Monday's MetaWrite: Who Is On Your Bus?

Getting Curious About the Voices We Hear When We Start to Write

All of us have voices inside our heads. Some encourage us to do our best, while others invite us to be self-destructive. Other voices shut down our creativity. I like to talk to students early in the year about the different voices they hear when they attempt to do something outside their comfort zone. Where did these voices originate? Are some of them positive and encouraging? Are others negative and discouraging?

At the beginning of Patricia Schneider’s (2003) book Writing Alone and With Others, she invites writers to participate in a visualization exercise to examine the voices they hear when they begin to write. I have used this exercise every year for the last ten years, and each year, when I ask my students to reflect back over the writing activities that helped them in my class, this ranks as number one.

Patricia Schneider’s Bus Exercise Script

Imagine yourself on a wide stretch of prairie or desert. You can see all the way to the horizon, where a little road meanders along, winding, curving. It stretches from the horizon, all the way to your feet. You are standing beside the road. Far, far in the distance, you see a bus coming toward you on the road. Let it come slowly. Perhaps there are heat waves that make it waver a bit at first. Let it come closer and closer until it draws up alongside you and stops. The door opens, and people come out one by one. Each person who gets off the bus is someone who has an opinion about your writing. (Mother? Father? Sister? Brother? Sixth-grade teacher?) The ‘loudmouths’ push off first. Let them off, one by one, and let each one say what is on his or her mind. Write it down. If you want, note how the person is dressed; write that down. After all the loudmouths get off, there are some quiet folk at the back of the bus. Let them off too. What they have to say may be entirely different. After you have written the speeches of the people on the bus, you may want to do a dialogue with one or more of them.

When students complete this activity, I ask them to reframe the original experience when the voices formed as a learning opportunity. In other words, reappraising the experiences to see the positive things that have come from even negative experiences. Acknowledge the loudmouths and see what opportunities come from that learning.

Reframing Negative Writing Experiences

Can you apply the maxim “get curious, not furious” to these experiences?”

Can you interrogate these experiences? 

Can you make meaning from a negative experience?

Can you lean into the positive experiences?

Can you put these experiences in perspective?

My students love this activity because it resurrects both champions and destroyers of their writing identity, voices that criticized and voices that championed their writing efforts. I like that Schneider has room on the bus for both the positive and critical voices.