I once created a daily writing exercise for myself by opening the dictionary to random pages and, eyes closed, circling my finger until it landed on a word.  “This is something like throwing the I Ching,” I thought.  I read the definitions of the words my fingers landed on and wrote the words at the top of blank computer screens and notebook pages and then did ten-minute freewrites on whatever the words made me think of.  One day, I wrote after landing on the word “hagioscope,” which according the American Heritage Dictionary means, “a small opening provided in an interior wall of a church to enable those in the transept to have a view of the main altar.”

The word made me think about how creative writing is an opening to soul, an altar others hardly see for the walls that our lives are.  Around that soul, we are skin and bones bundled into jobs, relationships, apartments and houses, cars and airplane seats, carrying briefcases and pushing shopping carts, everyone’s palms open for the gate keepers to give out passes or fines.  Because our writings are openings to our non-public selves, they are fragile in their beginnings and easily crushed. I have often met students who returned to studying the craft of writing after decades of thinking they could not do it because a teacher, professor or family member looked at a piece of their writing and told them they were bad writers and would never succeed at writing. It is hard for me to imagine feeling in a position to make such a judgment, let alone proclaim it, and it is painful thinking about how long such talk has derailed these students.

 Years ago, a poet teacher of mine returned from a trip to the East Coast where he had visited high school creative writing classes and told us there was “so much good writing out there it is frightening.”  The word “frightening” bothered me –if the writing he saw was so good, what was so frightening?  Was it the possibility that people might find out that they had a skill they thought only others had?  Was it the possibility that if others, such as my teacher, had not torn student work apart but responded sensitively to it, the work would have grown? Was it the possibility that a style of teaching based on exclusivity and faultfinding would disappear?

From that day on, I have believed that to teach creative writing well, no discrepancy can exist between the writing teacher’s goals and those of the students–everyone must want to create the very best writing possible and want to facilitate writing that grows into its own right shape.

Over years of teaching and holding on to this belief, I have also learned something else: the key to both writing and teaching writing is trust.  As I help students peel away the resistance that keeps them from both trusting themselves to write and trusting their writing to tell them what to write, I have learned better and better how to do that for myself, too.  I now know that starting a piece of writing or teaching others to start does not have to be harder than starting a car–the teacher and the writer just have to remember to use the right key, the one made of trust.  Particular lessons and writing ideas, response groups, and libraries of books by writers on writing all lend fuel that will combine with the oxygen of personal experience to keep our writing engines going, but before the ignition can create the spark that will start the engine, the trust key has to turn the ignition.

Each of us needs someone to have the confidence in us that will help bring out our self-confidence, someone who can help us believe that we have what it takes. Many students have come to writing class because a relative or friend told them their stories were interesting and worthy. Often people come to readings and have writers sign instructional books for friends and relatives they believe should be writing. Sometimes new writers find confidence in the words of other writers whose work speaks to them.

I have been lucky to experience friends’ confidence in my writing, but I have also learned trust from my relationships with my students. It goes something like this:  I serve my students’ need for trust by trusting that I can help them write and that they will write and when they do write, I feel trustworthy.  Because I feel trustworthy, I more quickly trust myself before the blank pages as they have in my presence. After years of teaching, I know that every time I help students write, I learn more about how I do it, can do it, or could go about doing it.

Today, the pages I fill with words are often for those who trust me to help them write. When I get the words right on the page, I feel as if they’ve formed a hagioscope for me to see through to the altar of creative time. We all sit in the transept.  As writers, may we all allow our words and the words of those we admire to help us view beauty at the center of becoming. As writers, may we all find a way, either with our writing or with our encouraging response, to help another feel confident enough to get his or her experience on the page.