Derivative and Poorly Written

Is not “constructive feedback” for a fourth grade child ( ~9 years old in Australia), I am not sure it’s constructive feedback for ANY age child on compulsory homework tasks. If a teenage child has aspirations of being a writer, then talking about how not to be derivative and ways to make writing better might useful conversations.

If your “feedback” to someone you claim to care about on reading something they have written is a single sentence telling them you think it is “derivative and poorly written”, all you have achieved is to prove that you are a bully.

Good writing takes time, practice, and inspiration. It also takes confidence, if not yet in oneself then, in the fact that drafts & pieces are evaluated by those accessing them both “in context” and in “good faith”.

Very few children are going to write anything profound or groundbreakingly original. And that should be okay. Being annoyed with your kid for “wasting the paper” by writing a story on it is beyond unreasonable. Being annoyed at your kid for a story they had to write as a school assignment makes you a mean, selfish, person. It also damages the kid & forces them to walk an impossibly fine line.

If you think a school assignment is stupid, well, okay…

What can the kid do about it though? Congratulations on putting your kid into an unsolvable situation that they cannot avoid dealing with. A small blip on your radar (thinking fiction as a genre is stupid, for example – and,yes, that was the reason the parent who did this to me gave for “critiquing” every piece of such homework throughout primary school to “show me” fiction was dumb – using my assigned homework tasks 🤯) becomes an untangle-able mess for the person you did this too.

As an adult, I have written several award-winning reports, I have had many compliments on my writing BUT the act of writing is fraught with anxiety & negative emotions. I am unable to silence that voice from my childhood, explaining that I am not saying anything that has not been said before; that others have or will express it better; that my writing words at all is pointless and vain…

I tell myself that healthy people express their thoughts & feelings. I know I do not expect my words to be read by others. I hate that the need to write as a way of working things out is in constant war with the fear and anxiety created around the act of writing in my childhood.

I hope that by exposing this conflict to the light I can stop fighting whether I should write at all and just do the writing I need to do in creating a life worth living. If other people read my words & find some value in them, that would be have value to me but is not the ‘purpose’ of writing.

I still can’t write on paper without a sense of shame and guilt at my presumptive wastefulness. Drawing, same problem. Knowing you “should feel differently” and feeling differently is a chasm I have been unable to breach. Time will tell if writing here can help change that…