Your writing teacher was wrong about you

One year, many moons ago, I had a student in my undergraduate screenwriting class who was… not great. No spark, no fire. No humor, no pathos. No great skill with words. She wasn’t even bad enough to be interesting. She was just… bland.

My class was a requirement for a major in which most students wanted to be producers or directors, so people who were not writers landed on my roster all the time. My job was the same for all of them; teach them how to understand story and how it works, and get them to tell a passable story by the end of the semester. Lots of those stories were… not great, but if they could launch a conflict, escalate it, and land it and manage to get their scripts in on time, they passed and went on to chase their dreams.

Anyway, mid-semester, this kid bumps into me in the hallway at the school, her face beaming. “I never wanted to be a writer before, but this class has me so excited! I even changed my major from production to writing!”

I’m not gonna lie; I felt a twinge of guilt, like somehow I’d made this kid think she could do something that I honestly didn’t know she could. But I also know that there’s no path to good work that doesn’t go through bad work first, and if this kid wanted to be a writer, then I had one job, and that job was clear.

Encourage the fuck out of her.

“That’s amazing!” I said through a forced, bright smile. “I’m so excited for you! Keep at it!”

I made myself available to all of my students, but as the final project approached—a fifteen-page script—I noticed this kid never took advantage of my office hours. Aside from her initial in-class pitch, I hadn’t heard anything about it. Now, fifteen pages isn’t much to me, a writer of novels, but these kids were nineteen years old. To them, it might as well have been a dissertation.

I was worried about this kid; she was sweet, and I liked her, and I really wanted her to do well. I wanted her to come to me and let me help her out, give her some guidance… but she never did. At the end of the semester, when I was excavating my pile of scripts for grading and got to hers, my stomach dropped.

This one was gonna hurt.

Except… it didn’t.

I started reading. She got a legit laugh out of me on the first page, to my surprise and delight and deep relief.

I kept reading. I laughed again. Kept reading. Conflict launched. Conflict escalated. Conflict landed.

And at the end, she made me cry. And then I giggled to myself while finishing my notes and my grading, because she fucking did it.

She wrote the best final script in that class.

Hank is the subject of a Substack essay I read recently: Some people are bad writers, and should be discouraged. In this essay, Naomi Kanakia tells the story of “Hank” a midlist literary writer who, when he taught, would actively discourage students if he thought they didn’t have “it.” Apparently, whatever “it” was would vary depending on Hank’s mood that day, but that didn’t matter. In his mind, he was doing the kind service of telling these writers that they had no talent and would never make it and their writing sucked and whatever other bullshit Hank wanted to spout that day so that they wouldn’t waste their lives chasing a dream that would never come true.

Oh. My. God. This shit sets my face on fire with fury. I have a friend who in junior high wrote a story and the teacher ripped it up and threw it away in front of the class, telling her she was a terrible writer. This friend was in her forties when I read something of hers, told her it was great (it truly was) and she didn’t believe me. She has always wanted to write, but because of one stupid bitch who should never have been let near a classroom, she spent her whole life not engaging with this passion. And y’all, she is good.

Talk about a waste of time.

I don’t know who Hank thinks he is, but I know who I am, and I know what I am not. As a teacher, I am not the final arbiter of who has talent and who does not, of whose work is worthy and whose is not. That level of pathological hubris is unfathomable to me. There are books millions of people love that I don’t get. Does that mean those books are bad, that the author has no talent, that anyone who loves that author is an idiot?

I can’t believe I have to answer this question but… no.

If I discourage a writer to the point where they never write again, I steal joy from their potential readers, and I do not have that right, especially not in a world where joy is regularly hacked to pieces and sold off to the highest bidder.

My job is to encourage every writer who comes to me, to tell them my favorite thing about what they write, and nudge them toward the sunlight of their strengths, so that they have the courage to do the work that finds the readers who will experience joy in their worlds.

The point is, if I had been an insecure dickhead more concerned with my own sense of superiority than tending to my garden of students, that student of mine never would have written that amazing script, and I never would have experienced the joy of reading it. Now, I have long forgotten that student’s name, and I have no idea what she’s up to now. I dearly hope she’s out there writing, but if she’s not, I can at least be sure of one thing; it’s not because of me.

That’s the job of a writing teacher, all you have to do is not fuck it up, but there are many, many Hanks out there who can’t step over even that low, low bar. Best case scenario, they’re beating the shit out of you out of misplaced kindness, but many Hanks are just douchebags with egos so fragile that they feel the need to weed the field of potential competitors.

And because incomprehensible asshats like Hank are apparently thick on the ground, I feel the need to come here and tell you that if you have ever had a teacher who ever said outright or made you feel as though writing is a waste of your time, then they are wrong.

Do you hear me?

They. Are. Wrong.

I know that without reading a word you’ve written, because what you’ve written doesn’t have to look like good writing to me in order to be produced by the spark within you. I can’t see that spark from the outside. My job as a teacher is not to determine whether or not you have that spark; you’re in my class, I’m presuming you do.

My job is to make sure that it doesn’t go out on my watch.

My friend, the great writer who had her story tossed in the garbage by that teacher? She’s still not writing. Now, she’s doing great, don’t you worry about her. She’s hugely successful and brilliant and beautiful and she’s doing just fine.

But she’s not writing, and that breaks my heart a little bit every day.

Fucking Hank.

Everything,

L

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