“There is so much less reading in schools, and very little teaching of grammar. For a writer this is kind of like being thrown into a carpenter’s shop without ever having learned the names of the tools or handled them consciously. What do you do with a Phillips screwdriver? What is a Phillips screwdriver? We’re not equipping people to write; we’re just saying ‘You too can write!’ Or ‘anybody can write, just sit down and do it!’ But to make anything, you’ve got to have the tools to make it.”
The further I go down the writing path, the easier it is to rest easy with the difficulty of the craft. I’m back with Ursula LeGuin, this time in her Conversations on Writing with David Naimon. An interview—her last—that was released posthumously. At times in this text, we know she is at the end of her career. She tells us. She has nothing left to lose, if she ever did. But it’s implied so much more in moments like the passage above.
I have taught writing for years now. That’s more about my personal life and current career than I ever thought I would reveal in this space. And I was raised in the school of “You Too Can Write!” I assigned the classical and contemporary essays, subjects of rhetorical analysis, and early on depended on the knowledge that I had studied grammar in several years of junior high and a year of high school, so therefore my students must have studied it, too. Of course, the misconceptions fell away quickly, and I incorporated at least some grammar into my teaching.
But it’s never enough. We need the metalanguage of grammar specifically and language more broadly, the perpetual refreshing when we read, not just to examine ideas, but to examine the construction of ideas. Yes, they are the tools we need in the shop, or at our own writing desks. They are the tools that help us learn not only to build, but also to see. I’ll admit a certain horror when I find that a student cannot identify a noun (person, place, thing, or idea), or the verb that the noun is either doing or having done to it. Yes, you too can write, but it’s merely throwing down the words and hoping without any sense of clear meaning or construction.
In my own work in progress, I am spending a lot more time listening to my editor, who is helping me see those passages that are narrating context, or world building, or telling what I either fail to show or show later. The process of cutting and emending is not a fast one. We don’t run with scissors, in life or on the page. So slowly, word by word, line by line, I discover my own language, my choices, and add by subtraction. At the same time, adding by addition is preferable, and the best way is not just to read good words, but to know the tools the author used to write those good words. Yes, you, too can write. But first, you must read.
Nicanor Abbott 