How to Teach Writing

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." – F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had no idea what I was doing at first. That class, a group of men who had recently immigrated from Haiti, were painfully polite and kind despite my incompetence. I spoke too fast, I used vocabulary terms they didn’t recognize, I was constantly handing out things and then realizing they were too advanced and taking them back, aware that these men would lose their right to a free education if they failed the final exam for the third time and most of them had already failed twice. I called my father for help but he had never dealt with this sort of student having taught literate, driven, and mostly brilliant graduate students’ Anglo-Irish poetry and Dickens. Finally, I went back to the writers who had inspired me with their stories about learning and teachers who had changed their lives or students whom they had educated. I reread Teacher Man by Frank McCourt and found his approach, storytelling and humor, was helpful, but I was younger than most of my students, and a woman, which meant I had to find a path towards mutual respect. Somehow I remembered the James Baldwin essay, A Letter to My Nephew, in which Baldwin urges his younger relative not to turn bitter and angry in the face of racism but to find a way to survive and live with dignity. It is filled with tenderness and rage.

Molly Moynahan teaching a class

I asked my students if they wrote letters and they all nodded. So we read Baldwin’s essay together and then I asked them to think of a younger person whom they cared for deeply and to write to them offering advice by sharing a lesson they learned. The essays were incredible. I had failed to recognize that asking struggling writers to react to a piece of literature that fails to engage them, that isn’t connected to their own experience, would lead to something filled with grammar mistakes, insincere statements and a lack of purpose. In short, it would be bad. Very bad. But these essays we removed the salutation and the sign off, were deeply felt and, with some minor issues of tense and run-on sentences, reflected what is best in writing; authenticity and an awareness of audience.

Thirty years later, this is how I teach. I ask my clients, my students, my writers, to find a connection no matter what the assignment, to something that matters to them. The results never fail to astonish. Of course there is more to be taught, the importance of an argument, all good writing is persuasive, the careful containing of the chaos of the words, how to rid your writing of filler and, always, that writing must be recursive, it is never perfect or even finished, but can always be made better. However, one must dwell in that imperfection and have the courage to let the words exist in the world whether they are flawed or not. As a writer I have experienced glowing reviews and comments like, “This is the worst book I ever read,” which is doubtful but there you are. You keep going, you remain like that boat that Fitzgerald describes in The Great Gatsby, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” And of course, masterfully he uses alliteration and a lovely word like ceaselessly to nail that ending.

—Molly Moynahan