As I mentioned in the welcome video, all writers struggle from time to time. All writers are reluctant on occasion. You know Diaz took seven years to complete this Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. But one of the reasons it took so long is that for three years in the middle of the process, he didn't write one word, the victim of writer's block. I mentioned how Leo Tolstoy did not believe at his death that anyone would ever care to read books like War and Peace or Anna Karenina. I used to believe that professional writers, successful writers, real writers, got up every morning with huge smiles on their faces, overjoyed that they were about to spend their day sitting at their desk writing. I used to think I could never be a real writer because sometimes I dreaded writing and I'd become up with almost any excuse to avoid doing it. The myth of the writer who loves writing all the time and never struggles is just that a myth, we all struggle on occasion. When we talk about reluctant writers, the difference is not that reluctant writers struggle and other writers do not, it's a matter of degree and frequency. All writers struggle on occasion but reluctant writers struggle all the time. They have not learned the strategies or figured out how to implement those strategies if they have learned them, to allow them to overcome the challenges that are causing them to struggle in the first place. They see these obstacles as insurmountable and understandably they grow frustrated and can lose hope. There are many reasons why reluctant writers struggle. One of them is that writing is hard and that's something all writers reluctant and otherwise share. That's one reason that the strategies and practices we'll look at in this course may also apply to all writers to some degree. What you'll hear me say from time to time is, this is true for all writers but especially so for reluctant writers. At the same time it's important to look at some of the reasons that reluctant writers struggle more frequently and more deeply than other writers. Why are some of our students reluctant writers? Here are just some of the reasons they may be reluctant. They feel overwhelmed or bored by the task especially if they haven't had a choice in what to write about, they may simply not connect to the task, or they may not be able to see a way into writing, a doorway to go through if you will. A writing teacher of mine used to ask, "What is the keyhole through which the reader can enter the story?" That can also apply to a writing task. What is the keyhole that will allow the writer to enter into this task or topic? If they can't find that keyhole they'll remain outside, locked out. For example, they may not know how to make a writing task their own. I'll confess that when I was in high school, I didn't always read the books that were assigned but when it came time to write a paper or take an essay test, I had figured out how to adjust my response to incorporate those things I had read and felt confident talking about. It always seemed somewhat natural to me to look at a writing task and ask myself, how can I relate to this? How does it relate to me? Reluctant writers can't do that. Reluctant writers might also need to concentrate more intensely just to form the text. When writing doesn't come easily to students they feel greater pressure and have to work harder even to do some of the basic things that come easily for other writers. They start out behind and they might have to exert as much energy to write one sentence as other students exert when writing a full page. They might struggle with mechanics or basic writing skills. This can weigh particularly heavy on reluctant writers if they have received a lot of negative feedback because of their lack of grammatical skills in the past. They can come to associate skills with mechanics, with writing ability, and conclude that they are terrible writers because they can't spell or punctuate properly. Well, grammar is important, it is far from the only measuring stick of a student's ability as a writer, and not even the most important one. But when that skill is overemphasized and it goes right to one of the areas that student most struggles with, it can destroy a student's confidence. Reluctant writers might have difficulty with word retrieval for their ideas. Not having a broad enough vocabulary or having the right word on hand when they want to use it can cause frustration in all writers but when it happens often with reluctant writers, that frustration only grows. The harder a student works to find that right word the farther away they're going to drift from their ideas and the flow that will never have a chance to get started because in a sense the machinery has stopped, while they seek out the right word. Reluctant writers might struggle with brainstorming ideas. What we call writer's block. Most writers write more easily and with more interest and passion when they could choose what they write about. But being given the choice can frustrate reluctant writers who might struggle coming up with something to write about. As a fiction writer, I naturally find myself reacting to the world around me by wondering how that latest tidbit might work as a story. I see potential stories everywhere. Reluctant writers aren't trained to think that way, to look at the components of their life as possible things to write about. Compounding the challenge is that their prior experience tells them that even if they do find a topic, the act of writing is going to be hard and frustrating and will likely lead to failure, so why even try? However, it is important that students do have choice. There are ways to help students who do struggle with brainstorming to come up with a list that they can go to when they need to. Reluctant writers might struggle tracking their thoughts and lose track of those thoughts. This connects to a couple of things we've already mentioned, especially how too much focus on grammar or mechanics or finding the right word can distract reluctant writers from what they are writing about. In the writing process course, we talked a lot about the two basic stages of writing being discovery and communication. With discovery being the stage when writers find out what they want to say. Later on they can enter the communication stage where they are concerned with how best to say it. Reluctant writers often don't see writing as a process with different stages but try to think about everything at once. Reluctant writers might never be satisfied with the product they create. This is also known as perfection syndrome, and it affects lots of student writers not just reluctant ones. Sometimes this dissatisfaction is the product of constantly negative feedback on their writing in the past, they expect the writing to fail and so even if it doesn't they assume that it has. Sometimes they don't understand what makes good writing. Again, if they'd been taught that good writing is writing that is grammatically correct regardless of anything else then they're going to discount the value of some of the most exciting components of good writing, strong voice, vivid details, a creative approach to the task. This feeling can also come about because students don't fully understand or don't buy into the idea of writing as process. Anne Lamott has a chapter in her book, Bird by Bird, which is called, and I'll use the euphemism here, crappy first drafts. A point is that the first draft is just to getting downdraft. It may be full of crappy writing but that's okay because you're just looking for those sparks that you can develop later in the next draft. Good writing builds in a series of drafts over time and the first one is likely to be pretty sloppy and may have a lot of bad writing. But if you think of writing as a one-and-done experience, you will want that first draft to be perfect and you're bound to be discouraged. Reluctant writers might have an identified or unidentified learning disability that impacts many aspects of writing. These are just some of the reasons that students may exhibit reluctant writing behaviors in our classrooms. Our first step is to try to get to the root causes of reluctance in order to provide the necessary scaffolding for writing to become more accessible to our students. We'll do that in the next video.
