On . . . writing

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately. I don’t know why.

It could be that I’m having such a great time with both of my Composition classes (freshman and college comp). Each class is at radically different points in terms of skill, but in both cases the writing is deeply rewarding to read. I’ve spent the first several weeks heaping my praise and advice on their drafts. This week, I’ve ceased scrutinizing each draft. I just turned them loose to take the skills and ideas we’ve focused on for so long and customize them to their styles and voices.

It could have something to do with the podcasts I’ve been treating myself to on the way home: Dean Koontz on writing. I don’t think anyone will ever confuse Koontz with Hemingway or Updike, but he has some very interesting things to say about writing. Outside of Stephen King (and JK Rowling), Koontz has sold more books than anyone. In this way, I’m in the role of my students – trying to absorb techniques and ideas from someone who knows a lot more about the craft than I.

It could also be that I’ve been thinking a lot about the craft of writing in what I’ve been reading lately (The Dante Club, You Come When I Call You (cheesy horror), and now It). While reading these, not only am I captured by the stories, but also captured by the style and structure of eat. How did he come up with this idea? Why did he settle on this point of view? How did he balance all of the different characters?

And in some moments, I’m just in awe of writing. At all levels.

That’s not a bad position to be in.

I have one freshman writer who is an ESL student. He struggles mightily with the language. He turns some teachers off with his brash personality and his desire to be the center of attention. But for some reason, we click.

A few weeks ago I was visiting with the Stacy, who cuts my hair. Her husband coaches youth hockey. We talked about the importance of giving everyone a chance since they are so young and have not had a chance to fully develop yet. She related her husband’s frustration with a young coach who focuses all of his attention on the gifted players. Stacy’s husband was frustrated and told her, “You know, anyone can coach the good players. It takes someone who is talented to get the most of out below average players.” From that moment on her husband made a commitment to one of the poorer players on the team. Of course, the boy was one of the players the young coach had already relegated to the scrap heap. Stacy’s husband vowed to turn the kid into a hockey player, if for nothing else than to piss off all the others who gave up on him.

I have taken this same approach with my ESL writer. It might be different if we didn’t hit it off so well. This writer, though, really has an interest in language. You should see how much time he puts into simply crafting a paragraph. Really, he puts more effort into those fifty or so words than many other writers put into an entire essay. I admire that. He asks genuine questions about the nuts and bolts of writing, verb tenses, pronoun usage, and phrasing. Then when he gets it and it clicks in his head, his entire face lights up, he giggles, and hops in his chair.

I also know that I could never do what he is trying to do. There is no way I could ever master a second language well enough to read it, let alone write relatively fluently in it. This is something I remind of him often.

I am going to make this kid into a writer. Each day I spend 10-15 minutes poring over his writing, tweaking and explaining. But it’s worth it.

In all likelihood, he won’t pass the MN writing BST, but he is becoming a better writer, whether the test shows it or not.

I’m trying something I’ve never ever done before with several of my freshman – several submitted essays contained glimpses of what they could be. To help these writers, I took an image, a line, or a piece of dialogue and typed it up on my computer. Then I built it up with strong details, description, dialog, and zest. After that I typed up a little note to the writers explaining what I modeled for them and how to apply that little snippet to the entire essay. We’ll see if that paid off in their second batch of essays.

Certainly, the writers in my College Comp class are light years ahead of my freshman, but they still have a lot of work to do. One writer I’m working with right now turned in a rough draft about an incident in which his drunken father and uncle had him swim across a river as part of family rite of passage. The draft was absolutely ripe with potential. However, it was just a skeleton. I advised him to put some muscle, flesh, and blood into it.

When it came time for the final draft, it just wasn’t developed enough. He fixed some of the convention errors, but he never really fleshed it out, so it was still just a skeleton. It did contain two of the best sentences I’ve read all year – and I noted this – but it was not enough to carry the paper to a good grade.

On a positive note, though, late today this writer came in and informed me that he has been busy working on this piece, even though he cannot resubmit it. He is just doing it to do justice to the experience he wrote about. That is what real writers do.

With all of this great writing going on, I feel like I need to try to get some done. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve really worked on anything substantial. But I have a few ideas kicking around, well, really percolating, in my mind for some time now.

When Will Weaver visited the RRVWP last summer, he said something very interesting. He said that sometimes you have to find the right time not to simply write but to let the piece come out. That is, you can start too early on a piece and it can come out too premature and undeveloped. Likewise, you could begin a piece too late and just end up sucking vapors as it’s passed you by.

I think I have a couple of ideas that need to come out. Soon.

I just need to find time – and a way – to get them out.

This brings me back to Koontz. In one podcast, he was answering some common reader questions. One focused on how he writes. What Koontz said, blew me away. Koontz acknowledged that he doesn’t do outlines nor traditional rough drafts. He writes on page at a time. Well, really he writes the first page over and over and over until he is happy with it. Then he moves on to the second page and repeats the process over. This way each page goes through – by his count – some 20-30 drafts.

Now this shocked me because that was exactly how I wrote as an undergraduate. I cannot begin to tell you how many hours were spent holed up in AC Clark library crafting a paper paragraph by paragraph. This worked very well for me, but it made writing very, very difficult. Nothing was spontaneous. Nothing needed to be revised because each paragraph was put through 10-20 drafts. The first sentence was the first thing I wrote and the concluding sentence was the final. Everything else was done in sequential order.

Then in graduate school I was swept up in writing as a process approach. I also discovered Peter Elbow and his ‘free writing’ approach. And it saved me. Rather it freed me. I became more comfortable with the writing process and new that I could always go back and revise.

It also freed me because I realized that for some things (such as this blog entry) I knew that I didn’t have to polish each sentence until it was perfect.

Maybe that was the overall point. For some things that excessive revision is a good thing. For others, a quick first draft is fine.

The more, though, I think about Koontz’s methodical approach to writing, I start thinking about revisiting that approach for the new pieces I have in mind.

I’ll keep you posted.