On today’s podcast, putting the fun back into writing. Ralph Fletcher says nothing helps writers grow like practice, but not just any kind of practice will do, you’ve got to bring the joy! In his new book, Joy Write, Ralph shares the whys and the how of giving students time and autonomy for the playful, low-stakes writing that leads to surprising, high-level growth. Ralph talks about how the element of fun has disappeared from classrooms, so we started our conversation with why that is. 



 

See below for a full transcript of our conversation: 

Ralph:    When you sit down with a bunch of children and they begin to write, I'm always interested in what they're going to be coming up with. We forget that writing process had its roots with romantic philosophers going back to Rousseau. Rousseau and those philosophers were really interested in children, not as unformed adults, but as just different. What are they doing? What are they going to say? How are they going to act? And for me, what are they going to write? It's wonderful to see what kids are going to write and how they express themselves, the quirky things that they do. That's fun for me, and it's fun for them to be able to express themselves.
    I think that nowadays in the more academic writing world, it's more about checking off a list of things that the genre expects, so it's less about that and it's more about compliance, frankly. That's not that much fun. I understand that there's a balance. We do want to enrich what kids can do and we want to show them, it's not just all writing in a vacuum, but I think that some of the things that we really need to be advocating for and celebrating in writing, things like voice in writing. Voice, which is the unique way children express themselves, and how it's different. If you end up with a whole stack of essays or argumentation and they're all pretty much the same, well, I don't think that's good writing, and I have to say that I see an awful lot of formulaic writing as I go around the country. I don't think that's good writing. I don't want to read that. I don't want to read the same piece over and over and over again.
    I have a little story about that by the way. I got a letter from a classroom that had read my novel Fig Pudding. I started reading the letters, and I started to notice after about the fourth or fifth one that they all followed kind of format. "I like this part," "I connected with this part" in the second paragraph, and then some questions at the end. And so they started to sound awful familiar, and the last letter attached to it was a Fig Pudding rubric, and I was like, "Oh my God, my book's been rubric-ed." A friend of mine said to me, "That means you've really made it. Once they put a rubric, man, that means you made it." Well, I don't want to be rubric-ed. I don't want those kids to be saying the same thing. When you start to see letters like that, you realize it's not about the kids really saying what they want to say, they're following a format that's been given to them, and it's not really authentic anymore. I mean I'd like to know what the kids think and not following the format.
    I think that that kind of thing is happening a lot in the writing classroom. One of the things that I say in Joy Write is that once upon a time writing workshop flourished because we had teachers who valued originality, passion, voice,