Creative Writing, and Complaints about the National Curriculum in Britain

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A recent post in The Guardian* reports that a lot of British authors plan to write a letter to the Ministry of Education, complaining about how kids are taught to write.  The essence of the complaint (see here) is that children (of roughly middle-school age, or a little younger) are encouraged to use more colorful words instead of the basic words they would normally use.  One of the authors who is planning to protest is Cecilia Busby.

[She] said her concerns about the teaching of creative writing were sparked a few years ago, when she was reading out a description of her character Sir Bertram Pendragon from her novel Frogspell to a year six class at a Devon primary school. “He is a gruff, burly knight with a deep voice and a large moustache who also happens to enjoy whacking his enemies with his big sword,” she told the class, only to be stopped by the teacher, who told her that “the word ‘big’ is one of the banned words in our classroom”.

This article got me really frustrated; the problem seems to be that modern demands of excellence on the part of teachers at all levels pushes them toward mechanical ways of increasing the 'excellence' of their students' performance.  Using bigger, more excellent words is one of these.  Remember you heard it here folks: the length of a word is not a measure of its value in the spot where you've put it.  It must be exactly the right word, in your opinion, for the meaning you want to convey.  After you have written for a while (ideally a year or two,) you develop your own idiom.  It's absolutely no use writing with words someone else would choose, because it becomes no longer your own voice.

To go back to how teachers respond to pressure to improve their teaching: this seems definitely a contrast from how my own teachers responded to pressure to improve exam results.  We practiced more, we wrote more, we read more interesting books, we showed up on weekends to do additional classwork.  But these days, there is a cadre of "improvementators" who tell teachers how to get better results.  There are improvementators for everything:

• How to get more people to look at your BLOG!!!'
• How to get more traffic to your website!!!
• How to expose your product to more people, using your FACEBOOK PAGE!!!
• How to sell more cars at your used car business by pestering people on their cellphones!
• How to get tenure at a small private college by brown-nosing the ADMINISTRATION!
• How to sell your textbook by pandering to college professors!
• How to kick-start your law practice, by using unusual, completely legal, but innovative techniques!

So some improvementator in Britain has got all the teachers asking the kids to use bigger, more flowery words.  That idea must have had its roots in some successful teacher telling his or her kids to spend a little time using just the right word for the job.  "You've used 'big' here.  How big?  Just slightly larger than usual?  Then say, a large thing.  A lot bigger?  Enormous, perhaps?"

Of course, this approach makes perfect sense; kids get lazy about writing, and need to be reminded that they should write as if they care about what they write.  One way is to have them think about adjectives and adverbs, which are the first line of attack on bland writing.

But I can just imagine this —successful— teacher being approached by her managers to help her fellow-teachers be a little more successful.  He or she becomes forced to become an improvementator.  Of course, the other teachers adopt a cartoon version of her technique, and ask their kids to use the most outrageous adjectives and adverbs they can dream up, using, of course, the inevitable Thesaurus.  Just be absolutely clear: I have nothing against a Thesaurus.  Some of my best friends are Thesauri.

If you watch TV (and of course you do!  We can help you watch MORE TV!!!) you will have seen millions of advertisements that will convince you that all these people are following some improvementator's recommendations.  Pharmaceutical companies probably have ways of suggesting how to use their drugs to increase a physician's profit, though of course that sort of thing is forbidden by the famous Hippocratic Oath, which doctors do not take anymore!

Writing well is not a simple thing.  I am by no means an expert, but thinking hard about what worked for me, I can think of the following ways in which my writing was affected for the better (in my humble opinion, of course).

(1) Read a lot.  A large volume of reading, of a variety of styles, gives you options for your own writing.  You get useful was of sorting out your own preferences; what works in what way.  Reading is the single biggest thing a good writer will have done.

(2) Write a lot of letters, and write carefully.  Personal letters get read and appreciated.  Write anywhere where they care about what you say, enough so that you have an incentive to write carefully.  I reviewed stuff for Amazon, and I had such a great time that I started writing.  I also joined a classical music appreciation list, and wrote and wrote, and of course, read a lot too.

(3) Take your writing exercises seriously.  Writing exercises are of various kinds: short response, long response, medium response, term papers.  Each one requires different skills, and you learn to pay attention to different aspects of what you're writing.

(4) Read older literature.  Modern writers use such careless language that you learn bad habits.  You can always write 'modern' if you want to; you don't need to have models of modern writing.

(5) Share your writing with good friends who write, and make friends with those who write.  They will often give you a good breakdown of what you do well, and what you do that they don't like.  It's up to you to see how much of what they tell you is worth responding to.  Part of being a good writer is to take criticism gracefully and objectively, and choosing what parts of it you need to take seriously.  (Don't make friends cynically; it is cruel to make friends with just one purpose in mind.)

(6) Read your own writing critically.  Notice what parts of it are clear, and what parts are screwed up.  Fix up the parts that need fixing.  If necessary, rewrite the whole thing.  This polishing up is invaluable.

That's about as much as I can think of, that would make sense as advice to very young people.  It is as senseless to expect every teacher of writing to be equally good at it as to expect the students in every writing class to be identical.  What makes a group of young people care about their writing is highly variable, and a school teacher can only be expected to do the basics of encouraging kids to avoid obvious mistakes and manifestly bad writing habits.  Ultimately a good writer creates him- or herself.

(7) To be a good writer, you must care about something, and write what you care about.  You must have the tools of writing ready when that moment comes.  If you care about the world around you, you read about the world, and you write about the world, and you examine your writing for effectiveness.  If you don't care about the world, what's the point in writing?  This is why it is hopeless to write just to make money.  Authors who set out to make money by studying what sort of writing makes people want to buy your writing, simply bursting with cleverness, are ultimately disgusting, and I wish they would stop writing.  This is what is behind my recommendation of reviewing products for Amazon.  If you've bought something from Amazon, I expect that it is something you were interested in, and you're going to be interested in whether or not it was worth the price, and how it could be improved.  (Never buy something if you don't like it.)  So write about it!  It's a natural.

(8) Observe.  I observe people, and I write what I see.  I'm not sure how much this will work for someone who desperately wants to be more commercial.  There are probably Improvementators out there who can help anyone become a more commercial writer, but I'm not one of them.  To me, a good writer is someone who has good ideas to write about, and can convey those ideas effectively.  Anyone who desperately wants to write, without ideas about what to write, is just a tragedy.

The world desperately needs people who write clear, attractive prose without resort to gimmicks.  Creative writing is important, but so are books that explain things to people, such as How to Change Your Door Locks.  Or, How to Cook Spaghetti and Meatballs.  I mean, just because you can cook doesn't mean you can write a good article explaining how to do it.  There is very likely an improvementator who claims to make any cook into a brilliant author of recipes (and in the case of cookery, it is just barely possible that it might be true), but the best idea is for a cook and a writer to collaborate, to write an excellent book on cooking, which neither one can do as well as that on their own.

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[To be continued; we're going looking for carpeting for our playroom.]

*Formerly The Manchester Guardian,  but I expect they guard a wider region than just Manchester these days.