Kinutil
And the young woman asked: What is your way of getting over the writers block? He had no easy answer to that one. But his thoughts led him to ask himself: Why is it that to this day we do not yet have a coded way to teach young people how to write?
He did not learn in school how to write. What they taught him was grammar. But grammar is at best a method to learn how to read. It is not a way to learn how to write.
He still wonders why teachers miss that. And his wondering always leads him to recall how he learned how to draw. In the old days, they also taught drawing as if they were teaching grammar.
His computer dictionary defines grammar as: “The whole system and structure of a language or of languages in general, usually taken as consisting of syntax and morphology (including inflections) and sometimes also phonology and semantics.”
And so drawing was taught by teaching the rules related to it. This, for any student, is a difficult way of learning how to draw. Just simply because it misses the most fundamental things about the art. Especially, the most fundamental of all, which is that it is a manner of communicating a thought. The rules related to communicating this thought are important, But not as important as producing the thought itself, and how any thought can be communicated several ways. There is no one way to do it.
Often the rules get in the way of forming the thought. And often we forget that a good thought is a good thought even when ungrammatical.
The better way to teach drawing is not by teaching the rules before everything else. The student is better off learning how to produce thoughts spontaneously, automatically, without fear of breaking the rules. The rules can always be learned and quite easily over time.
And so it is, also with writing.
The young woman asked him as well: How did you learn to write? This question reminded him of grade school assignments which required him to write about what he did in summer. Always, this assignment stumped him. At that young age, summer seemed like forever. And how could he put forever into the space of his grade school writing paper. How could he even remember everything? How many endless days did he spend at the beach in their old hometown? They lived near the sea.
A child is an extremely logical creature. And logical, in the most literal sense. If you ask a child to tell the story of summer, he or she knows immediately this is an impossible task. And so his or her brain boggles at the thought and stops working.
Better if the teacher asked him to describe a single day of summer. And then he would have written the story of how their dog died. How he and his siblings cried as they dug a hole for him under the Santol tree. And how they put a cross over its grave and prayed together that cold grey morning.
Over time, he did learn how to solve this yearly conundrum. Over time, he learned that he should never take teachers’ instructions literally. Thus, if they asked him to write about a mountain, he knew immediately, he is better off describing a small hill of the mountain. And he did get better grades for it.
He still wonders why they do not have a coded system or method for teaching young children how to write. When he became an art teacher, he went straightaway into constructing a method of teaching drawing that went beyond just teaching the grammar of it. He thought that if he had an established method, then he can at least improve his method over time. He made sure his method is more process oriented than it was rules oriented. The student learns over time. The student teaches himself or herself how to draw using the method he taught – his method.
How does one get over the block? Try to blank out your mind for ten seconds. See if you can get even two seconds where your brain does not produce a single word. And then realize how impossible this is.
The brain is an unstoppable word-producing machine. Therefore the answer is simple: First, clarify what you want to write about. Next, type out or write whatever words your brain produces. Suspend judgement.
Don’t think. Just write. After everything, you can just edit what you have written, perfecting the grammar and structure along with everything else. Trust the equipment. The brain is the equipment. Use it to write. It works.