-Form a writing group...maybe you could meet once a month at a local coffee
house. You could bring stuff you have written and share it, or you could use
the time to write together.
-Go to a coffee house by yourself and write for an hour while you have coffee
and a muffin.
-Buy Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and.or Wild Mind for other
suggestions such as the two above.
-Raise a question about your teaching pedagogy and try to answer it: why was
e-mailso effective in comp last semester? What differencwe did it make in the
class? something like that...Just write about it...youdon't have to do
anything formal with it.
-try a writing marathon in class: have your kids sit in a circle and give them
a question, as if it were going to be an essay test: How did the US change in
the years between the Civil War and WWI? for example. Everyone starts to
write. After about two minutes, tell them to stop writing and pass their
papers to the student on their right. You participate in all of this. Read
what that person has written and continue writing. Repeat 2 or 3 times and
discuss the answer to the question. I know some of you said it's hard to write
with discipline issues that you have to face. I know. I've taught 3rd through
12th grades. But everytime I have sat down to write with my kids, they take
the assignment more seriously.
-Keep a "what really pisses me off" journal: You know what really pisses me
off? People making me feel guilty for not writing!" And let it all out!
Don't write for anyone else...just write for you. Take 15 minutes, maybe every
other day. Try it and let me know how it feels. I wrote nothing before the
summer of 1988 except a few letters and maybe a shopping list or two. "Don't
forget to buy milk" may have been my total yearly output. Now I write a
lot...not every day, but whenever. I do write whatever I ask my students to
write, and most of them have commented to me on how impressed they have been
with my doing that and what a positive effect it has had on their own attitude
toward writing. Last semester Iwas so busy with graduate school tht I wrote
nothing else but my grad school papers and I used what I had written the
semester before in my comp classes (ssh...don't tell!) But I did work on my
own stuff over the summer and during this snow.
Let me know if you try it...you could even write to me over e-mail if you want
to talk about it some more.
Barbara