in the market, but also because it is arguably more readily teachable than academic writing.

Learning successful copywriting is closer to learning math than most writing taught in school. It is more formulaic. Because of this, educators would likely be better able to teach the specifics of how it is done well. Copywriting is also appealing in that there are online services for testing out the copy’s effectiveness. Grading copyediting assignments could be based on real-world results.

Journalism, too, has a form that can be taught (including the inverted pyramid). Screenwriting also has math-like aspects, working with a specific structure, the basics of which many teachers can lay out. Feature writing is less specific, more wide-open, but it is another type of writing that has broad applicability the world.

In addition to all of the other benefits cited—did I already make the point about how it is easier to learn things that you can relate to and actually encounter in your life?—there is a degree to which learning a variety of writing genres in itself leads to a sort of compounding of learning (a bit like learning multiple languages).

As it happens, this idea that there is a strength in learning across writing genres is the basis of the graduate writing program I attended (called a master of professional writing), which based on the insight that the more experience you have across each genre, the more you understand how they each work and the more you can learn to apply techniques across individual domains.

When parents ask me what advice I have to help their kids develop their writing, my advice is that they not double-down on more academic writing and instead find a way for their kids to start learning a different writing domain. And then once they have some experience with the new one, they should try another.

(I also offer a warning: one trap some teachers are falling into today with teaching academic writing is giving kids so many of the building blocks for the essay assignments, in the form of specifics themes and sentence prompts and starters related to the theme, that kids end up creating essays that read as if student is well on track for writing proficiency, when in reality the kids don’t fully understand what they have written, because so much of their writing was served up by the teacher in an effort to help.)

The internet offers endless options to learn different types of writing, from inexpensive writing classes in different domains available on Outschool, to free college courses that are available via edX or Coursera, to pricier copywriting courses (shop wisely for these, as there are good ones, but also many of the get-rich-quick scammy variety).

Again, I am not saying we all don’t want to be able to write persuasively for why we believe the cause of the civil war was either political or economic, but it shouldn’t be to the exclusion of other writing, and the earlier we pursue learning additional writing genres the better.

Lesson 9 - Publish

There has never been a time when it has been easier for writers to put their work out into the world. Thanks to the internet, the power of the publishing gatekeepers has been radically reduced. Within minutes of finishing reading this post, you could be putting your own words out into the ether through a variety of mediums (including Medium).

It is important to let that sink in, even though it isn’t new information. This is so radically different from the way so many of us grew up. Because none of us need rely on The New Yorker or our local newspaper to officially sanction something we have written, the rationale for not routinely creating written work is gone.

Imagine being a kid today. They have no barriers to publishing, whether they are writing or creating music, video, visual art. There are, of course, serious issues of privacy and security for parents to consider, but blogs, for one, can be set up for an audience of one, or they can be limited to a small group of family and friends.

Whatever a kid, or adult, is into, they can write about it and publish—cooking, video game reviews, or travel writing based on family roadtrips.

Best-selling author, marketing savant, and educational entrepreneur Seth Odin has said, "Everyone should write a blog, every day, even if no one reads it.” I heard Seth Godin say that years ago and didn’t do anything about it at the time, but I was aware that his point resonated with me and lodged in my unconscious.

Today, I write daily and publish weekly in part because I heard Godin make that point. It has been transformative. I hope it is entertaining and helping others. I am enjoying the process of writing and publishing, but I am also aware that the real benefit to me may only be clear years from now, when I am writing and discovering in ways that are deeply meaningful to me, but only possible then because I started today. Which is why I finally acted on Godin’s point. Publishing is a means through which we discover.

Our kids absolutely need to know they can publish—not just for the calculating rationale that it can be leveraged in college applications (though, by all means, whatever it takes), but so they can start learning some of the lessons of creativity and self discovery that may only come if we have the mindset that there is nothing stopping us from creating.

Concluding

It isn’t in the end that writing can’t be taught. It is that it is difficult teach. And much of what is taught is dancing around the edges. Writers look back on their educations, appreciate the teacher here and there who did have a big impact, but also realize how much of what they needed to know wasn’t clearly taught and was learned through hard knocks.

(As I was typing the previous paragraph, I flashed back to a forgotten memory of a one-day workshop I took years ago with the creative non-fiction pioneer Gay Talese, who after I read a story to him and the class said, “I’m not sure if that is a very good story or you just read very well,” and then offered no other input about the piece. Absolutely gifted writer, but apparently not one for teaching.)

I realize that in getting these lessons down I am exorcising some demons. Writing, like speaking, listening, and reading is a miracle that humans have been granted. It is unique in its ability help us channel our inner selves and then allow what was channelled to be refined and enhanced through revision. In doing so, it can be a source of freedom, pleasure, and power.

But the manner in which we are taught to write is often not commensurate with these lofty notions, and this asymmetry is only increasing as K-12 further focuses on fighting the slide in math and reading proficiency, and thus dedicates less time to writing, while over the horizon the writing AI robots are closing in with their soothing robot smiles and soulless robot eyes.

Leave the writing to us, they will say.

Much of my struggle to develop as a writer was self-inflicted—bizarro levels of insecurity, weak character that took too many years to correct, issues like that—but it didn’t help that there was so much pretending by the educational establishment that what we students were being taught was how to write well.

Everyone is a writer, in the same way we are all readers, speakers, listeners, thinkers. My great aunt saw this as she taught her writing classes in the 1930s. But to develop this easily neglected skill we need to go through the process of learning and practicing, a process that isn’t often explained in tangible detail, not at least as writers would teach it.

My hope is that these lessons contain some sparks to help other writers, would-be writers, and the writer-curious types. Some Mrs. Rebholz moments. Some Sixth sense moments. Whatever helps instill the confidence necessary to engage in writing.

Brenda was right. We are all original and have important things to say. Writing is a great way to discover that truth firsthand, and then to connect to others through our writing. The inescapable truth is that machines will increasingly write the words that we read, and yet Brenda’s words will continue to ring true, including the following:

“No writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print

While some say that writing, real writing, can’t be taught, and others who have struggle to learn writing may agree, the reality may be that it is difficult to teach and that the current teaching model is not set up to consistently succeed.

This is unfortunate on many levels. As Brenda Ueland, author of If You Want to Write, an influential books on writing and creativity, wrote, “…everyone is talented, original, and has something important to say.” 

The lessons of this extended post are not those of a teacher, but of a writer looking back and engaging in some reverse-engineering, answering the question—what are the lessons writing lessons I most wish that I had been taught?

They include:

• Lesson 1 - Getting in the reps. Writing is no different than other form of human communication, like speaking, reading, listening—key to becoming fluent is simply doing it, which is difficult in a time when we write less and less.

• Lesson 2 - This is going to sting. When we write, we capture a part of ourselves on the page, which is why feedback on our writing is so much more personal than other kinds of learning. Learning this lesson upfront, and repeatedly, may help students not prematurely conclude that writing isn’t for them.

• Lesson 3 - In praise of plagiarism. The quickest way to become an adept writer is to master a wide variety of sentence structures. In lieu of learning this from a teachers, writing students can learn by studying great writing and mimicking different proven sentence structures.

• Lesson 4 - The unconscious and flow. With a command of sentences in hand, the next unheralded key to writing is writing in a way that is lets the unconscious mind take over and get us working in a state of flow, which is how we can all discover how true Brenda’s words about creativity and originality are.

• Lesson 5 - You are here. A seminal insight for developing writers is the moment when they become aware of the need to actually connect with the reader, helping the reader to stay oriented to what they are meant to understand and experience, a skill that writers can in turn use to manipulate the reader experience for the better.

• Lesson 6 - Subtexting. A similarly momentous moment for writing students happens when they begin to appreicate all the messages and meaning they are communicating outside of the literal words they are writing, and eventually begin to intentionally send and manage those messages.

• Lesson 7 - Drafting. There is writing and then there is learning to revise and edit and revise and rewrite and start over that is the second part of the equation that is writing—both of are creative endeavors and are necessary for the writing to achieve its potential.

• Lesson 8 - Writing across domains. K-12 standards have unfortunately settled on academic writing as the gold standard, when the reality is that other domains—copywriting, journalism, feature writing, screenwriting, poetry—are often more relatable, teachable, marketable, and fun. The best way to help kids improve their writing is often to find a way for them to learn these other writing genres, assuming they are not taught at school.

• Lesson 9 - Publish. Gone are the days of needing permission to publish writing. There are many reasons why anyone wanting to develop their writing should take advantage of this change and find a way of routinely putting their words out into the world, even it if that is just a world of one.

As it happens, there are another ten or so lesser lessons that complement the bigger lessons that were cut from this post, but will be featured in a future, far shorter missive.