The Inner English Teacher

I am convinced that the main reason most people are so intimidated by writing has to do with one or more traumatic events in high school associated with a high school English teacher.

To the best of my knowledge, no high school English teacher ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature. None ever won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. They're not the folks who write the screenplays for the blockbuster movies or the people who write the novels that keep the airport bookstores busy.

You know why? English teachers can't write.

Now don't get me wrong--they're a fine breed, English teachers, except for the fact that they try to teach people to write.

On their best day, English teachers are good editors. And an editor is about as far from a writer as a pitcher is to a catcher in baseball. They're on the same team, but they're not exactly interchangeable.

The writer is the person who performs the heroic act of creation. The writer puts the ideas on paper.

The editor is the craftsperson who comes along later and polishes, fine-tunes, checks, and cleans up.

Later on a proofreader will check that it makes sense and that the words are spelled correctly.

The problem with English teachers is that they have so drilled into us the craft of editing that we think it's writing. In fact, your inner English teacher may be telling you that writing is all about not misspelling words, never making a mistake with punctuation, and knowing a gerund from an indefinite article.

Writers are communicators. It's our job to take an idea and put it into some sort of package that can be interpreted and easily understood (embraced, really) by our reader.

The biggest hangup I see in people who "can't write" or "hate to write" is that they are trying to edit first and write second. Just like in baking cookies, the messy part comes first. Writing is first and writing involves being messy. It involves crossing stuff out, adding stuff in, moving stuff around, and (yes) jotting things in place so fast that you have incomplete sentences and misplaced modifiers.

That's first. Later on you edit, which involves cleaning up the whole spiel.

If you have to outsource, outsource the editing. A moderately decent writer with a good editor can produce a great product that is ... in the end ... true to the writer's vision.

But if you sit down to write and are immediately struck by anxiety that you'll make a mistake, that's your inner English teacher. Kill her.