Why Write?

Why write?

Writing regularly allows you to hold and reflect on experience. It is also a place to discover things as you play with writing. Writing allows you to examine your life, live parts of it again – and even, through your imagination, try on other lives for size.

However you write, and whether you’re conscious of this or not, by writing you will be entering a worldwide community of those who record, represent and reflect on their own condition through words. 

This is as varied a community as any other. Many regular writers - such a diarists and doodlers - write alone for their own reasons. Writers who share their writing with others - such as children, colleagues, friends and bloggers - may do so for affirmation, communication or influence. To practise writing in these ways, is to enter a huge, unwalled forum in which power and ideas are always being negotiated between readers and writers. 

But to write at all is to be an agent. So it would be a shame if children’s experience of writing was limited to climbing someone else’s ladder – the higher, the faster, the better. There are many other directions to go, and many other reasons for going there. If teaching emphasises acquisition of fixed conventions at the expense of free discovery, learning will be circumscribed and the agency of learners will be diminished. 

Each writing journey will be different. And the first steps may daunt us. Emotions may surprise us. Memories may deceive us. Resolutions may frustrate us.  Listeners may enlighten us. Therefore a trusted writing group provides space to explore and discuss the complexities - and the delights - of writing as they are encountered. 

Teachers who recognise this from their own writing experience will provide rich and inclusive education through writing. Without such experience, it is easy for writing to be seen merely as an exclusive product with fixed values designed by others.

To find out more about joining an NWP writing group, click here.