It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions.
Optional Question for September
Last time, I mostly skipped the optional question of the month and so just gave it a very brief answer. However, my answer to this month’s optional question was one that I wanted to go over a little more, so I’ll mostly be focusing on that. And that question is:
Since it's back to school time, let's talk English class. What's a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?
In my senior year of high school, I had this creep of an English teacher who was always downgrading my writing no matter what I did to improve it. This was a time when I had fairly recently decided to go for a career in writing/journalism and had been ace-ing my English classes in my previous years of high school. Still, she would really down criticise not only my final drafts of papers, but also my first or rough drafts that we were required to turn in.
This teacher would criticise a rough draft as if it was supposed to be a revised one! She had me come in during my lunch period to give me a big talk on what I needed to do to improve a literary critical paper that she assigned to us and she kept pointing out little details that normally aren’t taken into account until the final revision process. Most of these details, as you may have guessed were grammar and mechanics. I told her I hadn't taken those into account because she told us to do a rough draft only. But she responded saying that we're still supposed to write it as if it was our final draft!
After that, I started trying to write my first drafts that way and would outline and plan them like they were second or even third drafts. I did this too much all the way into college both for my class assignments and my own fiction writing and doing so either stunted my creativity, stunted the writing itself or both. These problems, especially with college writing, would really stress me out especially when there were deadlines to meet.
It wasn't until about my junior year of college when one of my literature professors suggested that I write the rough draft before writing the outline and without stopping to correct for grammar and mechanics. She said that to do otherwise distracts too much from saying clearly what I'm really trying to say. I took her advice and it helped me communicate my most intended thoughts not only more clearly but more easily too!
Newsletter Update
I had said that I would be coming out with the summer edition of my author's newsletter, "Night Creatures' Call", a while back. I'm running late with it which I apologize for. I was going to release it by last Saturday but, being the Labor Day weekend here in the US and having been burned out from other projects and duties, I had to take a rest especially with that weekend being popularly known as the last weekend of summer.
Well, that’s not really so. Officially, the last weekend of summer here in the US doesn't come until about the third week of the month. So, I'm finishing up the summer newsletter and will be releasing it by this weekend. If you haven't signed up for “Night Creatures’ Call”, you can sign up for free here. I'm also trying to include in this edition a special digital gift for subscribers (it's not a book) that I've been putting together but I'm not sure if I'm doing it right and so have to try it out first. Hopefully it will come out right. If it doesn’t, well you can be sure that there will still be plenty of surprises in this upcoming summer edition!
What is a writing rule you were taught in school that messed up your writing?
Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: Beth Camp, Jean Davis, Yvonne Ventresca, and PJ Colando! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels!
Until next time . . .
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You describe a strange way to write the first draft. I've never heard of such an approach. I suspect your teacher wasn't really knowledgeable on the subject. And her students suffered.
ReplyDeleteBTW: your site only allows me to comment anonymously. It doesn't allow either a Google account or a name and email. Perhaps, you could fix it through some options?
Olga Godim from https://olgagodim.wordpress.com/
That teacher was just egotistical and stubborn. And yes, her students suffered except for those she played as her favourites and, obviously, I wasn't one of them. One thing it taught me was not to treat my students that way when I went into teaching writing in college and high school.
DeleteI'm sorry about the site's problem. I created it from the Blogger platform which is run by Google so it should not prevent other people's Google accounts from linking. It may be a problem with the platform. I'll definitely look into this and try to get it fixed. Thanks for commenting regardless of!
Crazy teacher to think the first draft needed to be polished.
ReplyDeleteAnd sorry, this post just appeared in my Feedly reader this morning!
No worries!
DeleteYeah, she expected us to revise it as we wrote it or something like that. Ridiculous.