Learning about Teaching & Writing from Stephen King

At the beginning of the year, I met my wonderful cooperating teacher who shared her summer experience of going to a writers workshop in New York City. She shared with me how much she had learned about herself as a writer and how much it taught her about her students as writers and furthermore what the purpose should be in having them write daily.

These past few weeks I've had my own experience in coming to know myself as a writer while working on our vignette assignment. I sat down and forced myself to write- no matter how terrible the writing is. I'm one of those nit picky people about word choice. I enjoy my flowery words. Something I've learned is to stay true to the content and the meaning of the story you're writing, and to worry about word choice later. Stephen King seems to think it will come naturally, later on. He wrote something rather blunt about writers who overuse the thesaurus, 

"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."

Did I mention I dressed up my dog as a pumpkin for Halloween this year?

One of the things that got me more excited about my vignette is that we are writing about something personal. This makes it both more interesting and more of a challenge. We should have a clear purpose for what we're asking students to write and why. Just like my cooperating teacher found, through practice in writing, and in drafting writing, I'm becoming a better, more conscious writer and teacher.