How a 12th-grade English assignment convinced me I couldn’t write fiction

A long, long time ago¹, in a galaxy far, far away², a 12th-grade English assignment convinced me I couldn’t write fiction. Two disclaimers before I tell that story:

1. I’m not here to bash teachers. A long, long time ago, I taught high school English. It’s the toughest job I’ve ever had, and I escaped to graduate school and librarianship as quickly as I could. Good teachers deserve way more money and respect than we give them.
2. The ultimate responsibility for my choices rests with me. The fact that I chose to let one bad experience convince me I couldn’t do something is my problem.

And one more thing before we get to the story:

For anyone who’s new here, this post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) blog hop. On the first Wednesday of every month, we IWSG-ers share our doubts, fears, struggles, and triumphs. Our awesome co-hosts this month are Beth Camp, Jean Davis, Yvonne Ventresca, and PJ Colando. Click those links and leave them some comment love.

Each month our fearless leader (Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh) gives us an optional question to answer. This month’s question: Since it’s back to school time, let’s talk English class. What’s a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

The high school English assignment that convinced me I couldn’t write fiction

OK, still with me? Great! This story isn’t about a writing rule I learned in school. The writing rules I learned mostly had to do with grammar and punctuation and have mostly served me very well. This story is about an assignment that messed me up as a writer. What was that assignment: Write a short story.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? Well, yeah, I suppose it was, except for one small detail:

The teacher never taught us anything about writing stories.

Nothing about plotting, creating characters, writing dialogue… nothing.

Zilch. Zip. Nada.

She just said, Go forth and write a story³.

And so I wrote what was probably the worst short story in the history of American literature. It stunk so bad that, 40 years later, remnants of its stench probably still circle above my hometown, blending with the scents of manure and sewage treatment to form a piquant bouquet of variegated shit.

It was that bad.

I have no idea what grade I got on the assignment–I tried to blot the entire experience out of my mind from the moment I wrote The End on the bottom of the paper–but fortunately the rest of my academic performance was good enough to keep my A average. The real damage was to my self-perception. I assumed after that experience that I lacked any talent for fiction writing and didn’t attempt to write another short story for over 30 years.

As I said at the beginning, responsibility for that assumption rests with me. At any point in those 30 years, I could have recognized that a single high school assignment says exactly nothing about my abilities. But I didn’t. “Lack of talent for fiction” slipped into my skull, burrowed in my brain, and became part of my identity.

For 30 years.

How did I extract that particular brain worm? To be honest, I really don’t know. Not entirely, anyway. A few people suggested I should write. One gave me a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I read Diana Gabaldon’s account of how she came to write Outlander (tl;dr: she decided that the best way to learn to write a novel was to write one). I had a conversation with a co-worker one afternoon about writing, and after that conversation, I Googled, “How to write a novel.” I found the site for Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method⁴, the approach sounded do-able, and I decided to give it a try. Ten years later, I’m still writing.

So, what can we learn from this story?

1. If you teach writing, make sure you teach techniques before you expect students to use them. Seriously. You wouldn’t expect a kid to solve quadratic equations without teaching them how to solve quadratic equations. Writing fiction is no different. It consists of a series of skills just like math does, and those skills deserve to be treated just as seriously.
2. If you really want to do something, don’t let one bad experience discourage you. Try it!
3. Most of what we call “talent” is mostly hard work and practice seasoned with a bit of luck. Most “talents” can be learned, at least to some degree. Some people are naturally gifted, yes, but most of us have to put in the effort to learn from others and then work our butts off to get better.

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1. 1984
2. About 2 hours north of where I currently live.
3. OK, OK, she probably didn’t actually say, “Go forth.” Sheesh, you people are sticklers for accuracy.
4. Randy also wrote an excellent book called The Snowflake Method. I link to it and other great resources for writers in Books to Help You Write Better: A Writer’s Reading List.

A few updates

• In my last IWSG post, I said I was ready to start writing again. I’m happy to report that I have started writing again! I’m back at work on Delta Dawn, my domestic suspense novel about an estate attorney who returns to her hometown for a final meeting with her abusive father and ends up in the crosshairs of a serial killer. I feel like I’ll be revising that sucker till I die, but at least I’m back at it and making (slow) progress.
• Still no news on the Best of Deathlehem anthology.
• And on a personal note – Long-Suffering Husband and I bought a house! Our next 523 weekends shall be taken up with house projects.

The memery

I’ve been slacking on my meme-gathering, so I did a little Googling and discovered a subreddit called r/WritingMemes. RIP to my productivity for the rest of the morning. Here’s a sampling of what I found there:

You mean I can’t just think my story into being? Damn.

When you’re 57 and still haven’t written your masterpiece…

This was me querying my first novel, which includes some on-the-page sexual assault and domestic violence. I don’t glorify those things or write about them in a sensationalistic way, but I don’t sugarcoat women’s suffering. I also don’t have an agent.

And finally:

Me while drafting: This is the worst thing anyone ever wrote in the history of western civilization. Why am I wasting my time when I could be doing something useful, like cataloging my spice cabinet?

Me coming back to those same words a few months later: Well, it ain’t Hemingway, but… yeah, I like it.

And on that note, I’m outta here. Time to get back to the house projects. Those spices won’t catalog themselves.

How about you? What was your high school assignment from hell? Or did you have an assignment that taught you something valuable or set you on the path your life would take?