March 23, 2025: Student Sprinters

At a recent meeting of our Student Writing Club, some of the kids were lamenting that they were not getting anywhere with their writing. They felt that they were not getting much accomplished. They knew what they wanted to write, they just did not have the time to make much progress each week. One even suggested that the Writing Club needed to meet more often so they would have more time to write.

Naturally that prompted a discussion where my fellow club sponsor and I talked with them about how our Writing Club meetings should not be the only time they write each week. They really needed to be writing every day.

“Every day???” said one of them. “I would love to, but just don’t have any time to.” Seemed to be the common thread.

So, we stopped and had a talk about writing styles. Not your genre of choice or your literary voice.  But how do you actually work best?  While there are as many ways of working as there are writers, I believe there are two major categories into which all of these individual structures fit- sprinters and marathoners.

Sprinters:

         These are the writers who may have other jobs or other responsibilities that make it impossible for them to have a “normal 8 hour writing day”. It may be the cooking show host who is now writing a cookbook, or the mother of three who is a picture book author.  And yes- students fit into this category. For sprinters, writing in small bursts of time and energy just works best. 

         Sprinters:

-       Can work very intensely for brief periods of time.

-       Can easily fit writing tasks into smaller chunks of time.

-       Will chunk a large project into many smaller tasks/sections.

-       Can easily ‘switch-gears’ to focus on a specific task/topic.

Marathoners:

         These are the writers who need to immerse themselves in their craft in order to do their best work. The bestselling novelist who clears her schedule for weeks at a time and immerges with another completed, polished novel. The writers who seek out fellowships and retreats in order to find solitude and extended, devoted writing time.

Marathoners:

-       Can lose themselves in their work and write for hours/days.

-       Would rather clear their schedule of other commitments and focus solely on their writing project.

-       Work at a steady and constant pace.

-       Need larger chunks of time to fit in warm-up and wind-down time

I am a sprinter. I used to feel guilty about that.  I would look around at so many of my writing peers and think that they devoted much more time and energy to their writing than I did. In online writing groups, I would read about the hours that they all wrote each day. At writer’s groups, I would listen to anecdotal stories of how the passion of writing pushed them and drove them into submersing themselves in their current writing project. I would hear them lament about all that they had to give up or push to the back burner in order to make writing a priority. And my guilt grew.  Did I deserve to be a writer if I did not suffer and give things up in order to write? Was I not as passionate about my craft as my peers?

But I am a full-time teacher and a part-time college professor. I cannot devote large chunks of time to writing, so I must be a sprinter.  I get up extremely early to have some writing time first thing in the morning, and then I may fit in small chinks of writing time during the day.

Student writers really need to be sprinters as well.  Even my young 9- and 10-year-old writers have a lot on their plates. Class, homework, extracurriculars, family time, …the list goes on.  

So, we brainstormed a few minutes on how they could find some time in their day to write. Where could they scrape together a few minutes to just jot down a few words or ideas.

The list we came up with was pretty extensive and unique to many of the students’ situations. But I could also feel a shift in some of the students. The nodding head, the smile, the giggle as someone shared that they were now going to plan to write during their brother’s “deathly boring soccer practices”, or when another honestly mentioned that they could give up some “gaming time” to writing. 

Perhaps I am overly optimistic, but I expect to see great progress the next time we meet!