Persistence and Patience

When I was a wee lad, probably about the boy’s age come to think of it, I would get writing assignments. I remember enjoying writing even then. I don’t think I had any particular gift for it or anything, but I read a fair amount and I also tried to write and I… just enjoyed it. I remember once sitting and starting to copy a book of animal fables. I don’t really recall the reason. Perhaps I was thinking that I really was writing in that delusional way kids look at the world. What else was I going to do, play with a DS?

My Mom was an English teacher, as fate allowed. So when I got my writing assignments from school and brought them home, I always had a writing hurdle to overcome. Mom would mercilessly cut through the words on the paper. “This isn’t a sentence. This is misspelled. This is OK, but confusing. You’ve written the same thing 5 different ways in one paragraph. There’s no structure. What were you supposed to be writing here?” By the time she got done with my initial cut, the page would look more like a wiring diagram or a blue print, anything but the alleged text I initially put down. It’s what she’s not an editor here on the blog…

Naturally, being an immature know-it-all, I took it well and cried.

By the time I was done fixing all the mistakes she’d pointed out I never felt like the paper was mine. I felt like it was hers. This was, of course, a crock on my part. She never told me what to write. She just guided me in the art of writing something that was minimally readable. But at the time, I recall the frustration of having my work ripped up like that. Looking back, I’m certain there was a personal aspect to it as well. When effort is put into something, it can be hard to accept criticism without taking it personally. All those lines and circles and comments make you feel stupid. They aren’t just lines on a paper, they’re lines on you and how you think and how you express yourself.

Like I said, immature.

I thought of all this today when the Wife was describing how she helped the boy through another writing assignment. It was the classic “What Did I Do on my Christmas Vacation” assignment. It’s due in a couple of days and before I headed out for a little sparring training tonight, I told the boy, as nonchalantly as I could lest I wake the insecurity beast within, he should organize his thoughts on paper; then write a rough draft that his Mom or I could read through and help him with; then write his final paper.

When I got home, to my astonishment, he’d written a page-and-a-half of text about his Christmas vacation. I read through it quickly and immediately picked out a number of misspellings, some capitalization issues, some punctuation issues and a couple of sentence fragments. That might sound like a lot, but it didn’t require any real structural changes or major rewrites. To his credit, it was well organized and readable and pretty close to a finished product, with few corrections I mentioned.

The boy was (quelle suprise!) upset that I’d picked out all those mistakes. Particularly with the spelling errors. We decided he could finish the corrections tomorrow night. After he’d gone to bed, the Wife described how she’d worked with him to get the almost-finished-product I’d read: eliminating the run-on sentences and the “And then we…” phrases, helping him decided what stuff to put in the paper, helping him organize it. She showed me the marked up first draft.

Somewhere around then, I realized the importance of quiet persistence. His reaction to my comments was emotional, as were mine those many years ago. But Mom’s persistence paid off and I internalized many of those lessons. It wasn’t something that occurred in one lesson, it was the cumulative act of writing, then breaking down what I’d written and forcing myself to think about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to tell it over many years that got me to the point where I could sit down and structure a paper or essay. Reading didn’t hurt either.

Similarly, the boy won’t all of a sudden have a light switch come on and start churning out prose like Nora Roberts. Rather, it will be the steady drip-drip-drip of forcing him to confront what he’s done and improve upon it.

Patience. Persistence.