What if your English teacher was wrong?
Why do we measure a writer’s value with terms like good and bad, or by properly placed commas and quotation marks and not by the value of their story? It stays with a person, this judgment, even years later, when their story is struggling but determined to find its way to the page. They open a notebook or blank page on their computer and …nothing happens. Or worse, it comes back to them. The declaration that they are bad writers. The judgment is still there, hanging around, calling them names.
Maybe they are brave, and they pound out a few lines, but all they see are the red and blue autocorrections and they’re transported back to their high school desk. There they are surrounded by other bored, resentful students, trapped by the scrutiny of a misguided teacher.
Or maybe they had a great teacher, but one that was forced to teach to an upcoming test or current standard and didn’t have time for anything else. They taught their students that the most important part of their story was their punctuation, verb tense or vocabulary. They didn’t see the delicate image, the vulnerable moment, the characters forming on the page. They didn’t value the student’s imagination and the spark of creativity finding its way into words, sentences, paragraphs, and story.
And this is their writing foundation and self-worth, until or unless that get that one teacher. The one who sees what they’re writing, even if it’s misspelled. The one who gets it. They nurture their writing, and help their story emerge. That teacher, the one who tells them that the dots on the page we’ve created to boundary our sentences, don’t really matter. They tell them the truth: Just write it, go for it, let the story out. We need your story. We can tidy up later.
That teacher instructs them on the beauty of flow and editing, the polish and crafting that goes into the second, third or tenth draft, each one, adding more refinement to a very fine story. That is the teacher I wish every student had. That is the one who encourages, shapes, and grows the best writers in the world.
That’s what I wish for the writers who come to me, with doubts in their minds about spelling, grammar, and their right to write. Because everyone has a story to share, and a reader who truly needs it.
