In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns argues many beginner authors struggle because our public school and high school education systems fail to teach students the revision skills, experimentation, and risk-taking necessary to create art.
The Writing Coach Episode #191 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #191 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners. And welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
We’re coming up on the next round of Story Plan Intensive, my four-week program, where each day I email you writer’s craft training videos, Monday to Friday. Also, on Friday, you get an inspiration, inspiring homework assignment, all of which builds up to you creating an amazing outline for your book by the end of the month. If you have not experienced the Story Plan Intensive yet, get registered now.
The other day, I was on a call with a client, and I was explaining to him some literary elements that were missing from his scene. He had some great dialogue; it was a well-plotted scene, but it was a little lean on environmental description as well as on physical movement. We were talking about how to get these elements into the scene, and he said, “I understand what you’re saying and what I need to do. But how can I do that on the first try?”
I said to him, “You don’t.”
Writing fiction involves so many layers of information and techniques that it’s almost impossible to get it all right on the first try. Writing is an iterative process.
In one of Steven Pressfield’s books, he says you’re probably going to do ten drafts of a book before it gets published. I think that’s perfectly reasonable, but people hear that they hear this idea that they’re going to have to go over their book ten times, and they think it’s insane. Even writers who I’ve worked with and who understand (or at least cognitively get that writing requires revisions), I still know that in their hearts or in the back of their minds, they’re thinking, “Yep, yep, writing a novel requires multiple revisions, for everyone else . . . but NOT for me. I’m the one who’s going get it all right on the first try.” And, of course, they then get frustrated when they don’t.
As a result, I spent a lot of time thinking about this issue, this idea that people come into writing so disconnected from the need for revisions and the importance of revisions. I think about where this comes from, this attitude of I’m going to get it all right on the first try… and I think the answer is school.
Even at a university level, most people cram their essay writing process into the afternoon, or worse yet, the evening, before it’s due. They pound it out at the last minute, and then they hand it in, and it gets marked. If they do well, they’re happy. If they do poorly on the grading, they aren’t encouraged to go back and fix it, they aren’t encouraged to revise and make it better. They just move on to the next essay.
In my own experiences, it wasn’t until I was in grad school and working on my master’s thesis that I was matched up with the supervisor who finally read drafts and provided feedback and encouraged me to go back and do better.
As a result, most people never have the experience of revising writing of any kind.
In fact, schools emphasize the idea that you have one shot at it. You type it up, you hand it in, and you do good, or you don’t.
So it was thinking about schools and the school system that led to this episode, where I’m going to complain a bit about the way we teach people, not just writing but the entire school system in North America.
That said, I don’t want anyone to misread this episode as in any way a criticism of teachers. My uncle was a principal, and my wife is a teacher. I believe that teachers are massively important individuals in our society, and I also think they are insanely under-resourced, underappreciated, and underpaid. I mean, the lack of respect and funding for education is just one of the problems we can add to the list that I’m going to cover in this episode.
Let me take you back to when I was in grade three. I was a loud, energetic kid, and my parents were in the middle of getting a divorce. I was getting into fights at school. I was getting in lots of trouble. And eventually, they placed me in the special needs class. I was in the class with kids with severe physical and learning disabilities. My difficulties as a student continued throughout public school and high school. I was constantly in trouble. I was always getting suspended, and getting sent to the principal’s office. And I received pretty poor grades throughout public school and high school.
My grades were good enough, at least by the end of high school, that I was able to make it into university.
I started university, and my grades started coming in, and I found myself to be a straight-A student. This was quite a shock for someone who had been considered “disabled” in grade at one point in my life in grade three.
In terms of my ability to perform in school, you might think something changed, that I changed. I grew up, I matured, and the way I approached school was different. But that’s not the answer at all. I was largely the same person I had always been. The difference was the environment and the education system that I was now a part of. The university required completely different things from me, and the expectations of me as a student were completely different than they had been my entire school career.
In my experience, throughout school, the most important thing was the ability to sit still and be quiet. That seemed paramount above all other things. And because I was the type of kid who couldn’t sit still and certainly wasn’t quiet, I could never succeed.
Of course, those are some of the worst skills — sitting still and being quiet – to go into the real world having perfected. In the real world, things like independent thinking, risk-taking, and an extroverted nature are almost always rewarded with higher results than being an introvert, scared to think for yourself and scared to take any risks.
What I was being taught throughout most of my school career were the exact things that lead to failure in real life and that disconnect between school and the real world goes beyond just behavior-related things.
There’s so much about grown-up life—in fact, we talk about it as “adulting” now, right? We see all these memes about how tough it is to be an adult—and the thing is, we’re never taught most of what we need to know to be an adult. We aren’t taught how to pitch ideas. We aren’t taught how to win arguments. We aren’t taught how to fix broken things, or take care of a home, raise kids, or take care of parents who are getting older. Or how to freaking pay taxes, right? I mean, every single one of us legally has to pay taxes and yet no one teaches us how to do it. We’re thrust into the world with this attitude of “If you can sit still and be quiet, you’re probably going to be all right.” And then real life hits you.
And for me, as someone who always did poorly in school, real life was kind of a surprise because I realized a lot of the skills I was naturally good at were actually useful. I imagine that realization is pretty darn challenging for people who come out of the public school system as A students because they’re able to be quiet and agree and do what they’re told.
I mean, the whole grading system itself is ridiculous. It sets up perfection as a goal. I see this time and time and time again with the writers that I work with: these people who think that if they don’t get 100% if what they wrote isn’t the best thing ever, then it’s not worth it, then it’s a failure. Where does this come from? It comes from the school system where the expectation is that you’re going to get 100% on every test, and when you don’t, you’ve made mistakes, you’ve errored, and if you error enough, you fail.
In real life, being successful 50% of the time is hardly a failure. Imagine you were a salesperson, and 50% of the sales calls that you had were successful. Imagine you were selling an online course, and every single second person who checked out the course bought it. You would be a billionaire. And yet, in school, we were taught that this is bad and that this is a failure. And, of course, failure and resiliency are how we get better at things. So again, in our school system, rather than teaching people how to experiment, how to make mistakes, and how to learn from those mistakes and do better, we make people absolutely terrified of failure, while putting pressure on themselves to always get 100% on everything they do, which is of course impossible.
School also gives us this expectation, really early on in life, that we’re always moving towards something. We’re always moving towards that next grade, that graduation day. We’re always looking to move on to the next thing. As a result, we’re taught to always live in the future; we’re telling little kids not to do badly on that school test because they might not get into a good university someday. We create this fear of the future while also constantly looking to it. And so we don’t know how to enjoy the present.
We don’t know how to enjoy an activity like writing, we look to publishing, we look to selling books, we look to success, we never stopped to think, “Oh, maybe I can just enjoy the process of getting there.” In real life, there is no there to arrive at. Even if you’re focused on retirement, which most people are throughout their careers, well, guess what happens? You retire, and life isn’t over. Now you need to find something else. And again and again, we see these statistics, especially amongst men, that they often die after retiring; there’s some insane stat showing massive numbers of men die within a couple of years of retiring. And it’s because they have nothing left to live for because they’ve spent their whole life looking towards the future rather than enjoying the moment.
And, of course, as a writing coach, you’ve got to know that I’m displeased with the emphasis on maths and engineering and sciences, while the arts and the social sciences are always looked down upon or thought of as not as important.
I remember in university, a professor saying to us, a bunch of English literature students, they said, “Learning English literature and studying the arts is one of the best degrees you can possibly get. Because if you study history, you’re learning history. If you study economics, you’re learning economics. If you study baking, you’re learning baking. But if you study literature, you’re learning all of those things. You’re learning about history, you’re learning about baking, you’re learning about economics, you’re learning about what it’s like to be alive and to be a human, and you are filling yourself up with the knowledge of every author who’s put a word on the page that you’re reading.
Ultimately, I think the thing that really prevented me from succeeding in public school and high school was this idea that there’s just one way to learn, that there’s this cookie-cutter approach that everyone needs to follow to be successful, or they’re going to be a failure.
And, of course, in the real world, there are a million ways to learn and a million ways to deal with different problems.
This is why in my First Draft group coaching program, which a lot of people choose to join once they finish Story Plan, we don’t have just one way of learning in that program. On Tuesdays, we have an open Q&A discussion where people can ask questions, and we can have a bit of a group talk. On Thursdays, we have hotseats, where we go really deep in-depth into one of the member’s scenes that have been submitted. In that group, we also provide each other with positive feedback in the form of written feedback. There’s also a video training library with over 25 courses on writer’s craft and tips for writers, but those video courses also come with graphic sketch notes that capture the information contained in the course visually. They also come with transcripts. Every single one of the courses in that program has a transcript.
Why? Why do I have Q and A’s? Why do I have hot seats? Why do I have video courses and sketch notes and transcripts? Why do I have a forum where we can chat and provide feedback in writing? Because people learn in different ways. And people need different types of support.
Even in the marketing for First Draft, I encourage people to look at a six-month window for getting the first draft of their book done. But you know what? Some people come in, and they have half a book written, so they get it done quicker, or they’re just focused on getting it done quicker, and so they get it done in under six months. Other people need more than six months to get it done. They have busy lives, or they’re just not as quick writer as some other folks. And that’s perfectly fine. It works nice in marketing to say, “Hey, this is a program that’s going to help you get your book written in six months,” but six months isn’t “the right answer.” Six months isn’t going to get you an ‘A’ on the test.
Everyone’s different. Everyone’s working at their own pace. Everyone’s writing with a different background and with a different situation right now, so my writing programs, whether it’s Story Plan, or whether it’s First Draft or whether it’s Final Draft, I’m always trying to ensure that the learners in my programs are able to access the information and the supports that they need in the way that works best for them.
Because I’m the kid who got stuck in the special needs class in grade three because the learning methodology that I needed wasn’t the one that was considered “the right one,” the one that works for everyone.
All right, that is it for this episode. What was your experience with the education system, be it public school, or university or college? Send me a message and let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
All right, Story Plan Intensive is open for registration right now. Get signed up now so we can make this March an incredibly productive, fun, exciting and educational month for your writing career.
Thank you so much for tuning in. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
