One of the gifts of being the tenth child in my family is that I’ve been an uncle since 2nd grade. Over the decades, I’ve witnessed dozens of nieces and nephews (and later, their children) scrawl masterpieces on everything from construction paper to napkins. Not long after they can hold a crayon, kids seem compelled to create, or rather recreate, some image on the page. Some samples:
When a child hands such a thing to any loving and thoughtful adult, the first reaction is inevitably unbridled praise. “Oh Sally that’s beautiful!” “Dominick, that’s amazing!” “How wonderful, Eli!” It seems cruel to inflate their young egos, but it’s what we do. After this initial round of gold stars, invariably a question arises. What is it?
This is a crucial moment, with implications about authorial intention theory and more. But I’ll keep it simple. In 40+ years of uncling, I’ve never had a kid say, “I don’t know.” They don’t say, “It’s an abstract expression of my innermost feeling. Bug off.” No. They cheerfully explain: It’s a kitten/sunflower/pizza. It’s you, Mommy. You might spend hours staring into the rollercoaster scribbles before you, and you’ll never see the image they’ve named. (By the way, the work above, in descending order from top: a butterfly; James and Jane on the swing; a bumblebee party). But here’s the thing I’m convinced of. The image is there. The kid’s just the only one who sees it.
I’ve tested this theory many times, flipping fresh artwork upside down on the fridge where it’s been lovingly magneted. When the young artist wanders by and sees their picture, they look baffled—and they fix it. After all, how can their helicopter fly upside down?
What’s happening here? My theory is that the child holds a clear visual image in their mind, what they want to draw, and when they look at the paper, they don’t see what’s actually there so much as overlay the image already in their mind over the scribbles.
Now imagine a young writer who has a vivid scene set on an exotic planet fresh in their mind, but the rough draft relies on vague language, abstract word choice, generalizations. Their reading of this work is dominated by what’s pre-existing in their minds, not what’s actually conjured by the words on the page. Writers are the worst people to judge their drafts’ effectiveness.
The implications for feedback are radical and vast. Faced with the sacred task of responding to an early draft, our primary job is to tell the writer what we see on the page. What’s rising in our mind as a result of their words—the imagery that’s emerging and the impressions that follow. In workshop conversation, we might offer helpful suggestions, but we must begin with the most basic of honest reactions. Absent that essential foundation, a critique might end up giving advice on improving the expression on a walrus when all along the writer was making a bulldozer.
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Neil Connelly directed the M.F.A. in creative writing at McNeese State University before returning to his home state of Pennsylvania to teach at Shippensburg University. He’s published two dozen short stories, seven novels, and a collection of short works.