Walk your Talk

I used to write as though I had an undisclosed amount of words available to me, like in Eddie Murphy's A Thousand Words. Perhaps this came from my mother telling me about an old proverb that said as much whenever she tired of my babbling, which was often.  Unfortunately for her, that warning never translated into limiting my chatter.  Unfortunately for me, it has persistently steered me from writing the way I'd like. I always wanted to be brave enough to write as though I could write all I wanted every day for the rest of my life and never run out of words.  I know writers like that.  You know writers like that.  They make it look so easy. Too easy.

I've always told my students that writing is like drawing water from a faucet.  If you leave it running regularly, the water comes out clean and evenly.  In abandoned homes, where the water's been turned off, though, the water doesn't come out at all, and then a rusty spurt falls down the drain, and sputters and long stints of silence commence before the water flows freely.  I truly believe writing is like that.  I have experienced the truth in my theory, yet I stare at a blank page more often than not, afraid to begin.  I can rationalize that if I don't like what I put down, I can erase it, delete it, throw it away.  But that prospect is terrifying.

Why is that? We don't always feel so attached to what comes out of us, we don't speak as though we can never take back words or revise our ideas, yet many of us write as though we are Moses, etching the commandments into stone.For this reason, I treat my students' writer's block with loving understanding.  I've been there. Yesterday.  So again I give my spiel as I see their eyes glaze over, as mine would, were the roles reversed.

But I don't walk my talk.  When I give an assignment, why only make one exemplar text, if any? It's my assignment.  I'm telling children to do something I'm not willing to do myself, or more than once.  That's not cool.  I could easily write an exemplar each period that my students are writing, so that by the end of the day, they have a half-dozen different examples of what I am looking for.

Well, not anymore, my friends.  My goal for the fall is no less than three exemplars for each writing task.  And why not? According to my theory, each one should get progressively easier to write. Shouldn't it?