Last week, I talked about where I was wobbling in my teaching practice. This week I want to describe a new pose I am trying out.
This week month I’m trying out a pose of sustained writing and “hustle.”
This month is National Novel Writing Month–colloquially NaNoWriMo, which challenges participants to write a 50,000+ word novel in the month of November. It’s a daunting number of words, but when broken into daily amounts (just shy of 1700 words per day) it’s … less daunting (?). I’ve never actually done it. However, I did challenge my 12th graders to participate several years ago. One of my students, Sam, was already a novelist in her own right and the month of November was one where she was co-teaching the class with me and coaching her peers with myriad writing strategies. I talk a bit more about this process of student-driven writing instruction in my book.
In any case, while I’m not writing a novel this month (or in the foreseeable future), I am using the online momentum of NaNoWriMo to focus on getting significant wordage on two current research projects: my work with Cindy O’Donnell-Allen on Pose/Wobble/Flow and my work exploring the literacy practices enacted in tabletop roleplaying games. I am calling these two projects, respectively, #PWFWriMo and #RPGWriMo. (There’s also a contingent of academics tweeting to the hashtag #AcWriMo that I’ve been lurking around.)
I want to describe my writing practices briefly. First of all my rules for my month of #NaNoWriMo are as follows: every day I will publicly update my progress on Twitter – it forces me to feel accountable and to feel bad on the days in November when I don’t write. A day of writing starts when I wake up and ends when I go to sleep. That means even if I’m writing well after midnight, it’s the same day (so chill out imaginary time-sticklers!). I’m also keeping two tracking systems. On my computer I have a simple Excel file where I list the actual words I write each day. It looks like this:
In my notebook I have a chart that measures writing in increments of 250 words at a time. It looks like this:
I will write, at a later time about how I am using Scrivener to allow me to organize my jumble of verbs and haphazard sentences into something useful. For now, here is a screenshot of in-progress messiness and varying writing prompt:
What I think is important to share here isn’t how awesome it feels to be 15,000+ words deep into a couple of projects that I am working on. Instead, I am interested in how reading and writing are fundamentally different in 2013. When I write in the morning and add my progress to a growing number of tweets, I am joining a community of other writers. I feel accountable because of how technology is connecting my literacy practices with others. It also allows me to engage in some good ol’ shit-talking with my friend Daye:
Reading comments in this post from last week, I’ve been thinking about my writing practices this week and the day-to-day stress of work and teaching and home life. I mean, it’s not like my workload is reduced during the month I’m choosing to put (digital) pen to (digital) paper. I think about those frustrating years of working a weekend job and teaching at the same time–trying to cram in grading student essays while working the graveyard shift at a newsstand on Sunset Blvd. Not fun. Cindy talks about GYST: Get Your Shit Together. I wonder if that’s an appropriate “pose” I can take on. It sure is something I wobble with on any given day. One of my early teaching mentors, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, talked about being a teacher and having to “hustle.” And I think about treating my writing and “real” responsibilities as hustle. In the past when I’ve played around with things like NaNoWriMo, I have approached it like this:
And this month I’m trying to approach it like this (while still keeping everything else somewhat together):
I’m only a quarter deep into what is a long month of writing, so we’ll see how long I can keep this pose going. I know there will be days I am not productive but I also know (and have felt) the awesome flow of cranking out 2,000 words on a beautiful Sunday morning. We’ll see where this pose takes me.
What new pose are you trying out?
[Also: it’s not too late to jump on the #NaNoWriMo bandwagon! If you get some awesome writing done, be sure to let my friend Daye know how much better you are doing.]
I think that what I have come to realize over the past TWO minutes after reading this blog and just happening to run into Antero in the hall, is that I have changed as an academic for the better or for the worse. Yes I am still going to get things done and I do still worry about the grades that I will get, but I have decided that I am not going to change who I am to get that. I write papers for professors who say things like, “make this more succinct” or have better use of the words that you write on the paper and things like that. I am sure that is how most of my assignments feel in education as well. I will write lesson plans that have way to many words or not enough words/explanation and I just don’t care. I find it interesting that throughout elementary and secondary education all the teachers say that they want to hear your voice in your writing. Then you get to college and everyone expects you to have a robotic voice giving facts, supporting evidence and what have you. Well, that just isn’t my style. I like to talk around things and add extra, no point, why would you even write that it is so unnecessary, words into my assignments. Sure I will get penalized sometimes for this, but it is who I am. I speak like I write and because of this it makes my writing feel authentic. So thank you Antero for your vague assignments, it bothered me at first, but now I feel that the work I do can be authentic and the grade I get will be somewhat arbitrary, that is as long as I pass and can still get into Law/Graduate school.
Writing that many words a day sounds like a really difficult challenge but it also brings up the point of what counts as writing. Should tweeting and Facebook updates be considered writing. I would argue yes because of a discussion that occurred in my 301d class last semester. We were all told that we have to create a twitter name than tweet a certain number of times per week. Garcia told us about the challenges of putting all your thoughts into a succinct 160 character count tweet. After attempting to write out the main idea of a class period in 160 characters, I realized the challenge in twitter and how it made me look at myself as a writer in new ways. I would like to bring these new ways of writing in the 21st century into my classroom because it forces writers to evaluate how these counts as writing and reflect on the skills twitter helps them develop. I remember being told about the write a novel activity during the month of November and never participating. I would encourage my students to do it but would give students a full class period close to the first day of november to simply write anything they wanted. Near the end of the class period I would show my students the challenge information then tell them to try to continue the ideas they started in class to create a novel or short story. All throughout November any spare time will be spent writing and any type of writing they choose will be submitted at the end of the month for the grade. This highlights the importance of writing all month. I personally found that many teachers are willing to give students time to read but not write. They are told to write back a response to a quick write or create an outline or take notes or create an essay about a topic picked by the teacher but never to write for a sustained amount of time about anything they want. I think this is how students figure out who they are as a writer and find a passion for writing instead of being forced to write about what the teacher chooses.
I have tried to do this for years and come up with the same “how can I possibly fit that much writing time into my already crazy month” problem. This morning, as I procrastinate work for various classes and grumble into my coffee about it being far too early (having been up for at least an hour) I realized that the “problem” is completely bunk. At the 2-year I went to in Sacramento, I used to spend math class writing furiously, not notes, but pages and pages of story which I later painstakingly transcribed to my computer. How can I possibly say I don’t have time, when I clearly have the capacity to crank out pages in class? Then I realized since attending a 4-year that I don’t have a math class where I can dedicate three hours to writing as I sometimes listen to my professor, and more telling I have to add up the hours where I’m not in class or doing homework just to prove that I have a total of one day to relax.
Proving that I have far too many thoughts and far too few outlets, I wondered what it would have been like if I had a teacher in Middle and High schools that encouraged students to participate in NaNoWriMo. Though I did creative writing in Middle school, it never “went anywhere” leaving me dissatisfied and probably frustrating my teacher. I have at least three stories that I “am writing” in various stages of completion. Yet, by the time I am done with my homework (yeah, right) I don’t want to engage my brain in anything. So I set myself the challenge, not of NaNoWirMo, at least not this year, but to write 6 character development prompts per week until next year when I will finally take on the NaNoWriMo challenge (and by some miracle not fail all of my classes at the same time).
I really wish that I could get involved in writing month, and write a novel. haha. Unfortunately I do not have the time, what with five lesson plannish assignments that are due in upcoming weeks. I wish this month was during the summer!
…I guess I’ll elaborate on my writing experience and how it motivated me in school and maybe influenced me to be an English teacher.
I started writing creatively in 5th grade. I had no concept of dialogue or pacing, but I would staple notebook pages together and write a story. Fortunately for me I had an encouraging grandma who was invested in my writing, and let me read my christmas themed stories after opening christmas presents one year. This participation in writing furthered in middle school. Like Kate, instead of paying attention in Math class I would scribble out pages of my “novel” buried in my black binder, hidden from my classmates. I was able to take journalism and creative writing in 7th and 8th grade and my writing continued. I even began co-writing a “book” with my new best friend, and we would pass a mead notebook back and forth to each other every day, going home at night to write our own chapters. This continued into the summer where we would meet at the library to exchange the notebook. By the end of our “book” we had compiled 5 very large, but ratty spiral notebooks, filled with our ideas of what a novel was.
This is the only “novel” I have ever completed. Though it could probably endure much editing and revision today, I had a vision then and my best friend and I accomplished it.
I wish I had that same vision today.
I was talking with a fellow English Ed student a few weeks ago and she expressed a lot of concern about how to balance life/work as a teacher. As pre-service teachers we hear a lot about how much energy, work, and time go into being a (good) teacher. (Nobody wants to be a bad teacher.) I think we get the impression that what teaching looks like is long, lonely nights of grading, early morning lesson planning, and weekend and evening professional development activities, without any time leftover to write our NaNoWriMo novel or to spend time with our families, work our second job, etc. I really think this image of a teacher as a martyr to his/her students should GTFO (“Freedom Writers,” I’m looking it you). I think obviously teaching is a tremendous amount of work, but it’s still a job.
If we set boundaries to it, it can’t overwhelm us. There are times to Hustle and Get Your Shit Together, but there are also times to turn off your phone, log off your email, and make time to make love to your significant other. We talk about teaching as a calling, as an identity, and I think there’s something to that, but more than anything, it’s a job. We should have set hours and boundaries when we are in “work” mode, or “school” mode, or “family” mode. By having those boundaries, I’ve found that I can be much more productive when I know that I cannot do schoolwork between 6-9pm because I’m spending time with my family. There will always be a pile of papers to grade and lesson plans to hammer out. They won’t go away; there will always be more. You can only be overwhelmed if you don’t have a plan.
I tried to write a book once…okay maybe twice. I remember in the 2nd grade my sister, best friend and I spent hours huddled up in the cubby-hole of my Dad’s office trying to write a book. To this day, I can still recall us fighting over which character we wanted to be in our “novel” while wrapping fruit by the foot fruit rollups around our thumbs and tossing goldfish into each other’s mouths. Let’s just end there and say that we never finished the novel.
Years later, right when I graduated high school and was bored one summer day I decided I wanted to try and write again. I whipped out my brand new macbook that I got for graduation and started typing. Yeah…that lasted about a week before I realized it was a lot harder than I had expected and the sunshine and river was calling my name.
So lets just say I’ve never been a super intense creative writer, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love to write. I love to write songs/poetry though in my free time and catch myself constantly scribbling lyrics into my class notes. In high school it was a way to escape reality, in college it became a unique hobby. Unfortunately, its slowly been dwindling throughout the years. I have become so consumed by writing (and reading) for classes, that I’ve been finding reading/writing during my spare time to be impossible. I follow the first diagram of deciding to do everything else BUT write. Sure I attempt to do the GYST, but my gyst involves getting all my other shit together before I decide to get my writing done. I constantly catch myself cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, eating lunch, going to the gym, or anything else just so that I can act busy and avoid writing. And this writing is writing that I am required to do for class, so there’s no way I even consider writing for myself. This #NaNoWriMo challenge seems like an awesome thing to participate in, but I need to focus on getting my shit together (in relation to school) before I can even imagine writing for myself.
hahahahaha! Dude, I already write something like 2000 words a day! It’s called Senior English Major! But wait.. I can’t put it all into a book and publish it can I? Dude, if I can make money with all this writing I have to do for school – I mean, like, I’m in dude.. That would be totally Tits! (Cartman loves me for that).
Seriously though, I love the idea. Both of my kids are actively participating in the project through classes at school. My daughter is so-so about it, but my son is actually very engaged. He’s writing a mash up of sorts and makes time everyday to write. Props to his teacher for bringing him to this realm – it’s a joy to see him hacking away at the keyboard with such enthusiasm – makes the English teacher daddy in me tear up a bit 🙂
So I just have to say that I appreciate your all-over-the-place, tangent thing you always have going on. Somehow, you still manage get your message across and bring amusement into your approach; it’s quite impressive. I have to be honest with you here and say I have never heard of this. Ironically enough, I just started writing another book and as of today I am at 99428 words. But I don’t think that counts since I technically started on the 28th of October. I have found that prioritization is more important than ever before. After my work is done I reward myself with reading a book or writing time. It’s about making time for those little things, like writing 2000 words a day or finishing a novel, that make the rest of life’s demands so much more rewarding. I like your new outlook though. Sometimes you just have to stop everything else and take the time to do it.
In light of NaNoWriMo, I’ll talk about my new writing pose. BUT, as much as I preach, I don’t always practice. Here’s why:
Pose: Write solely for me. Even if it’s a school assignment for 401, 402, 405 (plus all those other EDUC courses), …., I write only what means something to me. I make it my own. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time.
Problem: MOST of what I write for school doesn’t really mean anything to me (no offense, Antero!). I can try to really care about what I put forth for class, but it feels forced. Cue world’s smallest violin, right?
I’ve come to realize in my senior year that I have been there, done that, talked about that over and over and over and over again. I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of reading about classroom theory and ELLs and “how to get students engaged” and “making equity” and all that sh**! I want to be in the classroom, teaching kids, making a difference, putting theory into practice. Though, let’s be honest, a lot of what we’re learning now won’t be remembered or applicable to our real-life classroom and as soon as we’re student teaching/an actual teacher we will have to improvise. A lot. And adapt to new, more realistic theories we never learned about. A lot.
So, for this month, I’ve been trying to write more, and more meaningful. But it’s been slow going, as you can see why. Maybe I’m a pessimist, a cynical jerk. Usually when I write about stuff like this I come off that way. But usually whenever I talk about my frustrations is on blogs and posts like this.
Enough with the theoretical. I’d like to be in the classroom, please!
I always think that I don’t have time but when I look back at the week I realize that I did have time; I just have to prioririze that time. I could have left school five minute s early, smoked and walked at the same time instead of sitting outside smoking before I went to my car. I can read in between classes instead of talking to classmates. I could have stayed up an extra hour earlier or maybe I could wake up an extra hour earlier. What about the vopious amount of time I spend with my partner or talking with my roommate or watching Criminal Minds or How I met your Mother. Wow, this post is depressing me. Making me feel lazy. Point is, we all have time. Even someone like me who works full time AND is a full time student. We, the students, are just super good at procrastinating and being lazy!
Some day I hope to participate in NaNoWriMo but for now I am trying to just get my work done on a daily basis so I can graduate. It seems like NaNoWriMo always comes when I am already drowning in the writing I need to be doing for school. Maybe once I am in the classroom I can make it a challenge for my students and myself to write novels during this month, but for now I am just trying my best to get through it all. My friend, Fairon, gave me a great piece of advice to help me with my wobbling this semester. She told me to take it one day at a time, read what I need for the next day, write a little bit each day and eventually it will all get done.
The pose that I’m working on recently is to manage my time better. I liked what Tealana said about how when you think about it you probably have more time than you thought you did. But I am kind of in favor of being a little lazy when I get to be right now, because I feel like when I’m a teacher it will be a lot harder and I’ll have less time than I do now (which is scary to think about sometimes). I work full time and go to school full time but I like having time to do things for myself. I think people get caught up in being so busy that they think its a good thing. Our society likes to thrive on being busy, and if you’re busy then you’re right on target. But I want to manage my time so I have more time for my life.
Writing a lot of words everyday. Seems like something that we should all do, but probably find excuses not to do. It’s one of those things that I have always been very pleased with after I have done it, but I often times can find any number of things that I would or should be doing in its stead. I suppose that’s how most things are for a lot of us as we think about the work that is good for us, but just seems like a bit to much to ask for from us at the time (i.e. exercising, eating healthy, etc.).
I read what Tyler and a few others wrote and I have to agree that in a lot of my classes I feel as though there are very particular expectations from us as writers and that venturing far from that makes our work null and void. It’s interesting to think about, but particularly all of the writing I do for literary analysis has a very specific expectation and if we venture to far into one particular thing that hasn’t been discussed as widely as a lot of other things we get comments like, “you really should have focused on…” “where is this going?” and things of that sort. Writing for school is an interesting beast and a lot of times it is the farthest thing from “fun” and I am glad for that in a lot of ways, but sometimes it really sucks.
I recently studied abroad in Wales and while I was there I took a writing for performance class where we only had two assignments – a radio play and a short film. Both of these pieces of writing could be no longer than 2500 words and upon first seeing that it was daunting, but once I started I had both of these rough drafts done within a few hours. It’s amazing what writing assignments with a word count and maybe one line that you have to incorporate at some point can do for your writing. It gives you a starting point and a few constraints, but no other rules really. It was a good class and something that I plan on pulling a lot of different ideas and methods from for my future classroom.
Antero, you do realise that if you spent less time on your charts and more time on your writing you’d have more words finished? Eh? But that’s the difficult part about everything these days: there’s not enough time. I struggle so much with finding the time to do my homework, let alone sit down and relax. Tonight, for instance, I’m strongly debating staying up until the wee hours of the morning in order to finish some assignments, but if I go through with that plan I won’t be able to go to the gym in the morning because, trust me, trying to run a mile on three hours of sleep does not go very well.
I received some amazing advise today from the great Professor Roze: work on your big papers, your big assignments every day, even if it’s just for ten minutes. Make it a habit to do some sort of forward progress, whether that’s finding sources, writing a paragraph, or even just opening the document and writing your name on it. These days, no one has four hours of time to dedicate to one assignment, but if you work just a little bit every day, eventually you’ll have the project done. It’s definitely going to be something I’m going to try, because the deeper in I get, the less focus I have and this might be the fix to my problems.
The pose that I am working on is just making sure I have time to write for myself. I have looked back on the semester so far and tried to see how much personal writing I had done, and the answer I found was none. I haven’t done any writing outside of school, which I usually try to do some sort of writing whether it be making songs that never get performed or just writing a blog post about what is bugging me that day. I think it is important to write for yourself. You need to get those thoughts out of your head sometimes whether they are good or bad. But lately I have been trying to get back in the groove of writing something every weekend. Mainly I have just been keeping an online journal, but I still occasionally try to write my own songs. I wish I knew about this NaNoWriMo thing because it sounds like a fun thing to try, but just not for college students who are trying to get A’s in all their classes.
I’ve always wondered if English majors always have a desire to be writers. I don’t think they all do, but a good majority are overtaken by the power of words and therefore find the value in spilling out our own ideas through these little thought structures made of letters and other nonsense. I thought it was interesting to look at it from your perspective as a teacher, I’m worried that when I become a real adult (because I’m obviously not one now) my desire to create art and more specifically write my heart out will diminish. I mean, I don’t think it will, but being a teacher is a busy, hectic life and I already struggle to find time to write. Sometimes I just want to let my brain rest. But I like the idea of being a teacher because I think it will give me many moments to write about. Sure I may not be like, travelling across the world or fighting a bull or anything (as far as I know) but I will be interacting with tons of different people from different cultures and backgrounds the whole time. And this in itself is a constant learning experience. So I think it’s interesting that you’ve been working on this project. Writing is important, I think we all know this. Writing helps us find our real voice in my opinion. I’m sure I will always value (worship) reading and writing the way I do and I think that’s why I might be a good teacher because my passion for these things is so strong, but when I think about it personally I worry about my own creativity and writing flow… Will it suffer if I’m a busy teacher? Will it improve because I have still have to write all the time anyway? I’m not really sure… but as long as it keeps me thinkin’ I’m cool with that.
I know I’m not the only one that is struggling to prioritize my time and making the best use of the time I do have. And with the time I waste, I end up losing time I would normally want to spend reading. Yesterday, I heard an interesting approach to classroom management. Her number one rule for her class was: “When in doubt, read”. If her students aren’t sure what they are supposed to be working on, or if they finish the work the teacher assigned them to do in class, they were expected to spend whatever free-time they had in class reading either their class novel or another book of their choice. I want to apply this practice to my own life. Whenever I find free time when I don’t really have anything else I could be working on, I want to spend that time reading. I want to finish two books by the end of the month with the help of Thanksgiving Break: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath. The next book I want to start in December is Johnny Got his Gun by Dalton Trumbo. How I’ll hold myself accountable to that… well I suppose I’ll have to work to figure out some way I can continue reading while still flowing with the other stuff I am busy with already.
I love writing, but due to this reading and writing intensive semester, I just want to veg out some days. And that is okay. It is important for people in this fast-paced society to learn how to take a breather. Setting goals is fantastic, but many people don’t realize that they don’t have to learn everything at once. It is okay to accomplish one goal at a time. I just took up archery and plan on learning the guitar because I will always have these resources available to me. Forcing yourself to write 50,000 words in a month is fine. But taking it on with the mountains of school work (for college folks) is probably not a wise move. People need to learn to take one day out of the week to not work. Maybe take up a stress-relieving hobby, not a hobby where you are only forcing yourself to work even more. Learn time management, making sure to schedule plenty of time for relaxation (whether that is a couple hours of video games, or be awesome like me and let’s go shoot some arrows together :))
I think NaNoWriMo is fantastic! I’ve never participated… which may throw my reputation under the bus especially when praising how fantastic it is, but i don’t care. I think the whole movement turns the idea of novel writing on it’s head and forces writers to complete a project in a certain amount of time while also creating a sense of solidarity and world community, where you share tour struggles with all of those other writers trying to get to 50,000+. It’s a really cool thing. Although I’m not a participant of this specific activity, I am a member of a website called 750 words (http://750words.com/) which encourages spontaneous daily private writing, which has helped me progress as writer, you should use it too! It’s a great place and if you write for certain amounts of days in a row they give you (electronically) badges with funny animals on them, which is the only recognition as a writer that I ever need.
Accountability is the name of the game. It is vital that creative writers, and artist more generally, hold themselves accountability for the creations. I am a self proclaimed writer, I haven’t officially published anything, but I’m only 22, and there are myriad of excuses I rely on to justify my lack of writing. It is different with academics, in terms of practice and purpose. The purpose of most academic writing is to engage with a topic and represent what knowledge you accumulated about said topic; so the purpose is limited to displaying intellect. The purpose of creative writing is to engage with oneself and manifest creativity into something tangible. Practice also plays a role in the amount or writing, and/or time dedicated to writing. We write creatively because it fulfills us, we write academically is similar way; however, academic writing can be quantified and generally is. It’s like comparing a salary paying job, to volunteering. Both positions are rewarding, but socially salary is valued over volunteer, because of its practicality.
“What if it’s not good”… “Shut up”. Maybe it was the sequence, but this gave some very enlightening –and sobering– perspective about what we do and the intention behind it. We all know we want more, and we make all kinds of excuses –excuses are just reasons, but the difference is that excuses are really justification for ourselves even if the reasoning is good — and we (our own selves) wind up being not the only but at least the greatest obstacle we face –our own self-doubt and complacency, and the constructs of external issues, things like time management, responsibilities, obligations, and distractions, simply house our true negligence.
So, where do we stand? Right now, my mantra is “inertia” and I stand, posed, within and without it simultaneously. Inertia is a powerful force in its rock against the waves and boulder tumbling down a mountain like polaristic nature. One side is complacent and justifying; the other is deterministic and flaborgastingly unstoppable. But inertia doesn’t determine direction. I can write in this comment box for hours, moving forward, gaining insight and learning from the en devour truly, but time waits for no one and ultimately the responsibilities and obligations will still be there left unattended. I don’t want to turn away from it, but that inertia needs to change course or the boulder just keeps rolling in an unconscious direction. So if inertia is my mantra, that deterministic force, than prioritizing must be my pose.
What’s my point? I don’t know? I’ve never really had one. These are just thoughts. Dang, I really need to find another outlet. But here’s one last thing to think about.. if you want to. I’m reminded of something I saw in a movie once (Waking Life). “What are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?”
I have to agree with your pictures, they are extremely funny, and extremely relevant as to what is going on in my life…. some times I don’t…. well… let’s rephrase that shall we? ALL THE TIME, I feel like there is something more important than what I am doing at the time, and I have to create hierarchies of “stuff to do”. It was nice, yesterday, when I just was sitting out on the lawn, puffing at my pipe, and thinking about… nothing… just nothing… kinda felt like a long needed vacation from the world, though I was still on campus. Sometimes we just have to “make time” for ourselves, rather than expecting some to come along and bite us.