Thoughts on writing

February 9, 2011

Thoughts about writing

I wrote a letter to my 8th grade daughter's principal this week.  The essence of the letter was a request that he encourage the teachers to give more challenging assignments, the kinds of tests and quizzes that students actually have to study to pass, and especially, lots of essay writing assignments. 

I have not seen one essay assignment this year-- not even from her English class.  They do it all in school, I am told.

I don't believe in that.

Having taught high school English for five years, third grade for two years, Freshman English and remedial English at the university for two years, and one semester of teaching a journalism lab, I feel qualified to say a few things about the importance of writing and teaching kids to write adequately.

My daughter has said that she wants to become a writer someday.  Well, this will be difficult if she is not exposed to many difficult writing assignments-- and not all self-imposed-- over many years.

So I wrote the letter.  I also attended her parent-teacher conference (last night) and politely let her English teacher know that on my wish list was a wish for more writing assignments outside of class.  She responded that she doesn't want to punish the students who are doing their classwork so well with extra work.  I smiled and nodded and decided that I need to return to teaching once Baby H. has grown up  and started kindergarten.

As for me, I can write essays and articles all day long.  But what I really want to write someday is great, classic literature-- fiction. 

Charles Dickens

I can't do it, because I am too scared.  I am overeducated, too:  I can recognize great stuff and the not so great stuff, and it makes me shudder to think of being guilty of producing the not so great.  That's my paralysis.  Like that guy in the movie "Amadeus" who was Mozart's friend.

I tremble at the feet of the writers I see as great-- Charles Dickens, for example-- whose witty characterizations, poetic descriptions and intriguing plots I'd never be able to match. 

But my inferiority complex about fiction writing used to be much worse.  I used to assume that any published fiction writer was a good one, better than me.  I used to think that if a short story or a poem made it into an anthology, it was worthy, and if not, not.  Ha!  Now I am judgmental, (although also a better judge) and I'm finicky and overcritical and hard to please and much less easily impressed.  Yet, still, I want to learn how the truly great fiction writing is done, and do it myself.  I'm afraid to try.

I just borrowed a short story anthology from the library yesterday and read two stories that I hadn't read before.  One was about an insane man who hated his cats and murdered his wife, by Poe.  The other was called "Elk" and I don’t know who wrote it.  Both were well written, but neither was good.

They were in the anthology because of Ray Bradbury --and, by the way, I have not only met him and have had him autograph my book (in my college Freshman days), but I also kissed him on his large, pink, writerly cheek, and heard him speak on three separate occasions in two different states.  Ray Bradbury liked and chose the stories.  So I'm going to keep reading them.  And if there are too many more that I don't like, I am returning the book to the library with a happy sigh that I didn't purchase it with my husband's hard-earned salary. 

Part of the reason that  I borrow books like this is that I am still attempting to train my mind to know what great writing is, so that I can write wonderful stories myself. 

I am forty-one, and have yet to publish anything other than blogs which nobody reads, a bundle of newspaper articles, some concert reviews, a  400-page thesis on Literary Journalism, and a few vehement letters to the editor.  I'm no Dickens.  But I still have half of my life left.  (Or more.) And I don't think it's too late to start.

I do have stories that I'd like to tell --but only if I can do it very, very well-- up to my own high critical standard as an overeducated English teacher. 

"The greats" inspire me: short stories and books like Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," or Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations," or Leif Enger's "Peace Like a River," or Bryce Courtenay's "The Power of One," or John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," or even the sweet script of Nancy Oliver's "Lars and the Real Girl."

Willa Cather

A friend of mine is writing a book of short stories and has asked me to edit them for her.  I am happy to.  I know where the commas are missing.  I know which words require capitalization.  I can give advice about which parts are too slow-paced and which parts need clarifying additions.  But being able to edit is like being able to set a table and carve a roast that someone else has cooked.  What I really want to do is make up my own feast, my own recipes, from my own garden, grown with herbs and vegetables I've grown-- new inventions of hybrids, all to delight the table guests. 

What stops me is fear and the inability to juggle time.  Mostly fear.  Time comes when it's really wanted.  I have to put my flag in the sand and say, "This is what I'm writing.  It might not be perfect.  It might lack important qualities.  It might make someone mad.  I could be wrong.  But this is my best, wisest choice and I am going to have confidence in it."  This is what I want to say, and then just do it.  Okay, New Year's Resolution # 2:  Write a short story; post it here. 

Thursday, I read "Paul's Case," by Willa Cather.  I very much admired the first two pages.  The descriptions were vivid, the imagery rich, the story interesting-- "I've found another Great story", I thought.  But as the story continued, I found it to be mercilessly spiraling into suicide, which it did.  I was disappointed that it was a story without hope, because it started out so well.  I mean, I loved the beginning so much that I re-read it, just for the awe it inspired in me-- Cather can write!

I also read "The Black Cat," by Edgar Allen Poe, and hated it.  Although Poe is psychologically fascinating, and his descriptions are superb and his command of the language is great, I hated that story, as I hate most everything Poe writes.  It depicts ugliness of character, wickedness of soul.  Yuck.

Friday, I re-read "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" by Twain.  What was the purpose of the weird framing of the story?  It was really about the lead pellets weighing down the frog, the outsmarting of Mr. Smiley  --not about the people in the story's frame.  I liked the way Twain captured dialect-usage, but did not love the story.  I liked it, though.

Mark Twain

Friday, I also read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," by Joyce Oates.  Ditto the strengths and weaknesses of Cather's "Paul's Case" story, and Poe's cat murderer story; good description, good suspense, interesting characters, but depressing, hopeless ending.  Existentialism.  I keep thinking about that verse from the Book of Mormon:   "the natural man is an enemy to God…unless he/she yields to the enticings of the holy spirit…becometh a saint…willing to submit…to God."  (willing to submit to hope, to strength beyond your own, to the love and faith that surrounds us from both the seen and unseen worlds)

Why are so many famous, classic, literary stories such illustrations of the natural man/woman being a clueless, and wicked, enemy to God?  Maybe because of the apostasy and its attendant effects on society's understanding and consciousness collectively.  The best and brightest writers in such a state are only aware of the missing-ness of light.  They don't know how to describe that light, but only its absence.

If that is the case, then why aren't many LDS writers (except Shannon Hale and her "Book of A Thousand Days," which I loved) writing GREAT literature?  The stuff I've read has been lacking in plain old interest, for the most part.  They are so "I can take it or leave it" dull to me, lacking that imagery and poetry and realness that I love --the kind from Katherine Porter and Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Charles Dickens-- also lacking truly involving (Real, unique-as-a-snowflake) characters, poetic depictions, and suspenseful plots.  (Except Stephanie Meyer, whose plot was good but everything else was yuck.  --I only could get through half of one of the Twilight books, because even though the plot was suspenseful, there was no richness to the descriptions, no poetry, and so much twisted teenage low self-esteem that it made my eyes roll). I crave that literary stuff that should be wrapped around a tale like a cozy sleeping bag.

I admire any writer who actually writes rather than just analyzing writing so much, as I do.  Maybe I am still in the embryonic stage and once I get what it is I need to write, I will be able to write it.  Maybe LDS writers, too, are suffering the neglect of our own limited reaching toward truth and light, either in the gospel and the scriptures and our view of our lives in God's eyes, not learning what God's gospel truth really is,so that we can depict people in its light, more fully, or else in not studying the great ancestral writers enough to learn how to write richly and literarily.

I re-read "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" by Katherine Anne Porter last night.  Now, that's rich characterization, description, imagery, insight (like the first three stories) but it adds the glorious element of hope, and of humble, even noble, endurance --and character-pluck.  It took me all night long, mulling over these stories in my sleep, to discover why this story alone matched my expectations for good stories. 

Hope and  humble, ---maybe even noble--  endurance, and pluck.  These characteristics matter more to a literary story than even the dazzling qualities of descriptive perfection and suspense.  (although without the latter, you likely won't read it in the first place.)

This morning, DH said that he'd been computer programming in his sleep.  I said I'd been analyzing short stories in my sleep.  He said that during his scripture reading time today, he decided to write, and he started writing down stories from his life.  He felt like crying when he remembered many of his childhood stories, because of how vulnerable, hurt, and also foolish he was.  But he remembered moments of nobleness.  And he remembered some stories in a new light.  For example, the story about when a woman he knew used butter to try to oil a bicycle gear used to be a story that illustrated  cluelessness; now, DH sees that story as illustrating her sweetness and her determination to try to help with what resources she had.

This morning, I read "Open Boat" by Stephen Crane.  I had to jump to the end to make sure it wasn't another depressing, existential-death ending.  I read the last page, and then went back to the first and dared continue through.  Crane writes with wonderful, painterly descriptiveness about the qualities of the waves in the sea.  He also explores the faith/doubt of men in God, while they are in the face of great peril. 

  Stephen Crane

There's the image of a fist being shaken at the clouds, but there's also the image of the correspondent being tossed --by a miracle-- over the last section of the sea that was between him and the shore.  It seemed as if just the thought of God, wondering about him (or them:  the seven gods), even without a formal prayer, counted as prayer to Crane's unspoken faith.  Yet not all his characters escaped drowning. 

Well, I am typing one-handedly, pecking at the keyboard like a one-fingered wonder because the baby woke up.  And thar's another reason I'm an obscure blogger instead of a great novelist:  I like hanging out with people-- especially my own folk.