Messy Writing

All week long Sarah has been working on pictures to give to her classmates.

When I was teaching secondary English, I had one student who was a truly amazing writer, so good in fact, that when I read his first story he turned in I actually called him to my desk to make sure he wrote it himself.

He thought this was hilarious. Although his grammatical skills needed a bit of assistance, the guy really had AMAZING sentence structure and word choice. His details were fantastic. When his mother came in for parent teacher conferences, she mentioned that his older brother and sister, who had already graduated, were excellent writers, too. I asked her what she did at home, and she threw her hands up in the air and laughed, and laughed, and said, “If you only knew how many years I lived with writing mess! Paper on the stairs, on the floor of every room. Crayons, pencils, and markers were strewn about my whole house! If you want writers you have to close your eyes to the mess!”

I tucked that piece of advice in my little noggin, and it has come in quite handy for me lately. I am definitely residing in writer’s mess. This is Sarah’s. My desk looks just as bad.