In an essay on writing—on making meaning through storytelling and fiction—Sue Miller writes:
“For the true writer, though, however close the events may be to his life, there is some distance, some remove, that allows for the shaping of the work. The shaping, after all, is what it’s all about. Every reader can sense the difference between a writer who embodies meaning through the events he describes and the writer who seems simply mired in those events. It is that struggle for meaning that lets the writer escape the tyranny of what really happened and begin to dream his fictional dream.”
Miller, Sue. “Virtual Reality: The Perils of Seeking a Novelist’s Facts in Her Fiction.” Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times, Henry Holt, 2001, 156-60.
Miller’s “true writer” gains reflective distance from experience, and shapes writing and meaning. Analogy: true educators are reflective practitioners and meaning-makers. Don’t settle for the easy self-assertion that “I’m a reflective practitioner”: it’s a “struggle” to create reflective space, and identify and change behavior meriting change. Like readers’ discernment of “embodie[d] meaning” versus being “mired in” the details, students sense whether a teacher is committed to knowing them—who deliberately reflects and “struggles for meaning”—and with “some distance, some remove,… shap[es]… the work,” their learning.
