The Way of Oz: A Guide to Wisdom, Heart, and Courage

5: Learning and Writing

It’s the writing, not being read, that excites me. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), English novelist, essayist, feminist, member of the Bloomsbury group, and cofounder of the Hogarth Press Reading is essential to integrated learning, but writing is its core, whether it is published or not. Writing not only forces a high level of involvement and commitment to learning but also is essential to organization and understanding. The landmark book Making the Most of College by Richard J. Light (based on interviews with sixteen hundred Harvard undergraduates following several years of research in the late twentieth century) revealed that one of the keys to success in college is writing. Light’s advice is to take as many courses with writing assignments as you can. Writing is a key to learning, not just in college but also throughout your life of the mind. The message of writing and its importance, however, is not new. At the time of Frank Baum’s move to Chicago, John Stuart Mill in 1891 wrote, “Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words 5 Learning and Writing 77.........................Learning and Writing and phrases have, as it were, nailed them down and held them fast.” More recently, Hillary Clinton’s “understanding through writing” came from her weekly newspaper column in 1995, about which she said, “The exercise of putting my ideas on paper gave me a clearer sense of how to recast my role as an advocate within the [Clinton] Administration as I began to focus on discrete domestic projects that were more achievable than massive undertakings such as health care reform.” American essayist Joan Didion said the same thing, more pithily: “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” And best-selling novelist Amy Tan noted that “writing is a way of making sense of the world.” Virginia Woolf said that for her, writing provided a level of satisfaction nearly unparalleled in the life of the mind. Taking Notes and Spontaneous Inspiration You might want to begin jotting down your spontaneous inspiration, ideas, or observations on paper or typing them or dictating them into a PDA or its equivalent and transferring them later to an archival database. You should recognize that your spontaneous ideas and understanding (“eureka” or “aha” moments) may come to you at odd times, even in moments of clouded consciousness. Stories abound about insight that comes from the interplay of the conscious and subconscious minds. Julian Jaynes referred to the “3 Bs”—the bed, the bath, and the bus—as places where new insights might occur immediately before or after periods of rest and personal hygiene, or when traveling. Jean-François Champollion’s first insight into how to decipher the Rosetta Stone, which unlocked the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics, occurred during a coach trip he took to Paris in 1807. Walt Rostow remembered precisely when he was inspired to write his 1983 book on economics: “At 3:00 on the morning of December 15, 1982, when sleep was light, I got up and outlined this book in just about the form that it now appears .” A train trip stimulated Karl Folkers’s imagining The Way of Oz and Learning.........................78 the structural formula for penicillin: “On the train from Chicago to Madison , I sat there, looking out the window. . . . As I reviewed the evidence in my mind about the beta-lactam formulas, they sounded pretty good. . . . It was on that trip that for the first time in my participation in the penicillin program, that I really took the beta-lactam seriously.” It was also on a train that J. K. Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter books, was inspired. As she tells it, she had no pen or pad available, so “rather than try to write it, I had to think it. And I think that was a very good thing. I was besieged by a mass of detail, and if it didn’t survive that journey, it probably wasn’t worth remembering.” Of course, the single mom who was in dire financial straits at the time did remember, and the story became Harry Potter and the Philosopher ’s Stone (or Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, its title in the United States). Many creative people have conjured their best...