And I hated it beyond words.
Actually, most of my writing experiences in school left me with a bitter taste, and by Senior year I'd reached the pinnacle of frustration with the school system's idea of the written word. Thus it was that for the first assignment that year (and only non-essay assignment), prompted "How to...", I wrote about how to write.
And yes, I read it in front of my teacher. As I recall, she laughed throughout.
The Writing Process
From Kindergarten to Publication
From Kindergarten to Publication
The madness begins with a simple child’s song. A, B, C, and D (and let us not forgot elemenopee) are really your first introduction into writing. Little do you know that in this seemingly innocuous song lies the foundation for years of writer’s block. The first thing you can scrawl is your name. After learning to read, the teacher then introduces the basics of writing. And since the teacher decides that their life is much easier when they don’t have to decipher chicken scratch, mounds and mounds of handwriting worksheets and spelling lists are sent home and must be laboriously filled out. Later, you are introduced to this wonderful thing called “Word” and “spellcheck” and never need to write legibly or spell correctly again. Something similar is also done in cursive, an archaic form of lettering that is never used past the third grade.
After this painstaking initiation into the writing world, you are then free to –for a time– write whatever you wish. For a couple of years, many fun and fanciful stories are created until they are squashed by something grown-ups call “reality.” If we had known the tidal wave to follow that first persuasive essay, I’m sure we would have balked instead of cheerfully throwing ourselves into the surf. I mourned the death of the fiction assignment, but worse things are to come.
Much like the ABC song, the next phase starts out innocently enough, maybe even fun. After all, who doesn’t like to write in colorful pens? Blue for topic and concluding sentence, red for concrete, and green for commentary. But Jane Schaffer’s writing system strikes like a snakebite to the heel. The next few years are spent churning out fodder essays, mindlessly filling in the blanks until you’re sick of concrete and commentary sentences.
If you survive the inundation of Jane Schaffer, you reach High School and are told that Jane Schaffer is not only evil, but that further, to write well you must break all those painfully accumulated, maddeningly eccentric English rules. In the end, it is okay to start a sentence with words such as ‘and’ or ‘but’. And to top things off, you are taught many tedious citing format standards, which will probably change in the upcoming years.
And finally, should you decide to go to college, within the first five minutes of English 101, a clear minded professor will confidently and quite smugly tell you that your High School teachers were oh so very wrong and that they, the Instructor with a Bachelor’s degree in English, is here to teach you correctly. At this point you’re probably trying to get a picture of Yoda out of your swimming vision, gently admonishing you in his gravelly voice, “you must unlearn what you have learned.” Again. And perhaps at this point, you begin to think back to a dimly recalled, distant time when writing was fun, and wonder what the heck happened here.
But I guess you like pain, because instead of merely finishing the class and washing your hands clean, you decide to take all those stories that have been festering and forming and dammed inside of you and write them down. After all, it would be a shame to waste all those writing skills you’ve been learning for the past decade and a half. And what job can you think of off the top of your head that requires you to write MLA style formatted research essays? A scientist, maybe. But you have bigger problems to contend with now.
After years of writing expository, persuasive, and research essays, you have developed an almost incurable shyness about any writing that isn’t based on the world around you but is spawned inside your head. In fact, anything read aloud carries almost a sense of shame, like someone accidentally catching a glimpse of something they weren’t meant to see. People can be cruel about creativity and art, and any story that is written is a tiny glimpse into somebody’s fragile soul. So heaven forbid anybody actually read your stories! And yet, overpowered by a sense of almost desperation to find anybody of a similar mindset, you might fearfully show a little bit of your story to your closest family or friends. And with a little bit of gentle encouragement, you may actually take the chance and send your book to a publishing company.
Now, when you submit a book, not only do you send the first ten pages, but also this really daunting thing called a “cover letter.” I honestly think that the publishers came up with this thing just to weed out all but the most dedicated and to laugh about the bad ones over coffee. This thing requires a (non-trite) hook, a catchy title, a summary, and a desperate plea at the end. The summary is actually the kicker. The cover page must be at most one page long, so you have to take your 300+ page book that you have poured your heart and soul into and condense it into a paragraph. This must be done without neglecting the major characters, events, and your writing voice. To top it off, you have to state the ending and everything, so before your book is sent in, it has to be finished. Many sleepless nights are spent trying to cram everything into a summary and getting a really nice hook. It’s got to be perfect, because you’ve got one shot and people are lost or won in the first few sentences. After all the toil, sweat, and blood, you shove the hope-laden package into the mailbox with a tiny prayer.
If you’re lucky, you’ll only be rejected by thirty or so people before you get the point, but if you’re really lucky, you might actually be accepted. Of course, for that to happen, your story can’t be too far out there. Publishing companies only have so many slots open per year and prefer to play it safe (i.e. what’ll probably make money) than go for the masterful piece of art that’s probably going to flop.
Once your work is accepted, the trials are far from over. Mounds of revisions are made (not always with your expressed permission) there is a lot of back-and-forth, contracts have to be read and signed, and finally, finally, you’ll have a watered down version of something that resembles your story sitting on a bookshelf. And if you’re really, really, lucky the masses will decide they like you and you’ll be able to keep writing. But, if you’re like everyone else, you’ll keep your day job.
In fact, it could turn out that the most important (or at least most useful) thing you learn in your writing career was also the first thing you learned: how to scrawl your name on the dotted line.
After this painstaking initiation into the writing world, you are then free to –for a time– write whatever you wish. For a couple of years, many fun and fanciful stories are created until they are squashed by something grown-ups call “reality.” If we had known the tidal wave to follow that first persuasive essay, I’m sure we would have balked instead of cheerfully throwing ourselves into the surf. I mourned the death of the fiction assignment, but worse things are to come.
Much like the ABC song, the next phase starts out innocently enough, maybe even fun. After all, who doesn’t like to write in colorful pens? Blue for topic and concluding sentence, red for concrete, and green for commentary. But Jane Schaffer’s writing system strikes like a snakebite to the heel. The next few years are spent churning out fodder essays, mindlessly filling in the blanks until you’re sick of concrete and commentary sentences.
If you survive the inundation of Jane Schaffer, you reach High School and are told that Jane Schaffer is not only evil, but that further, to write well you must break all those painfully accumulated, maddeningly eccentric English rules. In the end, it is okay to start a sentence with words such as ‘and’ or ‘but’. And to top things off, you are taught many tedious citing format standards, which will probably change in the upcoming years.
And finally, should you decide to go to college, within the first five minutes of English 101, a clear minded professor will confidently and quite smugly tell you that your High School teachers were oh so very wrong and that they, the Instructor with a Bachelor’s degree in English, is here to teach you correctly. At this point you’re probably trying to get a picture of Yoda out of your swimming vision, gently admonishing you in his gravelly voice, “you must unlearn what you have learned.” Again. And perhaps at this point, you begin to think back to a dimly recalled, distant time when writing was fun, and wonder what the heck happened here.
But I guess you like pain, because instead of merely finishing the class and washing your hands clean, you decide to take all those stories that have been festering and forming and dammed inside of you and write them down. After all, it would be a shame to waste all those writing skills you’ve been learning for the past decade and a half. And what job can you think of off the top of your head that requires you to write MLA style formatted research essays? A scientist, maybe. But you have bigger problems to contend with now.
After years of writing expository, persuasive, and research essays, you have developed an almost incurable shyness about any writing that isn’t based on the world around you but is spawned inside your head. In fact, anything read aloud carries almost a sense of shame, like someone accidentally catching a glimpse of something they weren’t meant to see. People can be cruel about creativity and art, and any story that is written is a tiny glimpse into somebody’s fragile soul. So heaven forbid anybody actually read your stories! And yet, overpowered by a sense of almost desperation to find anybody of a similar mindset, you might fearfully show a little bit of your story to your closest family or friends. And with a little bit of gentle encouragement, you may actually take the chance and send your book to a publishing company.
Now, when you submit a book, not only do you send the first ten pages, but also this really daunting thing called a “cover letter.” I honestly think that the publishers came up with this thing just to weed out all but the most dedicated and to laugh about the bad ones over coffee. This thing requires a (non-trite) hook, a catchy title, a summary, and a desperate plea at the end. The summary is actually the kicker. The cover page must be at most one page long, so you have to take your 300+ page book that you have poured your heart and soul into and condense it into a paragraph. This must be done without neglecting the major characters, events, and your writing voice. To top it off, you have to state the ending and everything, so before your book is sent in, it has to be finished. Many sleepless nights are spent trying to cram everything into a summary and getting a really nice hook. It’s got to be perfect, because you’ve got one shot and people are lost or won in the first few sentences. After all the toil, sweat, and blood, you shove the hope-laden package into the mailbox with a tiny prayer.
If you’re lucky, you’ll only be rejected by thirty or so people before you get the point, but if you’re really lucky, you might actually be accepted. Of course, for that to happen, your story can’t be too far out there. Publishing companies only have so many slots open per year and prefer to play it safe (i.e. what’ll probably make money) than go for the masterful piece of art that’s probably going to flop.
Once your work is accepted, the trials are far from over. Mounds of revisions are made (not always with your expressed permission) there is a lot of back-and-forth, contracts have to be read and signed, and finally, finally, you’ll have a watered down version of something that resembles your story sitting on a bookshelf. And if you’re really, really, lucky the masses will decide they like you and you’ll be able to keep writing. But, if you’re like everyone else, you’ll keep your day job.
In fact, it could turn out that the most important (or at least most useful) thing you learn in your writing career was also the first thing you learned: how to scrawl your name on the dotted line.