Episode Two: Your High School English Teacher Lied - Let's Talk About It
Newsflash: your high school English teacher lied to you about the writing process. How do I know? I was one of them! I spent six years teaching students to write the wrong way before I started writing fiction and realized that professional writers are doing things differently. Like, completely differently. Tune in for the six lies you likely learned in high school and how to keep them from hindering your progress in the future.
Links:
Key Takeaways:
Everything your high school English teacher taught you about writing is a lie.
You do not have to outline; there are multiple ways to write.
Your first draft does not need to be perfect, but too many assignments are designed as if the first draft should be readable and coherent.
Editing involves more than just correcting typos; it requires structural changes and re-envisioning everything about your story if needed.
Collaboration is essential in writing even if it’s often discouraged or downplayed in the classroom.
Grammar rules can be bent in creative writing; focus on storytelling.
There is no single standard for writing; it varies by genre and audience.
The reader's experience is the most important goal; if your story doesn’t work for them, it doesn’t work at all.
Understanding your own writing process is crucial for success.
Unlearning harmful writing habits can lead to better writing outcomes.
Transcript:
I have bad news for you. Everything your high school English teacher taught you about writing is a lie. Yep, I am making a bold claim. I know it. Welcome to episode number two of the Better Writer podcast. Yeah, today I'm going to tell you every way you were taught to write in correctly. saying no shade to English teachers. I was one and that's how I know.
that what I was teaching, what I was taught and then passed on to my students does not apply to fiction and can be really harmful when we are trying to write publishable, sellable books. So let's talk about why that is.
First off, a little backstory.
was a high school English teacher for eight years. I taught in both Connecticut and Rhode Island at two different schools. And like all English teachers, I basically replicated what I had been taught in high school. There were some things that got updated. I think we are much more aware of accommodations and kind of making our classrooms accessible to all students nowadays. But generally speaking,
The frameworks that I was teaching, the methods that I had learned in high school, pretty much had not changed by the time I became a teacher. And I think that's especially true of how we teach writing. Generations of teachers have
pretty much the same things in writing workshops, and unfortunately, they are not helpful.
how I realized that.
The first four years of my teaching career, I was at a school in Connecticut where every student took two English classes. They had a literature class where they focused on reading and analyzing literature. And they had a composition class that was focused on writing. When I started, composition had just become seminar, so that balance was changing a little bit, but essentially they had a reading class and a writing class. I was in the literature department. So I did have students
write literary analysis essays that was part of the shift that was happening from composition to seminars, we had started teaching literary analysis essays. But writing was not the main focus of that class. It was something we did as part of reading, not something we did for its own sake. Then four years into my teaching career, COVID hit. That is when I uprooted my life. I came to Rhode Island. I started teaching at a different school. I actually started with them online.
do not recommend that, it was awful. But I loved that school and one of the things I loved about it is that I could basically teach whatever I wanted. I also had the opportunity to teach my own elective. And at that time I had just started writing fiction really seriously, I had...
basically made it my whole personality kind of overnight. And so was like, ⁓ great, I'm gonna teach creative writing. for the first time, I was teaching English class where I was responsible for teaching both reading and writing. I was also now teaching a creative writing class to students. And I had just started really seriously trying to write fiction and try, I was trying to write at a publishable level.
All of those things converged at the same time and I realized that everything I was teaching my students about writing was the complete opposite of what I was learning as a student of fiction writing in my personal life. Again, I was teaching what I had been taught to do in high school. I was replicating all of those normal high school English things that we do.
And none of it, absolutely none of it, was reflected in the way that I was seeing professional published writers approach their fiction writing. And I think a lot of us writers, we eventually end up unlearning these things, but I don't think anyone is really naming why we need to unlearn them in the first place. And when I became an editor, I saw this even more, that very similar mistakes are happening.
And I think they all go back to how we are being taught to approach the writing process in school. and the fact that no one is really naming the ways in which fiction is just completely different from what we have been asked to do in academic or professional writing in the past. So I have identified six lies that are being taught in school.
are likely affecting your writing if you have not been in the game long enough to kind of unlearn them naturally. And so I'm hopeful that this is going to illuminate some of what makes fiction so difficult to write when it doesn't need to be. Because I think if you can get
mindset and start to see how fiction is different, that doesn't mean you're gonna master the techniques overnight. But I do think it really gives you a boost in just being able to see
what you should be doing and how it's different from ways you have written in the past.
Quick caveat. I do want to give the preface that I am an American. I Taught in American schools. I was educated in American schools. I suspect that a lot of what I experienced is True in other countries especially because my high school was an IB school international baccalaureate So my education is my more internationally focused than most but I do want to say that I am a product of the US public education system and so
This might not translate to your context perfectly, but I think a lot of it will. Okay, let's dive in. The first lie is a big one, and this is going be controversial. Lie number one is that you have to outline. I know that this is still controversial in the fiction writing world, but I will die on this hill. You do not have to outline.
you do not have to outline. There are multiple ways to accomplish the same goal. But in school, we are often taught that the writing process is one size fits all and that we all need to go through the same steps the same way.
This is the lie that I think I feel most guilty about when I think about my own teaching practice because I was the same as most English teachers. I had a very strict process that I made every student go through. We start with the outline. You turn in your outline for feedback. We move on to the rough draft. Everyone has to turn in a rough draft mostly so I can see you have something. Then you do the final. There's no leeway. It's all the same deadlines, the same process, et cetera.
And I would have students who would sit there staring at their outline, whether it was on paper or digital or whatever, they would sit there and they would sit at the outline and they would get nothing done. And then either they just never turned in an essay at all, or they would, you know, finally on the last day of the assignment, I would tell them, oh, fine, skip the outline, write an essay, just do it, get them done. And then, you know, they would turn in something that was subpar because they did it in the last day before the assignment when we'd had, you know, weeks to work on it.
and I think this is probably, if we're honest with ourselves, typical of what happens in a lot of classrooms. And you may have had this done to you as a student in a
Because again, I had been taught that you outline, that's what you do. I outline when I'm writing nonfiction, whether that's an academic essay or, you know, anything like that. But when I started really writing fiction,
I discovered that I'm a panzer. The first book that I ever finished, got to the end of the draft, I did not outline. I just started writing, started making stuff up as I went along, and that was the very first book that I actually finished. And that epiphany changed my entire conception of the writing process, and I realized...
that I had been doing such a disservice to those students who were just sitting there staring at their outlines, not getting anything done, because I assumed, like I'd been taught, that they were just doing it wrong. They just weren't following directions. They were lazy. They were unmotivated.
So the first school year, after I had this realization, I came back and I decided to run an experiment. I gave my students three different sets of deadlines to choose from for our first running assignment. I had a plotter track where students would spend more time outlining. So those students would turn an outline. They had more time to do it. Then they had less time to draft and less time to revise. I had a pantser track for kids who wanted to skip the outline completely.
but they had to turn in two separate rough drafts. So they did a rough rough draft first, then a less rough draft before going on to the final. Then I had an in-between track. Those students turned in outline, but they did it earlier than the plotters. So they would then have more time drafting and more time revising. At the end of that unit, when students were able to pick their own deadlines, pick their own writing process, every single student turned in the assignment.
That was the first time that had ever happened in my entire career. And I was not a new teacher at that point. This was year six for me. having taught multiple writing assignments per year every year. That was the first time I ever had a 100 % turn in rate and 100 % turned in by the deadline.
If you work outside of education, that might not sound very special to you, but if you are a teacher, if there are any teachers listening, you know how exceptional that actually is, especially considering that this was fall of 2021 and these were 10th graders. So these are students who spent their entire ninth grade year at home. This was their first writing assignment, their first year actually going to school in person as a high school student.
Like we even still had masks on. So the fact that everyone turned in that essay really was incredible. And what that experience taught me is that the difference between plotters and pantsers is not a myth. There are actual differences in how people approach the writing process and all of those processes can work. And I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that every kid wrote an amazing paper. I'm not gonna tell you that everyone did it
perfectly, but I can say that I had A's in the plotter group, I had A's in the pantser group, and I had A's in the in-between group. the method that a student used did not determine the final outcome. Their skill as a writer in other aspects determined the final outcome. Their ability to take feedback and apply it.
determines the final outcome. So anyone who tells you that a pantser is just lazy, they're not disciplined enough to outline, they're wrong. They are wrong. You can succeed as a pantser, you can succeed as a plotter. And the idea that there is only one way to approach the writing process,
is a lie. It's a lie. And again, I feel really bad about perpetuating that myth in my classroom, but I didn't know any better because I think there's just so much noise out there. So much goes into perpetuating this myth. And teachers are teaching kids to outline. Teachers are teaching kids that there is only one way to approach the writing process. There's not. And I think so many people are hampered by this when they start writing fiction because they don't know how to figure out their own writing process.
because they never had a chance to explore that in school. I can go on and on about this and maybe there will be another episode about that actually. That will be episode three. So stick around because I'm gonna talk more about this plotter versus pants or divide. right, line number two. Is that your first draft should be readable or coherent or even polished? This one I think is more insidious. It's not something that is being actively said by any teacher.
Maybe it is. I would say for the most part, it's probably not. But it is baked into the structure of so many assignments that are being given in school. For example, students are often given an exit ticket.
Maybe the word exit ticket didn't exist when you were in school. I don't remember hearing it. I think it's more of new thing. But basically, it's like a question you answer at the end of the day to demonstrate whether you've learned the content. And I think the idea that like you have two minutes to scribble on an answer and it's supposed to represent a coherent thought, it's just kind of unrealistic. Like you're supposed to write a whole paragraph that makes sense. I know for myself, I was often told as a teacher that I should be
grading exit tickets for quality, both quality of thought and sometimes quality of writing. So again, a student might have 10 minutes, 15 minutes, less than that to write a full paragraph that then gets graded for quality. The implicit message is that thing you scribbled out at the end of class should be readable, should be gradable, should represent the quality of your thinking and work when
That's not really a realistic expectation, especially for someone who is still learning to write. We also have in-class essays. The SAT essay, when it still existed, is, you you're told, well, you know, they're gonna judge it like a first draft, but that means that your first draft should be judgeable, that your first draft should be readable enough that you can get a grade for it, that a high-stakes assessment can be based on what you wrote.
in under an hour. You know, I think even on a larger scale, if you have an essay that you wrote over a few days, a few weeks, even then,
Usually what happens is you write the essay, you turn it in, it gets graded, and that's it. You don't go back to it, you don't rethink it. the implicit message there is that once you finish a piece of writing, it's set, it's done, the grade is set in stone, it's locked into the gradebook. I know more and more schools are kind of offering revision opportunities now, but I think that message is still implicitly there that
Writing is something that happens once and then you walk away, that's it. And again, I think in class essays I think are particularly problematic, which is why I refuse to do them after my second year of teaching. That's a whole other story. But this idea that the first draft that you vomit out should be readable is really dangerous because I think a lot of people freeze. They think that their first draft has to be more than it is.
They think that their first draft has to be stronger than what's really required. Your first draft, its only job really is to exist. don't get me wrong, if you are a clean writer, that's totally fine. That is something to celebrate. But if you're not, that doesn't mean you failed. It just means that you are going to need to do some work in revision to make sure that your story ends up being what you want it to be. But that doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong. But you were probably penalized for having a messy first draft.
when you had to write an in-class essay or on the SAT. it's a damaging narrative. It's a narrative that isn't being explicitly taught, but it is baked into so many assignments and so many things that we are doing in schools. Teach students that your first draft should be readable, should be coherent, should represent your best ideas when that is not a realistic expectation for a first draft. And the sooner you can realize that that messaging was wrong,
the better off you will be. So I hope that you can start to unlearn that starting today.
Alright, that brings me to lie number three, which is the idea that editing means pulling out a red pen and looking for typos. And you might have gone to a school that maybe taught a little bit more editing than this. Maybe you were looking for missing commas in addition to those typos. But oftentimes I notice that people don't really understand what revision means. They think revision is just
cleaning sentences, making sure that everything sounds right. When really, we should worry about those sentence level things last. That is the absolute final step in your revisions. And that's especially true when you are talking about a novel. Maybe when you're talking about one paragraph, you're not gonna be making big structural changes. Okay, fine, But people try to take that same mindset
to a novel and it just does not translate. When we are talking about a novel, and I would argue this is also true of many essays, we need to think about the structure. We need to think, you know, for a story you're gonna be thinking about character arcs. You need to think about the plot, your chapter order, point of view. You might end up needing to massively rewrite entire sections of your story.
And that's just something that we're not often asked to do in a classroom setting. You might get a bad grade, but you probably don't have the chance to completely start from scratch and get a new grade. So people just aren't used to this concept of, wrote the thing, it didn't work. I'm gonna completely redo it in a new way. It's a foreign way of thinking for a lot of people, which makes it really difficult to approach the revision process because it's something that we...
often associate with that we did something wrong. I'm revising because it's bad. I'm revising because I failed. But in actuality, you're revising to bring your story closer to your vision. You're revising because your first draft was never meant to be perfect. It's really hard, if not impossible, to make your first draft perfect. And therefore, you keep refining and iterating and getting closer and closer to your goal.
And this lack of revision also ties in to lie number four, which is this idea that you have to work alone. For this one, I do want to note, as a high school teacher, getting students to do their own work is an ongoing challenge and a really important goal. So it is very important for us to keep kids from plagiarizing, copying off each other, et cetera. However, what that sometimes turns into is pretending that the writing process can happen completely
completely in isolation. We teach students that they should not work together at all. They should not let anyone read their essays because they might copy and then you both fail. mean, I've definitely shared those horror stories with students that like don't share your essay with anyone because if they turn it in, you could both get kicked out of college. which is true. It is true. But we tend to overdo it and suggest that
You should never share your work with anyone else. It's just you, you alone. All I want to see is what you can do with your brain. And again, there is a time and a place for that. But people who are actually writing and publishing professionally know that the process is incredibly collaborative. Writing fiction for someone else to read and buy requires you to make sure that your story is actually working for someone else.
We cannot, cannot create publishable books on our own. We need feedback. I'm not saying that you necessarily need professional help, but you do need to have someone else read your book so you can make sure that it makes sense to the reader. So you can make sure that your message, your intentions are coming across on the page in the way you wanted them to.
Another side to this problem is that people sometimes become afraid of feedback because in the classroom feedback is punitive or it feels that way. As in you've already gotten a bad grade or not the grades you wanted and the feedback is only telling you what you did wrong. And even if you're student who got
good grades on papers, often the feedback was like, okay, this was fine, but next time do X, Y, Z to be even better. And again, I'm not at all criticizing teachers because you have such limited time. There is not enough time to go through and comment on every single thing that a student did right. And so often the more efficient thing to do, the thing that saves you from spending your entire life grading is just trying to be quick to the point, here's what needs to be better, maybe you have time for...
one positive comment, but then you have to move on. And oftentimes also that feedback is coming at the end of the process. The assignment is done. It has already been graded.
That feedback is then meant to help you on the next assignment, And problem is that, it doesn't actually do anything for you in the moment because the paper is done, you can't improve this score, and the next assignment is going to be completely different, and some of those comments might not actually translate into what you're trying to do next. So a lot of people don't have experience getting good
in the moment feedback on their writing, which makes it difficult when you're trying to then write professionally to accept feedback, to take feedback in a way that doesn't shatter you or doesn't make you want to quit. And think again, a lot of it goes back to this idea that we feel like we're being graded again. We feel like we have gotten a bad grade on the paper rather than the reality that someone who gives you feedback when you are trying to get published is helping you get closer to your goals.
And that is something that I built into the process when I totally revamped my classroom. I actually started teaching students how to both give and receive feedback, starting with just having kids write a question.
for the people who are reviewing their essays. Because I think we don't always get in the habit of thinking about what do I actually want to know about my writing? That's a skill. Knowing what you need to work on, knowing what you need feedback on, that is a skill that oftentimes isn't being developed in classrooms. And we have to learn how to ask for feedback. We have to learn how to give instructions to the people critiquing us. Those are skills. So if you've ever felt like, don't know how to get good feedback. I don't know what I should be asking for or looking for. I don't know how to use these comments.
It's not because you're doing something wrong, it's because you've probably never learned how to ask for feedback, how to use it. There's a process and it's again, it's something that needs to be learned. All right, on to line number five. And this is another one that might be controversial, especially, I'm a little biased as a developmental editor. So if there are any copy editors out there, sorry, not sorry. But line number five is that grammar is God.
and that there are other very rigid rules that can never be bent, never be broken. Goodness, there are a lot of English teachers out there who love their grammatical rules or love the rules like you must use five active verbs in your first sentence and if you don't, you fail. I was not one of those people. My relationship to grammar is very intuitive, very informal. If I ever...
tried to count verbs in a student's paper, I would lose my mind. But, I think that makes sense, that's why I'm a developmental editor. I only worry about the story level stuff. I do not worry about grammar. But I think that there is an overemphasis on certain rules in education that ends up harming writers when they are trying to expand beyond academic writing. Now, I do want to be clear.
Grammatical rules do serve a purpose. They are a necessary part of communication. You can imagine if we had no standardization whatsoever, we would not be able to read each other's writing. So I am not arguing for no rules, no commas, no grammar. But fiction doesn't necessarily need to follow the rules as rigidly as academic or professional writing in other contexts.
There is room for creativity and art and what things sound like and fragmenting sentences if they make sense in context. And if we try to stick too closely to the idea of what good writing means, it can...
the overall experience that we end up giving our readers and lead to a weaker book.
I see that especially with people who are trying to be concise. Part of that comes from publishing itself and there are times when we do need to pay attention to specific word counts. But I also think part of the issue comes from this classroom mindset where you have exactly 500 words and if you go above or below, you get points taken off.
You have exactly two pages and you have to cram in a bunch of information and be as direct and to the point as possible. And I get it for the teachers out there, you have to put limits However, when we start writing fiction and if conciseness is our goal, if we are putting brevity above everything else, it's highly likely that you are stripping the magic out of your story.
because you will end up summarizing instead of showing. You are going to end up using generalities and vague descriptions instead of something that is precise and detailed. And you are likely to skip over a character's interior thoughts in favor of just getting to the point, and not really narrating the full scope of what's going on.
I do want to say I'm not telling you to ignore word count completely. However, I do believe that word count should not be the priority upfront. Get your entire story on the page first. Write in all of the scenes, show the specific setting details, introduce your characters, give us their thoughts on the page. Make sure you are showing your scenes and not summarizing things that readers are going to want to see firsthand.
start by getting the entire story on the page. Do not make being concise your entire goal, especially in your first draft because you can always cut things later. And I think it is easier to do that when you have made sure that the important things are on the page first. Then you can pare back at the sentence level. can, you know, we can figure out what is most essential after that. But I see a lot of people who underdevelop parts of their story.
because they are trying to just cut out the fluff, the extra stuff. When a lot of that extra, the descriptions, the emotion, the interiority is what makes fiction enjoyable to read. So you'd be really careful that you are putting the right mindset, the right goal at the forefront for the type of writing you're doing. If you take an academic or a classroom approach to writing and try to apply that to a novel, it's not going to work.
which ties in perfectly to our final lie. Lie number six is that there is one objective standard and that audience doesn't matter.
I think this is another one that is fairly insidious and that it's not necessarily directly stated, but it is built into the assignments we're given in school. For example, you are writing an essay. There is one rubric. There is one reader, the teacher, but the teacher doesn't really matter. All you're trying to do is demonstrate that you can follow the rules so you can get a grade. You're not
thinking about your teacher's reading experience. Unless maybe you're the kid who's like trying to distract the teacher with humor and get a better grade. But most people are not thinking about the teacher's experience as a reader because they're not told to. They're not thinking about whether or not their essay is enjoyable to read because again that's not the focus of the assignment. The focus is hit this very
specific standardized criteria and hopefully get the grade you want on this essay. When we writing fiction, the mindset has to completely change. There is not one rubric. There isn't one strict set of rules that applies to every book. There are some commonalities. There are things that apply across genres, but your ultimate goal is not to check a bunch of boxes. Your ultimate goal
is to create an experience for your readers that they enjoy. And that experience is going to be completely different depending on the genre you write. In fiction, the standards are incredibly subjective. There is no one size fits all because there are so many different genres, subgenres, age categories, interests, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
You have to decide who you are writing for, what genre are you writing, what age group are you writing for, who do you want to read your book, and then you have to figure out what they want from you and how to deliver.
It would honestly be easier if there was one set standard we could all focus on and adhere to, but there isn't. It's just not how fiction works. Because what's good in a romance is different from what's good in literary fiction, is different from what's good in mystery. Again, there's overlap, there's commonalities, but ultimately, the people who read those genres are looking for different things.
even if people read across genres. I read very widely. I have a lot of different interests, but I don't go to a will trend mystery for the same experience that I would turn to one of the Bridgerton books or to a Brandon Sanderson book. Even a Dan Brown book, which mystery and thriller are often thrown together, but I'm actually not looking for the same experience from a thriller that I am from a mystery. So even though I am one person,
when I pull a specific type of book off my shelf, I'm looking for a specific type of experience. If a Will Trent book ended with a wedding between two main characters but never solved the mystery, I would be very upset. And I would be very upset if a Bridgerton book solved a murder but did not have a happy ending because I'm going to those books for two completely different experiences. And even though
A mystery might have a romance subplot or a romance might have a mystery subplot. If you do not deliver on the main core experience your readers are looking for, you have not succeeded. There is no objective standard. It varies based on what you're writing and who you are writing
And ultimately, the only one who gets to decide if you have succeeded is the reader.
And I that's so hard because it's your book, it's your baby, but once you decide to publish, the reader is king. And if you don't deliver, you don't get to go to the reader and say, but wait, my grammar is perfect. There's not a single typo. I used The Hero's Journey and I hit.
every save the cat beat in exactly the right spot, no one cares if you don't deliver on the experience that they're looking for. It doesn't matter how many boxes you checked or how technically perfect your story is, it has to deliver.
that's makes fiction so, so difficult to write because it is subjective. There isn't a neat and tidy set of rules to adhere to that say you did this right or wrong.
⁓ And I think so many of us are looking for that A+. We are looking for someone to hand us a rubric with everything checked off to say, did it, it's perfect, it's great, you passed the class. And that is just not how the world of professional writing and publishing works for fiction authors. I wish I could tell you that it was, but it's not. And I think once you free yourself from that mindset of, I'm trying to check a box, I'm trying to do it all right. Once you free yourself from that idea,
and start trying to figure out how can I give my readers the best day experience I can. That is when you are going to start moving forward and actually creating stories that people want to read. And hopefully that doesn't overwhelm you. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of hope that you can figure out how to do that. Now that you know what your actual goal is, I absolutely believe that you can make it happen
because now you know what you're actually aiming for.
All right, those were six lies that your high school English teacher told you about writing that may have been holding you back in your attempts to become a published writer. Hopefully today has been eye-opening. Maybe today made you a little bit angry. I don't know. I would love to hear from you either way. So if you have a strong reaction, positive, negative, or anywhere in between, hit me up on Instagram, let me know, DM me. I'm at at Olivia Helps Writers, and I would love to hear from
if you have been that person,
bringing academic or business writing habits into fiction, please, please do not despair. Do not think about, my goodness, I have made mistakes. It's okay. You get to move forward now with a new mindset and You can do this. I believe in you.
Thank you so, so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer podcast. It is really an honor to be part of your day. And I could really use your help. This is still a new show. If it helped you, if you got anything out of it, please consider leaving a review, telling people what you like about the show or share it with a writer friend who needs to hear it.
⁓ or if you'd be willing, post about it on social media. I would really, really appreciate your support because my goal is to help as many writers as possible and that is only going to happen if they know where to find me. So thank you again for listening. Have a wonderful day and keep getting better one word at a time. See ya.
