Student at the Podium
Photo Credit: http://positively-smitten.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ps-public-speaking-4.jpg
Teaching has instilled in me many lessons. One of my favorites is highly counterintuitive. I want my students to surpass me in their work and thinking (which, in my case, is not that big an ask). What’s interesting is that wanting them to be better than me makes me push more diligently to improve my own work. It’s not competitive instinct. Neither is it a professional jealousy. Rather—and it has taken me a long time to see this—it is my way of honoring their effort. I’d rather my students see me as the writer working right alongside them than that guy who got published and talks about it.
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In the same way doctors make awful patients, teachers, it would seem, make deficient students. At least that’s been the case with me. I suspect the act of working to make sense for others disables the ability to do so in me at times.
For example, here’s a life lesson only recently learned. I hate clichés. I try not to write with them or, more importantly, live them out. At the same time, I teach my students not to fear clichés in the early stages of their writing. Clichés, I tell them, are merely easily accessible expressions for the deeper sentiments their scene or sentence demands—a depth that is just not consistently reachable without completely destroying any storytelling rhythm one has achieved while still trying to figure out what they want to say in general. Clichés are only harmful if you don’t go back and make them better, more expressive, less expected by the audience once you can see the larger picture. If they remain in your final draft, well, that’s just lazy.
Back to that life lesson. The fear of living clichés is the most insidious cliché of all. The thing is, clichés can only be seen in reflection, not while we’re in the process of living. Trying to avoid them as you go is paralyzing and actively makes cliché your experiences in the process. For more on this, see hipster culture.
Rather than avoiding them, we should choose to live more and more consistently reflective lives. Then, like any good writer, we can avoid lazy storytelling by revising for originality before moving forward with living better, more expressive, less expected lives.