How Writing a Novel Has Changed Me As a Professor

I always understood something of my students’ feelings about the difficulty of writing. As a student, when I read composition scholar Peter Elbow’s confession that as an undergraduate writer he had felt successful only some of the time, I thought, "Me, too!" It heartened me that a preeminent author on the subject of writing could look back on experiences that resembled mine, and his words helped me accept those stages of writerly flailing as normal. I was the queen of the not-quite-there B+ in college, and I went on to earn a Ph.D. in English. Still, working on a novel over seven years as a fully scheduled professor September through May made me confront more daunting emotions about writing than I ever had before, ones that now help me empathize with students experiencing the most difficulty.

I had thoughts like these: This is so hard. I don’t know whether I am going to be able to finish. I may not be the kind of person who can do this. Why did I think I could do this? I keep working, but I am not sure I am ever going to get to the end of this. Is any of this any good? I wish I could know now whether all this work is worth it. Who am I to be trying to do this?

I faced challenges in college and graduate school, but I never asked those questions of myself. Now I understand what it feels like to attempt a self-created goal, something nobody expects or needs from me, with almost no structures in place actively supporting me. No sense that I am one of hundreds marching toward a predictable outcome as I did in college. No cohort of friends in the same program helping me over obstacles the way I had in graduate school. No context signaling to me that if I want to be an author, I will succeed. Just me, my work ethic, my doubts, and my husband, Paul. When I need one person to believe in me, he has been that person.

I teach students at a community college who are working so many hours to make a living while pursuing their education that a degree designed to take two years can take four years or more. They frequently are the first in their families to pursue college, and it means not only mastering difficult coursework but inventing entirely new identities. As part of family survival teams, they don’t always have the freedom to make choices as ambitious individuals.  An outsider to their struggles, I have always appreciated how their circumstances test them as rigorously as their courses do. Writing a novel presented me with a mental ordeal closer to theirs, however, imparting greater understanding of what it must mean to keep on going.

Life offers alternative paths, and so any goal needs to compete with other viable options and win. Quitting has to seem practically unforgivable, which all by itself means living with the threat of a terrible judgment. Also, a person has to be lucky enough not to have intervening responsibilities require a change in course. While writing my novel, I have felt that fear as well. For lucky, ecstatic stretches the pursuit of the goal itself propels a person forward, but for much of the time it is just persistence and method. For what it’s worth, in this blog I offer what I can from my experience to help with college writing, and perhaps here and there a rant to let off steam. That, too, is part of survival. At graduation time, remember to thank the people who listened.