I’m Going to Write One Day

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“I’m going to be a writer one day.”
You must have heard these words in your classroom, and probably heard them more than once. Maybe you have followed students through their school years and actually seen them fulfill this ambition.

But how about “I’m going to write all this down one day”? That is more likely something you have said in the joy of the many moments that have brightened a dreary classroom day, or sparkled a less than sparkling class. Surely you have these incidents jotted down somewhere on a scrap of paper that you’ve maybe thrown in a desk drawer or kept in a special directory on your computer for when that “one day” should arrive.And you have plans to gather all the notes together and make them into a book, a memoir, a record for the family of your life as a teacher. Perhaps you have even appended a note: “work this into something.” But somehow life gets in the way and the “one day” when you are going to write it all down just never comes. Even teachers of creative writing or literature seem only slightly more likely to record classroom stories unless they already have a parallel career as a writer.

When my husband and I were teaching in Japan, he decided to study “Early English.” Well, it was actually the period of “the great vowel shift” he chose to study at Temple University there. “After all,” he explained to me, “if I am teaching English, won’t I teach it better if I also am studying it?” This brings up another reason to write and that is so that you can intensely recall, and so share with your students, the awe of a blank page; the spark when an idea springs into being; the procrastination excuses; the joy of words pouring forth; the triumph of a finished piece of writing; the strange hollowness afterwards. Perhaps you already remember all this deep down, but if you don’t, why not do some creative writing yourself, as you teach it, and so draw closer to your students and to just how difficult “writing it down” is. Doing so may also restore your freshness and curiosity, the same qualities that the best of your students show.

If you are like one of many teachers I have met who belong to the group thinking “I’ll write when I’m retired,” you’re probably feeling that that would be an appropriate time to record memoirs and memories. As I work with teachers, retired or approaching retirement, I can just sense the material bubbling up inside them. Some of them barely need a nod before they are writing away. Others need reassurance and encouragement—the same reassurance and encouragement that they must, themselves, have so many times offered to their own students over the years.

Not all teachers I have worked with in writing workshops intend to be professional writers as a second career, although they all aspire to write. Why do folks have the urge to write as the years go by? The obvious reason is to record those years for their children and grandchildren; to tell of the times they have lived in and what has passed from our culture that was familiar to them as children. Technology today is moving so fast that students today would not understand why, for example, the Juke Box was such an important element in teens’ lives at one time, or that there was a life before fast food chains.

Another reason for writing is to set the record straight—to revisit places and events from the wider vision of hindsight. Still others yearn to express themselves after years of duties and obligations and encouraging others—to at last take off the restrictions and write everything their hearts want to tell. Poetry, which condenses time like nothing else, is such a good outlet for these long hidden hates, fears, joys and loves.

Whatever your reason—to record intense moments or your own reactions, to keep in tune with your students, to start (or restart) finding your own voice—why not make the “one day” that you are going to begin writing, “today.”

Naomi Beth Wakan is a writer and writing coach. Her latest book is Late Bloomer - On Writing Later in Life, a book to encourage and empower your writing. Writing, her book of poems about reading and writing (suitable for secondary schools) is also available from Naomi.
www.naomiwakan.com