A guest post by Angela Toscano, a graduate student in English who describes herself as an “elitist snob and misanthropic curmudgeon”, but who is actually slightly cuddlier than that. When I met her in New Orleans last year at the Pop Culture Association conference, I knew we had something in common. It turns out we are both Hug-averse Italian-American Women of Unexpected Religious Affiliation, a very rare breed.

Angela heard my plea for guest posts as I try to get my life in order after traveling for a few weeks. Here’s her post:

I wrote my first poem when I was five years old. It was a complex, metaphysical piece about Baby Jesus and the Christmas Star.

When I was ten years old, I wrote a play that my 5^th grade class performed for the whole school.

I learned to write academically and scholastically during my junior high and high school years. A skill acquired through painful, excruciating episodes with my father in which he would sit at the keyboard and demand that I answer these sorts of questions: “What do you want to say about the Hopi Indians?” “I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know what to say.” “You have to say something.” “Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh! Uhhh, the Hopi Indians live in the Southwest.” “That’s not a thesis statement.” “Argghhhh! I hate this. It’s a stupid assignment”, cue throwing papers across the room in a fit of temper.  All these episodes involved tears, fighting and the eventual but inexorable dragging of the words from my mouth onto the page and into some eventual cohesive and logical format. As such, I could write an essay and a research report almost entirely by myself by the time I graduated high school. Although, not very well.

Now that I am in my third decade, I have the great pleasure of trying to teach 18 years olds how to write as a part of my graduate work.  I’ll tell you right off, and this is probably not a shock to any of you, but most of them can’t. Partially because they were never taught how, partially because they lack the inclination and the talent, and partially because none of them read very much; as such they have difficulty transferring their thoughts onto the page in a clear and coherent form.  They only vaguely know what a thesis statement is.  They don’t quite understand what the purpose of an essay is or what it means to cite sources. They have no concept of format or stapling. Worst of all, they have been consistently misinformed by high school English teachers about the Rules of Writing, which are nearly always wrong, wrong, wrong. For example, that you should never use “I” in a formal essay (untrue) or that you should never use the passive voice (not true) or, conversely, that you should always use the passive voice (equally untrue) or that you put a comma wherever you would take a breath (so, so, so not true).  All essays are five paragraphs long according to high school pedagogy, and of course, you would never be so bold as to put your thesis statement at the end of the essay. These are the same idiot rules I learned when I was in public school but I had the great, good fortune of being a child of intellectuals so I never really took them to heart. And when I did, there was always someone around to tell me no.

Teaching is terrifying.  I’m not a naturally extroverted person so every time I go into the classroom I have to psych myself up in the manner of Richard Gere in Chicago.  Razzle-dazzle ‘em.  The fake, teacher-me is chatty, friendly and assertive in a way that I am actually not.  Teacher-me is similar to public-me, who is also not really me.  My great fear is that I’m not actually teaching them anything, that despite the fact that I know how to write that I don’t know how to teach people to write.  I felt as if I saw an improvement in the papers of my fall semester students, but I’m not sure if this because they actually improved or because I was exhausted from the semester.  I felt myself getting weaker and less critical as the weeks rolled by so that by the time finals rolled around, I was not nearly as mean and precise a grader as I had been.  This worries me because I do not want to do a disservice to my students.  While I don’t believe that I am a natural teacher, I do want people to learn something, anything.  Even if it is just that they need to staple their essays before they turn them in.  Really, that was quite the problem.

In teaching people how to write, I am the one who has learned, mainly what I actually think about writing, if not something about teaching.  The first thing I learned is that you can’t teach people to write, but that you can teach people to write better than they do.  What I mean is that certain people are just by nature and talent better writers.  They do the things you are taught to do, but they do them naturally. This, I think, goes against what many believe, which is that anyone can write.  They can’t. But people seem to think this is true, especially of essays and genre fiction.  I don’t know why this is true.  I think it has something to do with how people regard language.  But I don’t understand why there are so many out there who believe they can write a novel or poem when they clearly can’t and moreover, never do.  It’s like believing you can be the conductor of the London Philharmonic when you’ve only ever conducted at church or a long with the TV.  Sometimes watching the arrogance of would-be writers, whether in class or out, is like watching a particularly cringe-worthy episode of America’s Got Talent, which should be re-titled Most of America Has Totally Deluded Themselves into Believing They Have Talent. I have had to learn how to puncture arrogance without actually breaking people’s spirits.

Writing well, so well that you actually move people—to tears, to new ideas, to action—is not something a person picks up simply by keeping a journal or going to workshops on the weekend, unfortunately. So just because I am awesome at Guitar Hero does not make me a suitable candidate for Julliard or even a garage band. Yet, unlike many other art forms, writing has been given the terrible reputation of being something anyone can do. To paraphrase a line from Ratatouille, not anyone can be a great or even good writer, but a great or good writer can come from anywhere.

However, most of my students know they can’t write. They just have no interest in writing. They think it is useless. A small minority of the students realizes the importance of clarity and grace in the written word and as they are good students and thoughtful people, wish to improve their skills. This is always the way I felt about math. I never innately understood it and none of my math teachers seemed to ever be able to make it any easier for me to understand.  It always seemed to me that math was taught as if you innately got it.  I don’t want to do that with writing. I would like to make sure that those students who don’t get it, naturally, can at least understand the parts and the structures of writing at the end of the semester.

Despite my belief that you can’t teach talent, I do think you can teach people to write better than they once did. You can better the little talent that is there. If nothing else, you can teach students to at least write clearly, even if you can never teach them to write beautifully. Several of my students wanted to know why they didn’t get A’s last semester. The real truth was because they just didn’t write well enough to deserve an A. Their writing was not interesting to read. It was not felicitous. Cruel and subjective but I do not believe in giving out A’s simply because a person tried and did a little more than the minimum expected. That’s bullshit and it’s unfair to the people who had to work really hard but for whom it doesn’t come easily or the people who have natural talent but for whom it is a honing of skills. If everyone deserves an A, then an A becomes meaningless. If college should teach you anything, it’s that you aren’t special at all and that you don’t deserve anything just because show up and do the work.

So what, if anything, does this actually have to do with romance? Well, I believe that romance, like most genre fiction, suffers under the same misapprehension that college freshmen have coming into composition classes: namely, that it is something easy to do.  That if you are going to write, you should write romance because it will require less talent than another genre and you will be more likely to be published because romance readers are less discerning. Romance is easy because romance is trash.  Students regard art and writing classes in the same way as non-romance people think of romance.  They think it will be simple, that it’s just a matter of doing the work, of following the formula without thought or skill.  They believe, almost uniformly in my semester and 2 weeks of experience teaching, that if you can speak the language, then you can write the language, and if you can write the language then you are a writer and deserve a decent grade.  A thought as misguided as believing you should never use the passive voice or that a common belongs wherever you breathe.

In any case, my goals in teaching students how to compose an essay are similar to my goals for romance: 1) that I make clear to all that this is not simply a matter of putting slot A into slot B, stirring in some fancy adjectives and a few randomly placed quotes to create an essay but a matter that requires thought and yes, even talent to accomplish well.  And 2) that the pleasure of writing is the pleasure of telling a good story, even if that story is disguised as an essay or even as a romance.