What do I write?

The perennial problem of how to begin

I might as well be honest and come right out with it.

This is my first article on Medium.

I have no grand illusions of the article being an instant success. I expect no accolades. No claps. No comments. No followers. No curation.

It’s not that I lack confidence in my abilities. I know I can write. I know I can spell. I know that I know a thing or two about grammar and syntax.

It’s more about being realistic.

Realistic in terms of, what are the chances? What are the chances of my first foray into writing on a global online publishing platform even being noticed?

Hang on, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take that back a notch.

What are the chances of me even getting the article posted on the platform?

Yeah, that’s more the point. If experience has taught me anything, it’s this: when it comes to tech, I have a much better chance of stuffing it up than getting it right.

I’m not joking.

Tech and I have a love-hate relationship that goes way back to secondary school days. When I say, way back, I really do mean way back. As in, way back to binary punched computer cards.

Oh wow, that experience scarred me for life. I still recall sitting in the classroom hunched over my deck of computer cards doggedly punching at the rows of tiny perforated rectangles with my straightened-out paperclip. It didn’t help that our teacher kept telling us that one mistaken punch would mean the whole program was doomed. I never did find out where I went wrong but any inkling I might have had of a career in computer programming was unceremoniously dumped in the bin along with the cards.

Can you see where I’m going with this? No? Neither can I! 😕

Oh dear, maybe I should trash what I’ve written and start again — after all, you’re not here for a history lesson about computer cards, and my ill-fated attempts at coding are best left buried and forgotten.

But wait a second…

…if I look at this from a different perspective, I can see that my meanderings have served a purpose and I’m not off topic at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Sure, I went off on a tangent and came to a dead-end, but isn’t that one of the traps that befalls writers who don’t know where or how to begin? They write themselves into a corner and get stuck.

Great. Now I’m stuck.

Time for a coffee break ☕️ …and a quick peek at my emails 📧

I know what you’re thinking. It looks like procrastination but believe me, it’s not. I have a hunch my inbox holds the solution to my dilemma.

I see today’s Medium Daily Digest is waiting for me. A quick scan of the previews reveals a range of intriguing titles, many of them in the form of a question. I’m tempted to explore further but not right now. A question of my own has popped into my head.

What do other Medium writers write about in their first article?

I click through to my browser and discover I’m not the only person to pose the question. I also discover that the Medium writing community is very generous in lending a helping hand to newbies on the platform. Curiously, on the subject of what to write about, the advice is unanimously consistent: Write about anything. Anything you like.

I feel my mouth twitch into a wry smile.

It occurs to me that my earlier waffle about tech incompetence is an example of how the write about anything approach has its limits. But that’s not the main reason for the wry smile. It’s the words themselves. Those three ordinary words:

Write. About. Anything.

When I put them in alphabetical order, they look like this:

About. Anything. Write.

Not the most inspiring words, are they? In fact, of the six ways these words can be arranged, there is only one that is syntactically legitimate, and that’s write about anything. Three ordinary words that when sequenced a certain way have the potential to transform into a galaxy of literary opportunity. Which is wonderful if you’re a competent writer with a vivid imagination or an encyclopedia for a brain but what if that’s not you? What if you’re at the other end of the spectrum? What if you’re someone who has trouble collecting your thoughts or avoids writing as if it were a deadly coronavirus? For you, those three words, write-about-anything, are more like a black hole.

I know that to be true because, in my role as a speech pathologist, I’ve worked with a steady stream of students who have made it their mission in life to prove to me how much they detest writing. For them, one of the worst things a teacher can do when setting a writing task is to tell them to write about anything. For them, that’s a ticket to nowhere. A field trip to oblivion.

It’s not the teacher’s fault for thinking that giving the student free choice will make the writing task easier. It’s a logical assumption. Except that it also assumes -

• the student has a ready source of ideas they can draw on
• the student, in the absence of a ready source of ideas, has strategies to generate ideas out of thin air
• the student has the vocabulary to translate their ideas into written language
• the student has a clear understanding of the structure of the proposed piece of writing whether that be sentence, poem, paragraph, short story, essay
• the student has internalized the basic conventions of written language in terms of spelling and punctuation
• the student is motivated to attempt the task

It’s hard to be motivated when experience tells you that what you are being asked to do is really, really hard. Sometimes impossibly hard. There is nothing rewarding about the prospect of failure. And these students — the ones I work with — are routinely confronted with failure.

The students I’ve devoted my career to helping have language-learning difficulties. In speech pathology circles it’s known as developmental language disorder. In the general community, these kids may seem to be completely normal except they’re not. Many of them are never diagnosed. Many of them never receive any extra support at school. Many of them are tagged with terms like slow learner, underachiever, disengaged, dyslexic, challenging behaviour.

Oops, I should have warned you I get a bit carried away sometimes. Sorry for shouting at you.

Okay, let’s try a role play.

Imagine you’re a speech pathologist or a tutor working at a mainstream school. A scowling 14 year-old boy — I’ll call him, Leon* — with oral language and reading abilities of a 9 year-old, shows up for his regular time-tabled session. He plonks himself down in a chair at your desk, thrusts a piece of lined paper at you and tells you, “I can’t do it.” You glance at the paper and note two words scrawled across the top, Personal Narrative. You make the correct assumption that Leon has a writing task to do for English.

What else does this scenario tell you?

Well, for one thing, it wouldn’t need the fly-on-the-wall to tell you Leon is not in the best of moods. You could be forgiven for assuming that his surliness is somehow connected to the writing task he’s shoved at you. It might cross your mind that his “I can’t do it” is another way of saying, “You do it for me.” You might even interpret his passive-aggressive behavior as his way of telling you that he’s refusing to do the writing task and has instead chosen to fail — that he’s given up.

While all of these are fair and reasonable inferences, you’d be wrong for believing them to be true.

Here’s the thing.

Leon’s sullenness is a front. A defense mechanism. A maladaptive technique that he’s been practicing for a while to cover up the shame and frustration he feels about being totally out of his depth in the classroom, the locker bay, the school yard, the library, and even the school bus. The only times he feels he can relax and be himself are when he’s playing on his X-Box and the sports ground.

It’s true that when it comes to writing, Leon really struggles. It’s one of several reasons why he was referred to you in the first place. But it’s also true that despite writing being an exhausting and seemingly fruitless exercise for him, Leon hasn’t given up. Far from it.

If he’d given up, he wouldn’t have bothered showing you the writing task. The admission that he can’t do it is his incomplete way of saying, “I can’t do it by myself.”

He’s asking for help.

More than that, he’s asking YOU to help him and that means he has a level of trust in your working relationship.

So what do you do next?

You pick up the paper.

“Personal narrative,” you read as if to yourself but loud enough for Leon to hear. “A story about yourself,” you add because you know the plain-English description will mean more to him than the genre’s formal title.

You sit back in your swivel chair and look at the boy slumped in his seat.

“You know, Leon,” you say, pausing until he lifts his head enough to look at you, “the hardest thing about writing is getting started.”

He mumbles, “She said I can write anything.”

You presume the ‘she’ refers to his English teacher. Either way, it’s the sign you’ve been waiting for. He’s beginning to engage in the task.

“So, you can write about anything,” you reflect, delivering the words with an air of thoughtful deliberation. You refine the idea by adding, “Anything about yourself.”

You notice a slight shrug of the boy’s shoulders and a shuffling of feet on the carpet.

You turn your attention back to the paper in your hand and you shake your head. “It’s hard to get ideas from a blank sheet of paper,” you observe. “A picture would help. Or a photo.”

That’s when the penny drops.

Leon reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. After a few taps and swipes, he shows you the screen. You see a photo of him standing proudly next to the captain of last year’s premiership football team.

“Wow, that’s awesome,” you exclaim. “That’s a story I want to hear.”

Leon allows himself a smug grin.

You realize it’s his way of saying thanks. Thanks for helping him get started. Thanks for showing him how to solve his own problem. Thanks for believing he can do it.

If you’ve made it this far, it’s my turn to say thanks. Thanks to you, intrepid readers, for your perseverance and making it through to the end. Thanks to you, fellow Medium writers, for helping me get started and for advising me to write about anything. Thank you, Leon for proving to me that where there’s a will there’s a way, and that giving up is not an option.

Leon* is a fictitious teenager who bears similarities to many of the young people I have worked with in my years of clinical practice. He is not, however, based on any one person. I chose the name for two reasons: 1. To date (and if I remember correctly), I’ve never had a ‘Leon’ on my caseload, and 2. Leon is Greek for lion and as far as I’m concerned, any person who lives their life with developmental language disorder has the courage and tenacity of a lion.

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