"Mr. Smoot, I used to be a good writer..."
said my student Adrian to me, "...but you've made me boring."

I was stunned. During his eighth grade year with me, this boy had learned to write model essays in the five-paragraph form. He always started with an intriguing introduction that led to a bold thesis statement. He always began each paragraph with an idea and supported it with quotations, observations, and logic. He always perked up his writing with metaphors. He could do all this with any given subject. No wonder he thought it was boring: it made discovery predictable through a five-paragraph formula that no one outside of school ever uses. That was my third year teaching, but it was time to start over, always with Adrian as my conscience.

I had been pretty sure of my philosophy of writing. "Writing" meant a process of searching in memory or books and ordering ideas to lead the reader willingly into discovering what the writer had found. I believed, and still believe, that writing is a way to discover truth, and that a good writer risks a change of mind during the process.

But my method of teaching writing to students such as Adrian was to require students to follow the procedures that I had discovered more or less on my own. I'm reminded of the blind-deaf messiah in TOMMY whose disciples don blindfolds and ear muffs for a day to attain the same enlightenment he got in a lifetime. It's futile.