Swift to Give Instruction

I hereby apologize for the punny title—I couldn’t resist (and also couldn’t come up with anything distinctly better). Hopefully you chuckled a little.

But onward to the topic: Kate Swift.

A subject of Sherwood Anderson’s short story or novel or what have you, the schoolteacher is an interesting character from start to finish. She is introduced as nothing less than an object of sin—of want and sexual desire and passion, of something corruptible and corrupting—and yet becomes something of a Christ figure. (At least in the eyes of Reverend Curtis Hartman.) She is “not known in Winesburg as a pretty woman” (134-135) and yet proves to be viewed sexually by at least two men within the work—Reverend Harman, as previously stated, as well as George Willard. (“He began to  believe she must be in love with him… You wait and see” [132-133].)

Kate Swift, similar to Frankenstein’s Margaret Saville, seems to be a less-prominent female character with a lot of meaning to her existence—and despite all that, or maybe because of it, I found her conversation with George Willard to be the most intriguing part of her characterization.

In “The Teacher,” Swift is more than passionate with her former pupil as she talks with him about his potential future. “ ‘If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,’ she explained. ‘It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now is the time to be living… You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they are saying’ ” (137).

I’ll go ahead and take a moment here to admit to extreme bias: I would consider myself a writer; maybe nothing particularly wonderful, but a writer all the same. This is the third year I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of AHS’s Literary Magazine staff and if I’ve learned one thing over the years (Thank you, Mr. Fortunato), it’s that writers write. Of course, there’s always the dreaded Writer’s Block and times that a break from writing is healthy—I know, I know, shocking—but to simply not write “until you are better prepared”? It’s a notion that I don’t understand.

Now maybe Kate Swift is trying to explain another phrase I’ve heard for countless years, in AHS 2013 Fortunatotion terms, “When you waste words, God kills a puppy.” Comparatively, I think Mr. Fortunato and Ms. Swift may be getting at the same thing—there’s a difference between writing and writing well.

But here’s my question for Kate Swift, and anyone else who wants to answer it: how do you get better at writing without practice? The quick-and-easy answer is you don’t. It’s like anything else, subjected to the age-old cliché “Practice makes perfect.”

I’ll wholeheartedly admit that this specific quote stood out to me because of who I am and what is important to me as such, but I still firmly believe that this passage is vital to the order of the story.

George Willard, the only constant character—and potential narrator (I’ll blog about that later)—is told to stop writing until he is older.

Did he take Ms. Swift’s advice?