We Aren’t Born Writers: On the Learning and the Teaching

Can a non-writer learn the tools of the trade, or are great writers born with something different? Is writing a gift–the kind of thing you either have or lack–or is writing a learned skill that any person can develop?

Questions of this ilk have sometimes plagued me, as an aspiring writer first, later as a teacher of young writers, and I look at them now and cringe at the false yet sturdy walls the notion of an inborn writing gift can build in us. Arguments for natural ability lead ultimately I think to complacency for the successful writer and self-loathing for the not.

The better question to ask about the learning and teaching of writing is the how, how writing is really learned, how we can all get better no matter our success or skill. Today, I’ll offer a few insights from my experience as an educator and writer. Let’s see what kind of headway we can make.

What is writing, really?

To understand how writing can be learned, we first must identify what it really is, and what writing is is a set of largely procedural skills, a complex web of if-then conditions that translate ideas into words, paying careful attention to audience and context. Each word and clause and sentence on the page is the sum of decisions we have made based on knowledge of what works in texts and what does not.

Writing is a composite of a host of different skills, including language skills yes, but also interpersonal skills that draw on a deep understanding of human emotion. This emotional skill allows us to modulate words carefully to achieve the effect we are seeking. Linguistically, we have to know the range of possible language structures available, the requirements and uses of each, and the denotative and connotative meanings they carry.

The magic of writing

If my younger self had read the description above, he would have cringed. Writing about writing like that, it seems to take the mysticism away. It guts writing (and art, of which writing is one type) of magic, because to discuss it as a set of cognitive processes in the brain feels at odds with what the experience of writing can feel like and the impacts reading a meaningful text can have. My high-school-age self took a psychology class and hated it, because it took the meaning out of life, I thought, by boiling it down to functions in the brain. We artists, perhaps understandably, want to see our craft as beyond the reach of logic to explain. What writing really is, we feel sometimes in our hearts, is largely subconscious, ultimately unknowable.

The problem with “unknowable” is that it rapidly gets repackaged as “unlearnable.” How can I improve my writing? Sometimes the answer is, “You either have it or you don’t,” or at least that can be the undertone behind nonspecific advice. Sometimes when we give such advice, we might privately be thinking, “Good thing I have it, and too bad this other person doesn’t.”

It is of course beautiful in a way to posit writing as a kind of magic, a communion with a muse. It casts us writers as devotees of a kind of sacred energy that only the select can access. It makes what we do special, different than other professions that are learned from books. But we make ourselves an exclusive crowd if we go on thinking this. Writing should be the property of all humanity, and when we say it can’t be taught, we’re closing a door.

Paying attention to our decisions

Writing feels different from other kinds of knowledge because it is largely procedural. That is, it’s part of our non-declarative memory which we don’t access consciously, all of the skills and associations and habits and conditioning that drive our behavior without our quite being aware. It feels like writing arises from the ether, and the ether is a much more pleasant image than a series of neural pathways, no matter how complex.

Because our writing knowledge is to a large extent procedural, subconscious, it can be difficult to explain. Why did you use this word here? We really might not be sure. That word choice is ultimately the result of a thousand little variables that we juggled without knowing it, and when we come up with an explanation afterward, it’s almost certain to be woefully simplistic in comparison to the cognitive architecture that really brought that word onto the page.

Writing and language learning

An analogous (and intimately related) set of skills is human language. Whatever language(s) we learned natively as children emerge so effortlessly, so variedly, we can express and understand a huge range of ideas without consciously knowing how. In fact, native speakers are usually quite bad at explaining why parts of the language work the way they do. In most cases we don’t even notice all of the complex steps our brains are going through to render an idea in words, and yet we clearly have the knowledge. Only once we’ve really interrogated it, studied it, can we really teach it helpfully to others.

The thing is, people can learn a foreign language. They can learn it really well, including when they begin after childhood. A foreign language is hugely complex. Writing isn’t so different. It too can be learned.

Analyzing the skill

Humans can learn a lot about complex systems by breaking them apart and looking at how each section works. This fall, I’ve been completing an online course in teaching English language learners, and part of our work has been in chipping away at the monolithic block of “language” to isolate particular skills that we can help students directly practice, hone, and use. When we look at language or at writing monolithically, it is massive and incomprehensible. Where does one start? But taken one step at a time, we really can make marked progress for ourselves and for students we are teaching.

Applying some of this understanding, I started teaching writing differently for my students (albeit academic writing rather than creative). I more consciously articulated concrete skills (how [and why] to use transition expressions, for example), and we set about the business of first identifying transition expressions in an example text, discussing the impact those transition words were creating, then trying making our own example sentences, then incorporating them into larger pieces of writing. I was amazed at how big of an impact this process had on my students’ writing. One skill. There are a million left to go.

Final thoughts

It might be true that particular genes or particular quite stable traits in a person impact writing skills, but to focus on this is ultimately hurtful. It stops us from really interrogating the procedural knowledge we have, so that we miss out on our own chance to develop, and it encourages a kind of fixed mindset that stops people from believing they can learn and improve.

Learning and teaching writing is not easy. Of course it isn’t. But difficult is not impossible, and the mountain to climb can be summited piece by piece. That journey begins, as all do, with that single step.

Teaching writing is about helping others build the sensitivity to words and feelings that strong writers draw on to write their texts. There is a lot we can do to promote the growth of that cognitive architecture in students, and we can keep honing our own too. To not do so, I would say, is a failure of the magic that writing really is: the ability to share the contents of our hearts as intentionally as possible, to come together, sharing, from everyone.

Best wishes for the coming week,
Jimmy