For a moment I sat in a near-quiet household and pondered my relationship to my craft. I teach writing, you see. I teach various forms of composition, I teach how to construct a novel. Perhaps above all these categories I teach people how to rekindle their relationship with writing. So, here I was in the quiet wake of an NFL playoff game considering my own relationship with the craft. I did not ponder why I write or any similar false construct, but I thought about the role that teaching the craft plays in my ability to partake in it. There is a longstanding meme that goes like this: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach (I’ve added the commas for vocal emphasis). What if that meme were valid in some twisted way?
The first hundred pages of a book is build up. You get to know the players. You get to know what’s at stake. You get dragged into things whether you want to or not and after a while you realize that you suddenly care about these characters and have a real investment in what happens to them. Then, quite suddenly, stuff gets real. The book shifts subtly and the stakes go way up. The relationships you gained intimate awareness of up and through pg 99 are suddenly in shambles, like that sweater you wore as a kid and you pulled on one thread just a bit too hard and the thread undid another thread and another and another onward until the spiderweb comes unfurled revealing the author’s deeper purpose.
I learned all this, of course, through reading. I learned how to do it through practice and through teaching. Unfortunately the act of teaching itself gravely limited my opportunities to do much more than teach and read the work of others. I fought through my schedule to carve out a niche of writing time. More and more that time gave way to the responsibilities of evaluating student novels. In time I, who taught, did not do. I reserved summers for the heavy writing, but even then I spent more time recovering from the effort of a dozen novel plotlines considered academically. The work weighed on me, no matter how much I love the work.
I can still write. There is no question that I could write considerably more if I did not have to be concerned with teaching. That’s one of the many reasons becoming a full time author is the holy grail of the profession. Maybe those who can also teach, but they don’t do as much as they would otherwise.