In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
My family is now back home after a week of Christmas Holiday in San Antonio, lots of Mexican food including the traditional Tamales on Christmas Eve, and much time spent with my wife’s siblings and their families. As the sports world reminds us, tis the season both for painful separations and for possible rejuvenation in new relationships. I’ve not watched nearly as much sports this year (Olympics included) as I’ve done in the past, possibly because two out of the three teams I root for (Yankees, football Giants, Illini basketball) haven’t been very good or maybe my attention is simply focused elsewhere. Last night I did watch the Illini beat Purdue, a frustrating game to watch due the ineptitude in play, but there were some bursts reminiscent of the glory days and that proved sufficient for us to prevail. One of the bright spots was the shooting of Alex Legion, a highly touted transfer from Kentucky, an example of how breaking off an old relationship and starting anew can be good for the person, even if that comes with some loss in prestige and if in the transition it seemingly implies a lack of personal commitment. I’ll return to following the Illini this season. The potential for them to be a good team is there.
During the vacation I got to thinking about separation and predicting whether it would happen from reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. The first chapter discusses predicting divorce by watching short clips of couples arguing through contentious issues and using that viewing as a decisive information source for predicting viability of the relationship. Gladwell focuses on the work of John Gottman and that he has the ability to “thin slice” these videos and make accurate predictions based on this sort of watching, because he knows what to look for. The critical variable is contempt. If at least one of the partners demonstrates facially contempt for the spouse, rolling the eyes is a dead give away even if it is on screen for only a second or two, then the relationship has serious problems. Contempt implies rigidity in held positions, a lack of willingness to negotiate issues through to an acceptable conclusion, a lack of trust in the partner. Gladwell is quite convincing on this finding. This chapter serves as a great introduction to the power of thin slicing and to what we learn by reading faces.
Owing to the nature of the book, Gladwell doesn’t ask from where the contempt arises. Was it there before the marriage? That would be hard to understand. Why would someone enter into a voluntary relationship with feelings of contempt for the potential spouse? If it was there does it arise because of a temporary blindness due to infatuation? Or does the contempt emerge after the honeymoon is over, triggered by observing some behaviors in the spouse that are viewed as unattractive, perhaps even reprehensible, in which case the contempt results from overwriting the earlier feelings of infatuation, replacing them with a darker, more sinister view? And might that be all too common because of one’s own lack of maturity in knowing how to forgive and to forget as well as how to negotiate through on a contentious matter without that escalating into hostilities or in producing an unsatisfactory outcome, one that can’t possibly succeed? I don’t know, but I’ve got a guess on this score.
Many people get married too early, in their late teens or early twenties, with kids coming soon afterwards. These marriages inevitably are cast in the Ozzie and Harriet stereotype, with the man as the bread winner and autocrat and the woman as homemaker, quite possibly repressing her desires for a career as a working professional. The asymmetry in roles encourages lack of communication on more serious matters, quite possibly blocking personal growth, particularly for the woman. It is much harder to start a career after many years, waiting for kids to be old enough to fend for themselves, in the meantime losing out on that period right after college when others cut their teeth in the job market and start working their way up the job ladder.
My guess is that deep down most of us don’t know what it is we want. We only learn what we want from experience. Early infatuation that leads to marriage masks this ignorance. The subsequent marriage can block the learning. The seeds for contempt of spouse are there in this structure. Particular episodes might trigger the feelings of contempt, but really they are symptoms, not root causes. If this is right, early marriages where the kids are deferred have a better chance of success, but even here there may be an asymmetry that creates stress on the marriage if the wife works while the husband goes to Professional School and if she doesn’t herself go to Professional School thereafter or find a meaningful career based on her earlier participation in the labor force. Marriages that don’t occur till both partners have established careers have the best chance of all because the partners know much more about themselves.
* * * * *
I got married when in my mid thirties. It’s not like I planned it that way. There was a lot of social awkwardness beforehand, perhaps because I was overweight in High School and College, losing about 60 pounds in the summer before graduate school with my intent to get back in the game, but then not knowing how to overcome my naiveté. The awkwardness was painful. Oftentimes when we struggle we don’t appreciate it as preparation for something else. Only in retrospect did I realize it gave me a chance to learn about myself, what I could tolerate and what I really wanted. When I met my wife while on sabbatical at the University of British Columbia I was ready emotionally, secure in my career and with an established adult sense of values. My wife was similarly situated. It was a joyous time of life for both of us. The year leading up to the wedding and the first year of marriage was like an extended honeymoon, full of laughter, romance, and many things new.
Of course, there are also disadvantages to getting married at a later age. We get more settled in our ways, sometimes developing unattractive habits that are hard to break. The biological clock keeps ticking. I wanted to keep that honeymoon phase going, but my wife and I both wanted to have kids and there would be risks if we delayed. As it was, when we took Lamaze class about another year later we felt we could be the parents of some of the others taking the class. That and the sonograms and the change in my wife’s diet marked a new focus for us. For my part, I put aside The Joy of Sex and started in on Dr. Spock.
We had a wonderful pediatrician, Dr. Jane Striegel. After a fashion, we called her Dr. Giggle, since we went to Carle Clinic so often in those days and didn’t want it to seem like a burden for the kids. She really helped us through the anxious times of being new parents. We didn’t know much on that score beforehand and didn’t have extended family living nearby to help us. So we fixated on issues including some that ultimately proved to be benign.
On our first trip down to Boca Raton where my folks lived to show them our son Nathan, my wife Leslie (she’s Methodist) learned some Yiddish (she already knew she was a shikseh, but that was about the extent of her language training). First my mom, then some of the neighbors, and then even strangers who we saw at the shopping center would look at the baby’s legs, give a little pinch, and say “pulkes” (pronounced pull-keys and meaning chicken thigh, intended in a humorous fashion). He seemed to be always hungry (a trait from my side of the family) and too big. Every time we went to see Dr. Striegel, her nurse would measure height and weight and make recordings of that. We sometimes looked at the plot of the results, which were outside the 95th percentile curve in each category. This fed our anxiety. Dr. Striegel didn’t worry about that. She cared more about the trajectory than the level and she showed us that the trajectory of the plots tracked the 95th percentile curve almost perfectly. She was right. Though he was a large kid his growth slowed earlier than most other kids and eventually he learned to eat moderately and slimmed down as a consequence. This was a big lesson for me. Focus on growth, not on snapshot views.
Dr. Streigel taught us many things, all in an extremely warm and down to earth way. One of those was about the baby’s cognitive development. She encouraged us to make a smiley face, hand drawn with crayon and done in primary colors, to show the baby for both stimulation and comfort. Leslie drew this on cardboard, cut it out and mounted it on a wooden stick, which we could use to wave the face in front of the baby. We called the product Mr. Face. Placing Nathan on his back on a blanket on the floor, one of us would kneel next to him and wave Mr. Face slowly about 8 to 12 inches from Nathan’s face. We’d watch his eyes follow the image intently. Soon afterwards, I put this to a very simple song of my own creation.
Mr. Face,
Mr. Face,
Mr. Face, Face, Face.
ooooooooOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOoooooooo.
Then it repeats. Waving Mr. Face while singing the song was surprisingly compelling, for parent as well as child. Mr. Face went everywhere that Nathan went. We depended on him a great deal. It was another big lesson. Our job was not just to attend to the baby’s immediate needs. We were to provide for his education. Mr. Face was the start of that.
Nathan went to daycare and we soon learned to hire the teachers there as baby sitters. One of them, named Wei Wei, was constantly teaching Nathan as she cared for him, how to climb the stairs, other things he could do to fend for himself, there were so many practical lessons. All of it was an education for Nathan – another lesson for me. We were very sad when Wei Wei moved away.
* * * * *
This story is about a search for origins. I want to understand the source of my own motivations for learning and for writing, to discover the primitives that drive me. It stands to reason that these will be found by looking at early childhood, where much of personality is formed. But the memories of my own childhood are scant, the cupboard is bare with not enough for even the dog to pick at. A man in search of his own origins will try to find them in his children, letting them relive the youth he has lost and forgotten. That is my guess.
When Nathan was nearly four and his younger brother Ben had already turned two, I happened onto a fork in the road choice about my career – remain a full fledged academic economist or start anew as an administrator in learning technology. I opted for the latter in a series of small steps, each till the last looking like it was a reversible decision, the whole process seemingly a happy accident. I had neither background in learning technology nor as an administrator. What I did have was my original motivation for embracing learning technology in my own teaching – I knew my Intermediate Microeconomics course wasn’t working for most of the students, though there were a handful who really liked it, and I wanted to know if the problem was me or them – and I had not quite a year of experience with learning technology trying to make improvements with the concomitant benefits from learning by doing from that process.
That hardly seemed enough. I did a variety of things to try to give myself firmer footing. One of those early on, I had taken books out of my parents house in Bayside before they sold that to move to Florida full time. Some of those were from when my dad went to college at NYU, 1933-36. He had a paperback copy of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, the paper yellowed from age, when turning a page the leaf would sever from the binding, an odd experience to be sure. I only bought a new copy of the book afterwards, in case I wanted to reread it. At the time of reading the decision was tentative and I hoped reversible, so I was loathe to make a greater commitment. I remember very little of the detail but I do recall a general sense from the book. There were passages of pure insight about learning, ideas that would light a fire in anyone who cared about those issues, but interspersed with some rather dull philosophical stuff that were a labor to slug through.
From there much of what I read about learning came from the suggestions of others. Over time I read Donald Schon, Jerome Bruner, Jones and Spiro, and much more that I found resonated with me. I also learned some important bits from my own practice. One was that many faculty, irrespective of their discipline, were quite willing to discuss their teaching issues with me and that I enjoyed participating in those conversations. Another was that many people were willing to regard me as an expert in the field, in spite of my lack of preparation. I took advantage of both of these in my interactions.
Yet implicitly I understood another need I had that in retrospect seems obvious but at the time I could only feel my way to it. I had to learn about my own learning, an inward looking journey that didn’t rely on what I garnered from my readings, an examination of self that would address whether I’m essentially the same as my students in learning or fundamentally different. Was what I was learning from other sources for me too, or only for my students? Could I teach them by feeding my own needs?
So though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, those happy days with the kids, reading to them while they were sitting on my lap or going to bed, watching movies or cartoon shows as a family activity, watching them watch and emote, provided a pathway into myself.
I did have fond memories of A. A. Milne and Dr. Suess and easily developed a love for Sandra Boynton (a hog and a frog cavort in the bog), Goodnight Moon, Thomas the Tank Engine, and many others. Reading with the kids was physical in a way that it isn’t as an adult. Of course, reading and snuggling go hand in hand. Young kids spend a lot of time in their pajamas, the type that are skin tight and with the feet sewn in. But reading is also about guessing games with pointing. The books have pictures. The kid points to a place in the picture. The parent nods assent. Reading is a back and forth show and tell. The kid wants to show he understands. He is giving a command performance; yet one that he fully enjoys because it is wrapped up in play, affection, and family. Our kids had two themes that started from the reading, trains and dinosaurs, but that soon extended to the outer world with the show and tell part of it all. I believe it is this early joy from show and tell that is the source of the look at me, look at me, look at me many of us feel as adults.
The movies we watched offered a different way for the kids to learn since the stories were much more intricate. Disney is extremely shrewd in making its featured animated films so they appeal to adults on their own level, while entertaining the kids too. Vegging out after returning from San Antonio I spotted Mulan on the Disney Channel and started to watch it, my wife joining me in the viewing after a few minutes. The appeal is still there, not least because the villain Shan Yu is drawn in a way to resemble Stacy Keach, but also because of well done production numbers and mature story line, though the kids are now too adult now to watch this sort of thing. The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Balto all have this same sort of appeal. When the kids were small we watched those and other Disney films, Toy Story and later films from Pixar, and the first four or five of the Land Before Time series.
At first I didn’t anticipate that the kids would want to know these stories by heart, but they did. So we watched them over and over again, rotating through our expanding collection of full length cartoon movies. Once the kids knew the story well enough, they play acted while they watched the movie, inserting themselves into the story, making motions while looking at the screen. (They did this individually, not as a team.) There was no script for the kids to follow. They made it up as they went along, a type of make believe prompted by the movie. As the story became part of them, they became part of the story. This is something I didn’t know about how kids learn. It was fascinating to watch all the more so because they did this without any prompting from me or my wife. It was natural for them.
I’ve got less of a sense of how much other make believe the kids did early on, because I wasn’t there to watch them most of the time. But from the movie viewing I’ve come to understand that good stories begat make believe, which in turn morphs the story ad infinitum.
Although I recall those times with much fondness, there were some dark clouds. The Pokemon craze, which started around that time, bothered me. The TV show, my kids first taste of anime, was ok if that was all there was to it. The first full length feature movie was horrible because they made the story for kids only, but I really can’t fault them for that. It was the tag line – got to catch them all – that got to me. The tag line started to seem like part of a Ponzi scheme when the neighbor kids, who were a year or two older than ours, talked about their trading cards. My kids got wrapped up in that for a while, but fortunately there was no carry over from that to their subsequent interests.
A few years later, Ben got very into SpongeBob, an improbable story line and setting where I confess that I didn’t see the appeal. (Time Magazine named it one of the top 100 TV shows of all time; shows what I know.) It was an early example of the child leading the family in its pursuit of entertainment and culture. Sometimes there is learning simply from embracing the popular.
* * * * *
As a teenager in Bayside there were various chores to do around the house. I could take or leave yard work – raking the leaves and mowing the lawn, didn’t like the work I had to do for earning an allowance – taking out the trash and watering the plants, but ultimately learned to like washing the dishes, a job I fell into because my High School was on split session and in 10th grade I was home in the mornings and had free time to do the dinner dishes from the night before. By that time my sister was away at College, my mom worked as a High School teacher herself and she also did language tutoring at home in the late afternoon and into the evening, my dad commuted to Manhattan for work, so this task fell on me as the next oldest among the kids.
We had a dishwasher but only used it to rinse the fancy plates and silverware when we had company. The regular dishes were hand washed. There was only one sink, not the two side by side that you find in a modern kitchen today. So it was a bit of a trick to first wash and then rinse each dish before placing in the rack to air dry. One of the reasons I liked doing the dishes is that I came up with my own algorithm on how to manage the chore: first the glasses, then the plates, then the bowls and cups, then the silverware, and finally the pots and pans. We were a little primitive as a household in all of this. I don’t think I learned about dish soap for another year or two, so originally I did this with a bar of ivory, leaving a soap film even after the rinsing. It was kind of like the story about folks growing up poor. Nobody said anything about it so I didn’t trouble myself on that account.
The real reason I liked doing the dishes was because I could daydream while doing the work. Other chores demanded paying closer attention. Our dishes were inexpensive and pretty much unbreakable. I did have to scrub them well, but otherwise my mind could be elsewhere; and it was. I used the time to explore all sorts of fantasies and play through ideas, just for my own enjoyment. Most of those are long forgotten but a couple I still recall.
The next to last year I attended Camp Oxford, I believe it was summer of 1967, I got put into the Senior group, Bunk 18. (The groups were Frosh, Cubs, Sophomores, Middies, Juniors, Seniors, and Super Seniors. After that you became a waiter, then a counselor.) I started in Bunk 3 as a Cub, then another year as a Cub in Bunk 5, then Bunk 9 as a Soph, Bunk 13 as a Middie, but then I skipped the Juniors entirely by getting put into Bunk 18. After several years of being one of the older kids in my group (Bunk 5 was oldest in the Cubs, Bunk 9 was oldest in the Sophs, and Bunk 13 was oldest in the Middies) I was now in the youngest bunk back with older kids whom I hadn’t been with since I was a Cub in Bunk 3. We played a lot of basketball then and it was competitive. I played with the better kids, not because I was particularly skilled, but because I was the biggest. During rest hour one of the counselors coached me one-on-one, trying to get me to learn a hook shot and make a pivot in the post. When we played inter-camp games, I was the starting center. And in our normal competition during the summer where we were divided up into three permanent teams within our group for all team sports (softball, volleyball, flag football were the main others) I was the second leading scorer on my team and surely the leading rebounder, catching my own misses from right under the basket. For whatever reason, that experience stuck with me and while washing the dishes and maybe also when going to bed I fantasized about a 10-team basketball league with kids that age, populated by the better athletes in the Senior group and other kids of approximately the same skill level, all of us becoming good players in the process. The next year at camp many of those other kids had gone on to become Super Seniors while I remained a Senior so the experience was one and done, but the fantasy about the basketball league stuck with me for quite a while thereafter.
I got a completely different idea perhaps from growing up so close to the Long Island Expressway, we lived on 56th Avenue two blocks north of the LIE, and maybe from seeing futuristic stuff at the World’s Fair, which was near where Shea Stadium was sited, Willets Point Boulevard on the IRT #7 line. I envisioned a series of moveable sidewalks to replace all car traffic. Each sidewalk would move at a different speed, the outer ones quite slow, the inner ones much faster, and the relative speed of two adjacent sidewalks would be such that you could cross over from one to the other without feeling it dangerous. The innermost sidewalks would be moving at 40 or 50 miles per hour so you could get around town in a hurry by riding them – traffic wouldn’t delay you like it would on the LIE. And because it would all be electric powered, there would be no pollution from burning gasoline. A perfect “what if” that never saw the light of day.
Washing dishes I could think about stuff like that, spending a lot of time for my own personal enjoyment on these mental sojourns. I don’t know what got me into the habit of doing that nor do I know whether other kids I knew did likewise. I didn’t talk about these fantasies with my friends. But these other kids had to do chores too, maybe even wash the dishes. What did they think about while doing their work?
* * * * *
The argument I want to advance about writing, here I’m talking about the adult sort of writing that we’d like our College students to be able to accomplish, is that for it to seem natural and part of our daily existence we need to think of it as the culmination of many behaviors learned earlier in life including some that one would not consider as writing at all but that were natural in their own setting. Unfortunately, many students who are taught writing believe it to be a thing unto itself, hence something alien from their own experiences, a rare activity to engage in only when forced to do so, something painful and not at all elevating, done because school requires it rather than because they feel a need to give voice to their own ideas.
I suppose at this point I need to pay homage to Donald Murray, the father of the concept of writing as process. I will borrow from him liberally in what I have to say. But I have some reservations that I need to get out beforehand. First, and though I have some very dear friends who teach writing and I value their friendship especially because they seem so generous in spirit, much more so than economists where the modifier “grouchy” is almost surely an understatement, I’m quite unclear on whether there should be courses aimed at teaching writing. Writing is always about something and if there is a course dealing with that something shouldn’t that be where the writing happens? The ideas that emerge from the writing do require critique. Who should provide that? Also, writing and semesters don’t mix, in my view. (Maybe learning and semesters don’t mix either, but for now I’ll content myself to zero-in on writing.) Writing takes as long as it takes. If the semester concludes but the writing process is still in mid stream, what then? I’m afraid students get the wrong idea this way. For them to be passionate about their own ideas, those ideas must be pushed to some meaningful conclusion; there is reward in that.
Second, when we are discussing that something and asking students to write about it we have to squarely confront the dilemma that they are novices on the subject, reading the writings of experts, so it is fair to ask what possible contribution can they make and is the writing assignment well conceived to elicit those contributions? The students are well aware of the dilemma and it can paralyze them in the writing, inviting a going-through-the-motions approach, plagiarism too. Without the student seeing the personal value add, the assignment is ill conceived. How does one convince students that they can contribute especially when, according to Murray, the focus is away from product? And if they feel they can’t make a contribution are they entitled to opt out of the work?
While this one looks like we’re painted into a corner, there is an obvious way out. If young kids can through their make believe change the story by becoming part of the story, why can’t older kids do likewise? If that’s the right response, the trick then is getting the students to see that is their role. It’s some trick.
Third, what do we know about the students daydreaming or about the students engaging in intellectual conversation that is an end in itself and happens entirely outside the context of the writing class? Do we know whether it happens, where it happens, when and how? If it is not happening are the students really ready for writing? Should there be pre-requisites, a course on daydreaming, another on witty and engaging conversation? Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? My great fear is that our culture where students, particularly students from good middle class homes, are either so heavily scheduled or always connected with friends or family that they have neither time nor inclination to scratch their heads about off the wall ideas. I don’t know how seriously to take this essay by P.J. O’Rourke, he may very well have become too jaded in his evaluation of all things Disney, after all their aim is to appeal to the mass market and maybe because we can learn so many wonderful things online its harder for a place to embody novelty in an essential way, but if he’s right we seem to be turning into a society of dullards. All work and no play is not the formula for Jack to succeed in writing class.
With those caveats, let’s go back to Murray. He breaks the writing up into three stages, prewriting where the bulk of the effort happens, composition which he is very matter of fact about, and rewriting or editing if you will. Keeping each of those stages distinct in conception seems useful to me, though Murray came up with schema before word processors and personal computers. It may be that nowadays there is a cycling through of these stages repeatedly, just to produce the first draft. My belief is that there is guessing at each stage, though the type of guessing changes from one stage to the next.
Prewriting is very much like make believe. It starts with some spark of an idea and then it gets pushed around in all sorts of ways, finding a story line, getting additional ideas to tie in, hearing from the voice in your head about how some of it sounds, building a crescendo of enthusiasm for the subject. For me this is not much different from what I did as a teen while washing dishes. Nobody taught me to pre write. Much of it, I believe, is not teachable. I very much embrace the old Nike logo – just do it. Absolutely correct. Over time I’ve learned how much of this I need to do before sitting down to compose. That’s something you can’t know ahead of time. You have to experience it. Sometimes I can just sit down and compose with the whole thing flowing nicely as if the words and the structure seep out in a continual ooze. That’s fun when it happens, but I’ve come to realize that really I’ve thought about the ideas before, just not right before the composing. It’s more of a struggle to get the sentences out when the prewriting is incomplete.
As I’ve become more ambitious in the type of writing I want to produce, the prewriting phase has gotten longer. It requires patience. Even with the make believe there is a mental testing – does the story hold water? Would anyone care about it one way or the other? (This second one will make you neurotic. How can you know that? Perhaps the best you can do is ask whether you care about it.) Sometimes there is floundering when early tests are not passed or when the day job requires too much attention to allow the make believe to play out. Unless writing is “what we do” that’s bound to happen. The offset, more than sufficient I believe, is to feed our native curiosity and desire to gain some understanding of that idea that sparked it all. Curiosity is the great enabler. Satisfying our curiosity is fun. Prewriting is learning we can do that without becoming smug, even when mom and dad aren’t there to answer all our questions. We can answer them ourselves, build a story to make sense about what we find, revise when we learn something surprising.
I don’t write much down when I do prewriting, perhaps book marking some references, but otherwise most of the work is in my head. I make a sketch of the story rather than an outline – sketches have sentences and perhaps substantial narrative, outlines have bullets and a hierarchy that may make for a logical structure but seems alien to a story. The process is very much like having a conversation with yourself. One real reason I write now is because I don’t have a sufficient number of friends to engage in discussion over issues I care about. Prewriting is the viable alternative.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m prone to stew on an idea if I get a little bit stuck or if what I’ve got doesn’t seem up to my personal standard. This is deadly because all else stops while I’m stewing. Sometimes I write just to get a sort of closure. Perhaps graduate students at the dissertation stage (or writers of a book like this one) need to learn to get bits out regularly so they don’t stay in one place. Writing requires a sense of motion. Progress contributes to the enthusiasm. I’ve not seen this issue with undergraduate writing, where inadequate prewriting is almost certainly the main culprit for the mediocrity of the results they produce.
Composing a sentence on the computer screen is different from making it up in your head. With the latter, if it seems ok you keep going to the next sentence and then the one after that. Once it’s on the screen, however, you reread, first a sentence at a time, then a paragraph at a time. I do that by ear and judge how it sounds. If it doesn’t sound right I rewrite immediately. I also ask whether I believe what I’m saying. I need to be a fan of my own writing. If I can’t root for it, why should anyone else? Like any true fan, I want to know that I’ve touched all the bases. Often in asking that I discover that something seemingly entirely outside the discussion at hand all of a sudden appears relevant. I don’t know if this happens with every writer. It happens quite a bit with me. Murray seems to suggest it is universal with his emphasis on discovery. (How does he know that?) Writing is about discovery. When do you discover something? When you ask are you there yet only to find out that you’re not. But there’s more to it than that. We do many different things in parallel, read from a variety of sources, watch video on TV and online and we try to make sense of that. If we’re writing it’s natural to bring in the parallel ideas, just to see whether they do fit. The discoveries are sometimes forced from without. Finding those sort of connections is surprising and extremely satisfying.
Its time to talk about ego. In the prewriting and composition you’re making something up so ego cooperates and stays out of the way. Thank you ego for doing that. But now ego is back from vacation and is pretty defensive about it all. You’re going to start dicking around with this creation of yours. How can you improve on perfection? Why not just let it be?
This is a challenge every time. I know of no silver bullet to handle it all, but I can offer a few tips and tricks. I start with the mechanical corrections first, typos and punctuation. It’s not that the mechanical stuff is important. Maybe I start with it because it's not important. I’m not ready to pick a fight with Mr. Ego just yet. Those red squiggly lines that word processors produce help on the typo front, though sometimes you want to leave the word as is and to hell with the word processor. Because so much of my writing is by ear, I have trouble with homophones, which can survive several proof readings. I’m aware of the problem. So if I’m a good boy (often I’m not) I put the writing away for a while and go back to it fresh after a fashion. That helps.
Punctuation is harder. Writing by ear makes you conscious of the pregnant pause. Somewhere you read that dramatic effect in writing is a way to draw the reader in. The problem, though, is that on rereading some of those pauses seem stillborn. I have a love/hate relationship with punctuation and with commas, in particular, I’m a little schizo. My process is like doing the Hokey Pokey.
You put the commas in,
You take the commas out.
You put the commas back in,
And you shake them all about.
There is humor in self-correction. That’s a good thing. Being defensive is not fun. After a round of going through the mechanical stuff you’re ready to turn to more serious matters. And the axiom to bring to bear is, “know your weaknesses.” So there, Mr. Ego. It’s not all sugar and light. There are weaknesses to confront. Get off your high horse.
You may be able to produce a long list of weaknesses. I know I can. Best to stick with just what’s at the top of the list, item one only, maybe item two. Go further than that and you’ll be beaten down too much.
My problem is pontification. I like to give voice to my opinions. Sometimes I do that without caring how it comes out. I need to remind myself of the Aesop Fable about the North Wind and the Sun, delicato. When my writing fails often it’s because it comes off too much like a lecture. It’s not that the points are wrong in a fundamental way, but couldn’t I make them differently so that amorphous reader we all direct our attention to cares about what I’m saying? Then sometimes, not too often but once in a while, the points are wrong too because I can express a strong opinion even when I’ve got no clue to what I’m talking about. That might seem frightening, but really if you guess at things it will happen. The problem is not the guessing. It’s on short circuiting the verification process. The real villain is sloth. Hang the devil. If only I could. I suppose it’s lucky I can’t so I can return to write anew.
Murray talks about the student producing draft after draft. When should the writer stop and claim victory? That’s the $64,000 question. When there aren’t external deadlines imposed that dictate the answer the solution is really an economic one. The goal is to maximize the value of the portfolio of writing, not just this one piece. Perfectionism needs to be addressed because it means the writer is solving the wrong problem. To guard against that I keep in mind an expression my friend Larry taught me, “good enough for government work” and another expression from a different Larry (The Cable Guy) “Git-r-done.”
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Much writing that is done for school is via the term paper. I’ve come to conclude that the form is flawed. Do students read term papers of other students, find the ones they like, and then try to imitate the form in their own creations? I’m not talking about plagiarizing here. I’m talking about developing a personal style by first imitating the style of other writers we like to read. I don’t know anyone who reads term papers for entertainment or personal edification. Why do we instructors assign a writing form that students can’t possibly appreciate first as readers? That seems pretty dumb to me.
The issue of reading for writing is an important one. It is impossible to be a good writer without reading broadly. The kid who is doing a good bit of reading will pick and choose those things he likes to read and those writers he admires. That’s a good place to start in finding a model for his own writing. It may be, however, that the kid is reading mostly books. Starting off writing a book is too daunting. So some of the reading should be short stories or essays. Substantial magazine reading or short story reading is essential for the fledgling writer.
Nowadays there is much reading and writing done online. As a regular blogger for the past few years, I’m all for that. But I’d urge caution about using other people’s blog posts as the model for the new writer. Blogging is early writing published without review. Reading early writing is fine but it’s good also to read more mature writing that has been polished, to get a sense of how the latter differs from the former and to develop taste as a reader whether there is a preferred form, perhaps to come to self-understanding as to why that preference exists.
Once a young writer has found another writer to emulate and starts producing pieces there is a type of guessing going on. We might call it improvisation or variations on a theme. At first there is bound to be some awkwardness and discomfort with deciding how much of the master must show up in the new work. After a while the new writer will have found a comfort level and understand how much of his own persona should come through in the work.
Because we continually want to learn, once that comfort level has been attained the young writer will look for new models to emulate and may watch other writers talk about how they go about their writing. The great playwright, Harold Pinter, in his last appearance on the Charlie Rose show, talked about writing a play based on an image he had formed. Heeding Pinter’s advice, the young writer might search for an appropriate image and then base a piece on that.
A few years back when I was developing my blogging style, I was heavily influenced by watching The West Wing, with its fast dialog, deliberately leaving out pieces in the story so the viewer could puzzle about it, and with multiple-threads, stories within the story so to speak. I tried to emulate some of that (not the fast dialog but the multiple threads) in my writing. I became conscientious of “weaving” but since I know next to nothing about that that, I had a simpler picture in mind at first. In grade school we did needle and yarn in a mesh, one color for the columns, a different color the rows, producing a checkerboard look. As we moved up in grade the mesh got a little finer but the basic approach remained the same.
I like this analogy because of problems I see with young writers, even very bright students. Their writing tends to be very flat. One thing follows another but there is no tie between them. The sequencing of ideas in their writing creates a sense that they are making a list, not telling a story. They need to self-critique their own approach. The image of the mesh with the horizontal and vertical threads is a good place to start.
My current image is the double helix. It differs from the mesh in that we come round again but this time we’re not at the same place as we were before. Having two strands and circling back with each is what I aim for. There is guessing about what those strands should be and how they relate. There is a different sort of guessing in figuring out where to return. It’s what keeps the writing fun and challenging.
Since most of us write at a computer our writing and reading have been heavily influenced by Google. There may be some preliminary research that was done in prewriting, but during composition there is more research, which happens every time a thought pops into the writer’s head – maybe this idea from the outside is relevant here. Who has written about that idea and what’s been said about it? Expeditious as ever, the writer does a Google search or two on the idea. Things turn up that seem promising. So the writing pauses and the reading begins. This reading is done online because the writing pause is only temporary. Or is it? There is a fear that the writing is only an Emily Litella thing. Beyond that what we read may be so fascinating that we get wrapped up in it and forget about the writing. If the writing reasserts itself the writer needs to address the issue of how the reading fits in. The Internet, therefore, is responsible for taking Murray’s structured three stage process and jumbling it all up. That’s ok. His essential point about process remains.
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Let me close this chapter with a challenge. Like marriage, I came to be interested in writing as a thing in itself later in life. It was only a means to an end before that. I was ready for writing by the time I found it. Can students learn all this about writing when they are much younger? That’s the question that needs to be answered.
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