Mr. Rogers, Face-Plants, and Creative Progress

On the first day of my Creative Writing classes, I always take the students outside. I go to the trunk of my car and pull out my skateboard. This gets their attention real quick as they try to figure out what an old fogey like me is doing with a skateboard. Then, in what I like to think of as a Mr. Rogers-kind-of-way, I start changing from my dress shoes into my skating shoes. This really gets my students going.

The comments I hear from them range from concern for my well-being like, “Um, Mr. Robb, I don’t think you should do that. You’re going to hurt yourself,” to a desire for my demise like, “I hope he falls on his face!” to sheer unbelief like, “No way! Mr. Robb skates?”

Once my shoes are on, without warning or explanation, I run and jump on my skateboard (a fairly simple trick that I think kids are calling a “Bomb Drop” these days). Now my students are really freaking out because they never imagined that their boring English teacher could possibly have any skills beyond correcting essays.

This is not me, but it is a "Bomb Drop"
Photo: howcast.com

But I’m not finished yet. I follow my Bomb Drop with a trick called a “360 Pop Shove It”. This is a fairly impressive looking trick that has become second nature to me over the years. I can practically do it in my sleep and I stick it every time. Now the student’s minds are totally blown.

I roll back up to them and ask, “Do you think this is the first time I’ve been on a skateboard?” Of course they all say no. “Why and how was I able to do that?” I ask. Sometimes a student will think that I just got lucky. If that’s the case, I do it two or three more times so they know that luck has nothing to do with it. After a little discussion I get the point across that it took a whole lot of practice. That I’ve worked on that trick about a million times over the course of several years and that’s why I could do it in a way that looked effortless.

Now I head off down the sidewalk on my board again. This time I intentionally try a trick I know I can’t do very well. For me, it’s usually a “Heel Flip”. It’s not even that great of a trick, but for some reason, I’ve never gotten the hang of it. It’s the kind of trick that I can land maybe one in ten times. So I try a Heel Flip and I fall. I try it again and I fall again. I keep trying and keep falling. Some of the falls really do hurt. This isn’t acting. I’m genuinely trying to land this trick and I’m genuinely face-planting on concrete. There’s always a combination of laughter and sympathetic groans coming from the students. Eventually, I always land the trick. Sometimes I even get cheers.

I roll back up to the students and ask, “Why did I fall so many times before I could do it? Why couldn’t I stick that trick just like the other one?”

After a few requisite smart-alecky remarks someone will usually say, “Because you haven’t practiced it as much.”

“Exactly,” I say. “If I want to get better and learn more tricks, I have to practice. If I want to improve, I have to fall down… a lot. It hurts, it can be embarrassing, I might look like an idiot, but that’s the only way to make progress. Even the pros were once beginners who got laughed at for falling on their faces.”

I go onto explain that writing (and all other creative endeavors, for that matter) is the same. I quote Julia Cameron when she said, “Mistakes are necessary! Stumbles are normal… Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves… It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time… Give yourself permission to be a beginner.”

After this little object lesson with my class, we go back into the classroom and do our very first assignment for Creative Writing: Write a letter of permission to be a beginner and sign it. This letter serves as a reminder that it’s okay to write badly so you can eventually write well. I have the students put it right in the front of their portfolio where it will be the first thing they see every day when they open it up for class.

We all need that reminder. I highly recommend you write yourself a letter like this. Write it literally and, more importantly, write it in your core beliefs. A letter of permission to fail, fall down, look like an idiot, embarrass yourself, AND progress, improve, learn, grow, and have a lot more fun and creative life in the process.