karenthology asked an interesting question.  She said, "How has being a high school teacher affected your own writing?"

I told her this was both a great question and a can of worms question that I'd not really thought about.  So, wow!  I've been mulling over it all morning.

First, there are really obvious effects, like thinking about grammar, sentence structure, and the elements of good writing all the time.  What an advantage this is for me as a writer!  Of course, they say that we teach what we most need to learn, and I think that's true for me.  I was a miserable grammar student in high school.  I still am in a lot of ways.  I think about grammar a bunch, but I don't feel like an expert.

This attention to grammar might sound peripheral to writing--at least a lot of wannabe writers tell me so--but it has affected me.  It spills into how I build sentences, how sentence rhythms sound, how paragraphs build, etc.  By teaching it, thinking about it, reading students' work to comment on it, etc., I'm more aware of what I'm up to when I write.

Another effect is that reading student work is like being a constant slush pile reader, except that I don't get to send the manuscripts that I'm not going to publish back to the author (what a relief it would be on my grading load if I could just put a slip in with the student's essay that read, "Thank you for letting me see your work.  Unfortunately, it does not fit our needs at this time," and I would send a check to the one or two essays I thought were worthy *g*).  No, what I do as the perpetual slush pile reader is to give the writers feedback on what they need to do to make the current essay better and to improve the next one.  That means I'm always thinking about what works and why it works.  I not only have to be able to identify it, I have to be able to explain it.  That make it a lot easier to be objective about my own work.

In a similar sense, when I teach literature, I'm also internalizing what makes those stories hum along.  For example, we started Death of a Salesman today in A.P. English.  Heavens, amazing dialogue!  Here's an exchange that got to me:

WILLY:  Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!
LINDA:  Shh!
WILLY:  The trouble is he's lazy, goddammit!
LINDA:  Willy, please!
WILLY:  Biff is a lazy bum!
LINDA:  They're sleeping.  Get something to eat.  Go on down.
WILLY:  Why did he come home?  I would like to know what brought him home.
LINDA:  I don't know.  I think he's still lost, Willy.  I think he's very lost.
WILLY:  Biff Loman is lost.  In the greatest country in the world a young man with such--personal attractiveness, gets lost.  And such a hard worker.  There's one thing about Biff--he's not lazy.
LINDA:  Never.

Isn't that beautiful, how Willy gets himself so worked up while Linda is both trying to mollify him and protect her boys?  Her concern isn't in what he's saying, but in the effect of the words on the boys.  Instead of disagreeing (or agreeing) with "Biff is a lazy bum!" she says, "They're sleeping.  Get something to eat.  Go on down."  That's so human!  And then Willy soars into his dreams for Biff that are attached to his beliefs about how you succeed, followed by, of course, the very, very cool, and also devastatingly human contradiction in Willy's last line and Linda's agreement.

How can that not affect my writing?  I'd have to be dead from the neck up not to at least think about it a bit every single time I teach it.  So, one of the effects teaching has on my writing is that I get to study masters all the time.  I also think it's an advantage to be reading outside of science fiction and fantasy.  I do plenty of reading in the genre on my own.  For my day job, I get to go to the giants I don't ordinarily read.

Maybe the strongest effect on my writing, though, is that by teaching I'm surrounded by the human condition.  If I ever feel removed from characters' deeply personal and unique attachment to their lives, I only have to look at my students.  I love their quirkiness, their drives, their mannerisms, their passions.  Watching them makes me want to write about people and to try to do it well.  One of the easiest pitfalls in writing is to forget that real life is so much more complicated and interesting than literature.  I'll never be able to duplicate the messy coolness about being alive, but I can always stay aware that people are messy and cool.

If I could capture with any accuracy at all just ten minutes of any high school student's life, I would call myself a great writer.  The effect of teaching on my writing is that I'm always paying attention to people.  I want to know what's going on inside their heads.  I want to sympathize with their world views.  I don't want to lie on the page by cheapening what it means to be conscious and moving about in life, so I pay attention.

How's that for a rough draft of an answer?