The Wonder Boys, now playing on Hulu.
It was a hot summer night, the temperature hovered at 100 degrees. My daughter quietly pushed a piece of paper onto my desk. It had been a long day of editing a manuscript, my eyes were tired, yet I understood the significance of her offering. This took courage. Every child of a writer knows writers are a persnickety lot. Our weapon of choice is a red pen. Experience, literature and a fondness for playing with words forms our reservoir. I've tossed books across the room after reading the first page when confronted with sloppy sentence structure (Anita Shreve is guilty of this). Inclusion of too many thats or I's are proof of a writer's inattention. Yet, this single page was an indication of trust. What my daughter presented was her three-hundred word analysis of James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
She, like many young students, have written plenty but stand on the precipice of beginning to understand craftsmanship. I suggested minor edits, being careful to suggest ways to make her writing more clear. Daughter turned it in. The teacher gave her a B-. His edits were fine, especially since he was grading 150 of these. I didn't make a big deal out of it, and encouraged her to read through his comments and remember them for next time.
But I was reminded me of the times I've gotten emails from soldiers telling me that they've always wanted to write, but hadn't done well in high school.
So, this is for every person who has always wanted to write, but was discouraged by a middle school or worse --a high school English teacher.
When I took university level creative writing courses through the Writers' Program at UCLA, the most annoying individuals were High School English teachers. They thought because they had 1. Read many books; and 2. Graded student's papers, they knew everything about writing. Incidentally, the second most annoying group were out-of-work screenwriters. The third, unhappy lawyers. The fourth, librarians.
Each week, we'd read one another's work. The more obnoxious high school english teachers would "tsk tsk" over grammatical errors, shake their heads whilst writing snarky things on the bottom of the page, and constantly engage in a game of one-upsmanship with the university professor.. It was, after all, the only way they knew how to behave given their day-to-day grind. But when it came time for the group to read their work, that's when their own vulnerability was served to them on a plate.
The truth is, they were no better or no worse than anyone else. What usually made their writing "not work" were the usual pitfalls every single one of us writers experience. They couldn't see the scene, tried to describe too much, didn't describe enough, their character was moving around in murky air. Many failed because they tried to emulate their favorite author. There were plenty of people who wanted to write like Isabel Allende, Barbara Kingsolver, John LeCarré, Hunter S. Thompson and even F. Scott Fitzgerald. But what they lacked was their own voice, the one that gives the reader a reason to want to read their work.
So I'm telling you to forget that B-. Push aside memories of marked up papers. Just because you got an F in high school English, forget about them. This is not to say high school teachers shouldn't be lauded for bringing teenagers up to par for the exit exam. In addition, many do have a rich and diverse reading list. Some are even passionate about literature. But, they are not where you are at this point in your life. What they thought about your writing then, doesn't matter now. Forget about them.
The hardest thing you will ever do is shake loose the scene swirling around in your head and putting it onto the page. You will write, and you will rewrite until it's just right. Most of the time, you'll be alone. There will be fear, uncertainty, boredom, humiliation, disgust, anger, happiness and elation. No writer escapes this combination of emotions.
If you can put aside what others think, you will learn to love playing with words. The writer who does this becomes passionate about reading broadly (all kinds of stuff). Craftsmanship isn't seen as a chore, but as a duty and even a very fun game. Finally, if you don't mind failing, then you will have succeeded. So get to it. Get that scene that's been running around in your head onto the page. Commit to it, get it down on the page. Along the way you will find your voice.
if you follow through, bake them, and send them off to a platoon in a lonely outpost. (As you can see, I've added Afghanistan to the title of this post).
Posts
