To Be Interesting, You Must Be Interested

[april_lidinsky]

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being in the front row when Newbery Medal-winning author Kwame Alexander visited South Bend, Indiana. Alexander was on tour to promote his newest lyrical novel for young readers, Black Star, the second in “The Door of No Return” series.

There were many engaged young people in the audience, and they dominated the question and answer period with verve. A few showered Alexander with praise for his novels, which taught them history they hadn’t learned in school. Some said he’d showed them how poetry can carry a story. One high-schooler asked how she could find a publisher for her novel; he invited her to chat with him after the event, and she beamed.

And then came more tentative questions from the back of the room: “How do I become a better writer? And how can I figure out what to write?” Heads in the crowded auditorium swiveled in the direction of the speaker. I suspect many of us empathized with this brave young person who managed in several seconds to capture the core anxieties of most writers.

Kwame Alexander smiled broadly, and, I like to think, said a version of what we all tell our students (and ourselves!) when we’re worried about our writing and paralyzed about what to write about. His advice: “Read a lot. I mean, really read a lot, and pay attention to what you like and don’t like.” He also said, “In order to be interesting as a writer, you’ve got to ask a lot of questions. In order to be interesting, you’ve got to be …”  And since he paused and I was in the front row, I supplied a word: “Interested.” It was not an original contribution, I know, but he gave me a dazzler of a smile, and repeated it to the crowd: “Yes! In order to be interesting, you have to be interested.” He seemed so pleased to be brainstorming with the mixed-age crowd about the hard work and satisfactions of writing. I wanted to bottle the fizz of the evening.

At this stage of the semester, many of us are working with students who struggle to find something to write about. After all, one can write about anything, but to be worth the time of the writer — and reader — that pesky “So what?” question remains the gold standard. How many of us have sat with students who are simply stuck and “can’t think of anything to write about”? It’s tempting to flip Kwame Alexander’s point and say, “I can’t make you interesting if you’re not interested.” But that’s not very helpful.

So, my co-author, Stuart Greene, and I offer a variety of actually helpful questions for students in Chapter Five of From Inquiry to Academic Writing, Fifth Edition. Channeling Kwame Alexander’s advice to be interested readers so that they can be interesting writers, we help students see themselves as participants in the scholarly conversations they read about, inviting them, with scaffolded models, to:

            1) Draw on your personal experience

            2) Identify what is open to dispute

            3) Resist binary thinking

            4) Build on and extend the ideas of others

            5) Read to discover a writer’s frame

            6) Consider the constraints of the situation.

Like Kwame Alexander, I believe — and hope you do, too — that our students can develop into more interesting writers by learning to be more interested in the world. And that’s a habit of mind that pays dividends far beyond our classrooms.