Ep 109: Improve Your Writing with a Growth Mindset

My mom, a journalist, was talking with a friend. She beamed at my brother. “Charlie, he’s the writer of the family. And Annie? She’s…” Here, I felt my mom hesitate. Then, “Annie’s the athlete.”

My brother excelled in everything involving words—from composing song lyrics and essays to dominating Scrabble games and inserting witty comments into conversations at just the right moment. I played softball and ran track. And I rode my yellow Schwinn ten-speed down country roads stretching between corn and soybean fields, past herds of Black Angus cattle and silos filled with grain. The labels fit, though deep down, secretly, I wanted to be a writer, too.

Three years after Charlie graduated high school, I sat in Miss Flint’s Senior English class. Miss Flint told us we would keep a journal chronicling our senior year, creating at least five entries per week...She held up three examples of some of the best she’d ever seen—journals from past students whose work she adored.

One was Charlie’s. I recognized it immediately, having gazed at it many times while he worked on it during his senior year. She passed them around for students to flip through. When Charlie’s came to me, I opened it, noting his handwriting—a combination of big printed letters and rounded cursive. The content mingled light humor and occasional sarcasm with spot-on descriptions of people and situations. For one page, he cut letters from newspapers to compose an amusing ransom note.

I studied the pages, wishing I could copy his techniques. Then I passed it to the person behind me.

At the end of my senior year, Miss Flint didn’t ask to keep my journal.
Stuck in a Fixed Mindset
You can read the rest of my story in a two-part series, but I share this excerpt to illustrate how I grew up with a fixed mindset. I was labeled the athlete, not the writer. The natural ability—the gift—of writing was bestowed on others in my family, not me. Therefore, with a fixed mindset, I concluded I could not become a writer.

But I was hungry to learn and grow in as many ways as possible in life, even if I never wrote.

A natural autodidact, I loved the library, filled as it was with mentors, coaches, and teachers available to me for free, in the form of books. I scoured the place in search of satisfying my curiosity, gravitating to the nonfiction selection a bit more than fiction—even though I loved stories—because I wanted to learn.

I'd check out stacks of books, gleaning what I could in two or three weeks' time, getting answers to my questions, then returning those books a couple of weeks later to pile on another stack of information to take home and devour.

I'd follow my interests and whims, pursuing a wide-ranging knowledge base, much of it practical. I wanted to learn to bake bread, crochet, tie friendship bracelets, build a kite, draw cartoons, catch wild rabbits, make yogurt (which I never did, but I learned the basics from books). I was interested in macrame and running and photography and sewing and, secretly, writing...even though it was fixed in my mind that I wasn't a writer.
A Natural Growth Mindset
Despite the fixed, unchangeable reality that I would never write, I seemed to exhibit a growth mindset in just about every other way, seeing no limits to the kinds of skills I might acquire or experiments I might attempt.

I didn't care if my coil pots turned out lopsided or my drawing of Snoopy needed more rounded ears or even if a few crickets escaped from the cricket habitat I set up in my bedroom.

Plants in my terrarium died. A duck egg I found, never hatched. I didn't understand all the vocabulary in a book about volcanoes or the space shuttle, both of which captured my interest for a season, along with a hundred other things, but that was okay because I learned enough about them to answer my basic questions. As for the uneven stitches in the scarf I knitted, that was fine by me, because I was a little more skilled and confident than the day before,