On Teaching Writing to Young People, a guest post by Nancy McCabe

I’ve written stories and poems and plays for as long as I could write, and I’ve also taught writing to students of all ages for almost forty years. I’ve also published several books for adults. But it was while writing my first young adult novel, Vaulting through Time, that I found myself especially remembering what it was like to be a child writer. 

Vaulting through Time, about a time-traveling gymnast, is grounded in real life, partly based on my many years watching gymnastics when my daughter competed. I also drew from my own memory of what it’s like to be a teen seeking to define my identity and maintain my relationships with family while also embracing independence. 

But the really fun part, the part that really took me back to childhood, was freeing myself to just go wild and make stuff up. I loved being able to take my character to different parts of gymnastics history as well as her own family’s past in order to find answers to her questions. And in the process, I found myself reflecting on my childhood writing and what I learned about writing from my experiences as a young writer and later as a writer in the schools in several states.

1. Any activity can be creative

I wrote stories, poems, and plays as a child, almost never showing them to anyone. The joy was in creating, in immersing myself in other worlds. 

I wrote a story about a girl who discovers an ability to travel to a parallel universe, a perfect world, gradually discovering that it’s imperfection that makes life interesting. 

Then, after watching The Parent Trap, I moved myself to tears by writing a story about identical quintuplets separated at birth after a shipwreck, only finding out about each other as pre-teens. First, the main character discovered that she had an identical twin, and then they discovered that they were in fact triplets! Imagine the joy and celebration. When they discovered they were identical quadruplets, a thrill ran through me. And by the time they learned that they were identical quintuplets, I was so wrung out with emotion I had to stop writing. 

Sometimes my plots had potential. Often they were absurd. But I remember most the feeling of emerging from the worlds I was creating and being surprised by my real life. Writing was almost like time traveling or inhabiting someone else’s body. It was all-consuming and made the outside world feel less scary. 

Many of the activities I spent time on would have looked frivolous to adults. I cut from magazines and catalogues pictures of rooms I liked and people who might become characters, I played out scenarios with my dolls, I made cartoon characters using my protractor when I was supposed to be doing math. 

Nowadays, kids’ imaginative play might look a little different. But coming up with their own plots for videogames, drawing comics, writing screenplays or fan fiction or slam poetry, or doodling in the margins of their homework are all ways of developing creativity. For those young creatives, adult input mostly isn’t needed. All we need to do is sit back and let it unfold. And the more absurd the ideas, the better. Let young writers go wild. Don’t try to bring them back to reality. That will intrude soon enough!  

2. DON’T Stop and Think

Once I was a visiting writer in a third-grade classroom. After giving students instructions for an exercise, I told them to start writing. But then the teacher jumped in. 

“Before you start writing, stop and think,” she said.

Although I knew her intentions were good, I inwardly groaned. Stopping and thinking and planning what I was going to write had never really worked for me, nor had I seen it be a particularly valuable part of the process for writers I’d worked with. I mean, sure, we could all produce conventional, fairly boring pieces of work that way. But what gives writing life is thinking on the page, seeing where it takes us, following it where it wants to go. 

Don’t put a stop to the process before it gets started. Encourage young people to write wildly and freely, to let loose. It’s less important to follow instructions than to follow their subconscious minds.

3. Take young writers seriously

We all probably have memories of teachers and librarians who had an impact on us. My best memories were of adults who didn’t intrude on my work, but offered quiet support: A librarian, when I was seven, who saw me looking at textbooks shelved near the picture books in the children’s room, somehow knew that what I really needed was chapter books, and led me to the stacks of middle grade stories and a whole new world I didn’t know existed.

Or Mrs. Dirks, my AP English teacher when I was a senior in high school. For my creative writing class, taught by Mr. Wolf, I wrote a story that included the word “humongous.” Mr. Wolf insisted it wasn’t a word.

I asked Mrs. Dirks what she thought. She told me she’d check it out.

Four hours later, she delivered a message to me in my Humanities class. Everyone stared curiously as I opened the paper and then started laughing. She had written a list of spellings and definitions from various sources.

I learned that humongous really was a word. But I remember this because it meant so much to me that she took me seriously enough to spent time tracking down the information.

Another time, Mr. Wolf called me up to his desk after I’d included some swearing in a story’s dialogue. I braced myself to be scolded. Instead, he started passing me college literary magazines. “You don’t see the f-word much,” he said, “but I see a lot of shits and damns.” My classmates, quietly writing at their desks, began to glance up as we engaged in a lively discussion of the use of swear words in fiction. 

I appreciated that Mr. Wolf didn’t try to impose on my story. He just took me seriously and engaged in a discussion of the issue.

4. Relinquish Control

Undoubtedly like many of you, I’ve been startled when students quote something they remember me saying, something that in some way transformed them. Usually, the words they quote are things I’m sure I would never say! But I’m glad that whatever they heard or remembered was meaningful to them. And I’ve learned that what I think is my wisest advice is rarely the advice that circles back to me years later. I’ve learned that the messages we mean to send and the messages we actually send may not be the same, and most of the time, that’s okay. 

Once when I was teaching in a sixth grade classroom in Arkansas as a visiting writer, I passed out headlines from a tabloid, The Weekly World News. I instructed the kids to imagine a story that could have appeared under each headline and write a poem from the point of view of someone in that story.

“He needs a new card.” The classroom teacher, lips pressed together, hovered over a boy. “We don’t use language like that here.”

I sidled over to look at his headline: “Terrified parents held hostage by their hell-bent ten-year- old.”

I’d forgotten that hell was considered a bad word in elementary schools. I figured that a lot of these kids regularly heard preachers talk about hellfire, and would therefore understand the gravity, the recklessness, of a hell-bent ten-year-old.

I covered “hell-bent” with my finger. “Why don’t you just leave out this word?” I suggested.

The boy looked confused, but he nodded and set to work. Pretty soon, he handed me a poem. It was titled “Terrified parents held hostage by their bent ten-year-old.”

That young writer may have concluded from this experience that poetry and adults are really weird. But I hope that somehow that experience activated his imagination, made him wonder why this ten-year-old was bent and what that meant to his or her life. Was she born without spine or abdominal muscles? Did he have a habit of sleeping doubled over in the kitchen sink? 

In the end, though, I have no idea what, if any, impact the experience made on this sixth grader. But it reminded me yet again that writing is a process of discovery, and that discovery happens in the mind of the writer. All we can do is help set it in motion and hope for the best. The joy of creativity is in the way each individual can start in the same place and end up somewhere altogether different.

5. Creativity is in imperfection

Rather than correct “mistakes,” I learned as a visiting writer to look for the truths that they convey. I remember a 13-year-old girl who wrote about “betraded love,” a phrase that simultaneously captured her sense of betrayal and her indignation at her boyfriend trading her in for someone else. Or a 10-year-old boy, who, in between flirting with girls on either side of him, wrote, “The warmth of love engulps me,” expressing his feeling of being engulfed by love—and a fear that love might swallow him up. 

I didn’t correct these students. Their “mistakes” reminded me how much creativity can be a process of mining our missteps and failures, of learning how to turn the accidental intentional.

6. Reading fuels writing

The first time I wrote a story, I was about six. I had just brought back a pile of books from the library, and my dad told me to make a list of all of the titles so that I’d know I had all of them when it was time to return them. I sat at the kitchen table, making my list, when I was suddenly seized by inspiration. I turned over the paper and wrote a story instead. Just the act of writing down titles had inspired me.

While learning to keyboard in school in the sixth grade, my daughter decided to practice by typing up the texts of all of her favorite childhood picture books. She copied the words from more than thirty books. For her, it was a nostalgic exercise, reliving all of those favorite stories. 

In the process, she became a better typist—but more importantly, I was surprised to see how much her writing improved after that day. Typing out those texts had caused her to look closely at every word, every line, to deeply experience the rhythms of language, and the process had transformed her.

Sometimes in classes in writing for children and young adults, I have my students type up texts of several books before they compose their own picture books. But I would probably not ask fledgling young writers to do this. However, if it’s something they decide to do on their own, I would offer my encouragement.

I realize, writing this, that there’s a common theme here. That we adults can offer prompts, reading suggestions, and support, but that what’s most important is that young writers own their work, discover their own processes, experience encouragement but not too much intrusion from adults. As with so many other aspects of teaching or parenting, we may never know what sticks.

But if we can help set the wheels in motion, we can let young writers take it from there.

Meet the author

An adoptive parent and former longtime gymnastics mom, Nancy McCabe is the author of six books for adults and has published articles in Newsweek, Salon, Writer’s Digest, The Brevity Blog, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among many others. She’s a Pushcart winner and her work has been recognized nine times on Best American Notable Lists. She directs the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford and teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University.

About Vaulting Through Time

Can she perform the vault of her life to save her loved ones—and herself?

Sixteen-year-old gymnast Elizabeth Arlington doesn’t care that her mother is older than the other girls’ moms or that she doesn’t look anything like her parents. She has too much other stuff to worry about: an embarrassing crush on her ex-best-friend Zach, and changes in her body that affect her center of gravity and make vaulting and tumbling more terrifying than they used to be. But when she makes a discovery that throws her entire identity into question, she turns to Zach, who suggests a way for her to find the answers her mother won’t give her: a time machine they found in an abandoned house.

As Elizabeth catapults through time, she encounters a mysterious abandoned child, an elite gymnast preparing for Olympic Trials, and an enigmatic woman who seems to know more than she’s revealing. Then when a thief makes off with an identical time machine, Elizabeth finds herself on a race to stop the thief before the world as she knows it—and her own future—are destroyed.

ISBN-13: 9780744309362
Publisher: CamCat Publishing
Publication date: 07/25/2023
Age Range: 13 – 18 Years

Filed under: Guest Post