“Live Writing” & Nurturing the Freedom to Make Abstract Connections

By Alexandra O’Sullivan

When people ask me what I do and I tell them I’m a teacher, their faces often brighten for follow up question, ‘What do you teach?’ then quickly twist into humorous disgust to exclaim, ‘Oh, I hated English!’

Some days just walking into my classroom to face the ever-present hatred, not of me, but of the subject I happen to love, is uniquely discouraging.

In my first year of teaching, I handed out reader’s notebooks filled with lined paper for the students to fill with their reflections on different texts. The books had shiny covers, pages for brainstorming ideas and for recording reading goals, and were held together by spiral binding. Within the first week several students had ripped out the binding and were walking around the classroom using it as a whip to whack other students. One student tore up everything I gave him, including the worksheets I printed, along with every short story, poem, and essay. When asked by a school village leader why he was misbehaving in my class, he screwed up his face in pure disgust and spat, ‘It’s English!’

In my naïve moments, as a hopeful writer pursuing my teaching degree to pay the bills, I’d imagined introducing great literature to utterly absorbed and wide-eyed youths, believing that my passion would translate to theirs. If I couldn’t cut it as a full-time writer, then at least I could share my love for literature with the next generation, but I was failing at that too. Those that can’t do, teach. What do those that can’t teach do?

I went to class each day, fresh worksheets sitting in the folders tucked in my teacher’s bag. I presented my PowerPoints, and pin-pointed the few students who did enjoy reading and writing, who emailed me their novels and short stories for feedback and who read impressively sophisticated books during silent reading. I watched these students sit in a small cluster, their faces veiled with a waning patience as I yelled and begged and pleaded with the rest of the class to sit down, to stop throwing paper, to be quiet and let me get through the explanations and instructions before the independent task. It was those quiet students, the ones who did share my love of English, that I felt like I was failing the most.

I couldn’t blame the other students though. Beneath their bravado I sensed a terrible fear. During my first teaching placement I’d been told I had to ‘live write’ on the board in front of the students while discussing my creative choices. These ‘think alouds’ were an integral part of a pedagogical methodology that focused on the teacher explicitly modelling every skill before asking students to do it themselves.

The first time I tried ‘live writing,’ I stood in front of the class, gripping my whiteboard marker, and felt the glare of the classroom lights on me. Writing is often done alone, in the dark, where those early drafts can be as ugly as they need to be. Writing, exposed, in front of a classroom of children who were just waiting to cut me down, was truly daunting. I stumbled through it and came out with a deeper empathy for the students who, as I stood over them demanding that they do their work, turned pale and insisted, ‘but I don’t know what to write.’

They were telling the truth. The fear of exposing those ugly first sentences can block the best of us, let alone the troubled youths I was teaching. Even writing in the dark, as I’m doing now, is often hard work. Sometimes there is a struggle in accessing the necessary abstract thought, those magical connections that snap together like magnets to create coherence in a piece of writing. Usually, if I wait patiently enough, they come zipping in and snapping together all on their own. Usually.

Many students, I have noticed, don’t like to think in the abstract. When I ask them to seek such connections in a text, they roll their eyes and moan, “I don’t get it.”

If I never ‘got it,’ if I never experienced those moments of zipping and snapping that make the wait well worth it, then I’d want to rip it all up too. Sometimes, I still do. But I always return to the struggle, because pushing beyond it brings such joy. If only my students understood this. It’s not always easy. To face great art is to face yourself. To find connections in literature, to create your own, are ways to enter a lifelong conversation with the world, and with what it means to be a human in it.

In desperation, I designed a stream of consciousness writing lesson. I created a PowerPoint that explained the technique of non-stop writing where you just get down all the thoughts in your head without worrying about how they sound. I asked the students to set a timer for me to demonstrate the technique on the board. We bantered back and forth about how long I would write in front of them, then decided on one minute. I admitted to them that I was feeling intimidated before I turned to the board and began. Behind me, I could hear students giggling and accusing me of ‘stopping,’ every time my marker paused for a millisecond.  

When it was their turn, I set the timer on my phone for three minutes. “So, we can write anything?” A student asked again. “Anything!” I confirmed. “Fill the page with swear words, tear them up afterwards if you want! Just write nonstop, and silently!” I pressed the timer. Ten seconds in someone yelled ‘shit!’ and, as agreed, I reset the timer. They knew I meant business. They tested it again. On the third reset, twenty-two heads bowed down over pages, twenty-two pens scurried back and forth, the only sound in the room.

I walked between desks, breathing in the focussed writing that was happening all around me. When it was over, students erupted into a babble of excited chatter, many clamouring to come forward and share their work with massive smiles on their faces, their pages filled with words. I had given them the darkness the writer craves. The freedom the writer needs. For a moment, at least, they got it.
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Alexandra O’Sullivan lives in regional Victoria, Australia, and writes fiction, creative nonfiction, reviews, and feature articles. Her work has appeared in publications such as Meanjin, The Victorian Writer and The Guardian. She works as a high school English teacher and was recently included in the anthology Teacher, teacher published by Affirm Press.