On writing adequately

[thedarkages]

It's getting near my 20th high school reunion, and the alumni mailing list is causing some old memories to come back to me. In my senior year, we took a class called College Literature, which was intended to prepare us for the rigors of university literature classes ahead of time. It was taught by a woman named Margaret Laster, who was simultaneously the greatest help and the greatest hindrance to my writing of anyone in my life. She believed in the shock and awe method of literary criticism. Laster told you exactly what she thought of your writing, and almost invariably, she thought that it was crap. Like Dorothy Parker, she had a lacerating wit that left people silent, until, after class, they realized what they should have said.

The truth is, though, that my writing was crap. The biggest influence on my writing up until that point had been Latin, so my sentences were Jamesian, full of carefully balanced clauses that were so evenhanded that they failed to express any but the most subtle opinions. I never used a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word where a ten-letter Latinate word would do. My writing was full of pretentious puffery. Mrs. Laster made an example of me to the class at its second meeting, when she pointed out two terrible phrases in my first composition:

deital forces    -> gods
arboreal foliage -> leaves

Yes, it was that bad. Like a flamethrower, Laster burned it all away and calcined it into dust. I went on to win prizes in college for writing, and, although I never attained an E.B.-White-like level of clarity, I gained an ability to vary my diction that helped me in many circumstances.

At the same time, Laster instilled in me a level of doubt about my own writing that has often left me unable to deliver the goods. To this day, I have never been able to revise my writing in drafts. It comes out one sentence at a time, and it doesn't go further until it has been corrected over and over again. Once I reach the end of a paragraph, I check the paragraph. It's a very slow method of composition, which really requires that my ideas be completely worked out in advance. Without that guiding insight to get me through a piece, I am stuck with a blank screen or piece of paper, and, even when I partially fill it, can easily lose the thread in my throes of self-checking. I don't write much, and I don't write often. There are certain kinds of assignments, like catalog copy, where I can let myself go a little, but when I care about my ideas and how they are received, I slow down to a crawl. Deadlines do not have much effect on this kind of stuckness; my ability to advance myself through writing has thus been very limited.

I cannot lay my personal failures at Laster's door. I don't think any sane English teacher could have left me where I was. But, when writing, I think of her before I think of any further potential audience, and I think, "Would she yell at me for this?"

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I never had that problem with her. She did come down hard on my writing, because she came down hard on everyone's writing, but she was impersonal about it, which made it easier for me to take. She told us at the beginning of the class, "Everone gets an A in my class. That's because I average the grades on all the papers, and everyone gets an A on every paper. The reason everyone gets an A on every paper is that I make you keep rewriting it until you *do* get an A."

Then we commenced to rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. But she didn't insult or humiliate anybody, to my knowledge, she just told us coolly and clearly what to do on the next draft.

[thedarkages]

I don't know what to think. You were a year or two after me. Laster's daughter, Meredith, was in College Lit in my year; perhaps she got feedback from her daughter which helped her teach in subsequent years.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I was one year after you, and yeah, that's possible. Or else maybe she was tougher on the class with her daughter in it, some parents do that.

It's also possible that the one incident with using you as a public example was an anomoly, and that with regard to comments on papers, I just had a particularly thick skin. My father was my primary editor during those years and he was utterly ruthless, so anything less would've looked positively tame.

[thedarkages]

Well, there's something to be said for ruthless editors, and I said it, but since then, I've had occasion to come across a different kind of editor. At Squaw Valley, a writer's conference where I went a couple of years ago, I was in a workshop led by the editor Joy Johannesen. She and the other students extensively critiqued the piece I had submitted, but she did it without outrage or cruelty. She was a real professional.

let the madman out

[2wanda.livejournal.com]

Ah, I have similar horror stories about math. I can't say that I have your problem with writing, however. I've never been a good enough writer to become an editor. It must be hard to be critiquing your own writing before you've barely even gotten a few sentences out.

I didn't learn to write well until I went back to school (not that I'm great at it now.) My favorite writing teacher at De Anza liked to quote a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Betty Sue Flowers, saying:

You are letting the Judge out before you even let the Madman out of the closet.

You have to let the Madman out. Tell the Judge to sit down and wait his turn.

[brooklynite.livejournal.com]

I've always been jealous of writers who carried around their very own Readers in their heads.

Not so much after reading this, tho.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's a place for both styles. I agree that the place for ruthlessness is not generally with high school kids, I was just an odd high school kid, so it didn't happen to bother me.