The Ten Commandments of Writing July 9, 2009

{Adapted from The Lie That Tells a Truth, by John Defresne}

1. Thou shalt sit thyself in thy chair.

2. Thou shalt keep holy thy writing time.

3. Thou shalt not bore thy reader.

4. Thou shalt not be obscure.

5. Thou shalt show not tell. Unless thy story requires telling.

6. Thou shalt honor the lives of thy characters.

7. Thou shalt steal.*

8. Thou shalt rewrite and rewrite again and again.

9. Thou shalt not pity thy manuscript.

10. Thou shalt confront the human condition.

*Artists who have weighed in on the Seventh Commandment:

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Genius borrows nobly.”

Pablo Picasso: “Copy anyone, but never copy yourself.”

Thornton Wilder: “I do borrow from other writers shamelessly! I can only say in my defense, like the woman brought before the judge on charges of kleptomania, “I do steal, Your Honor, but only from the very best stores.”

George Balanchine: “God creates. I do not create. I assemble and I steal from everywhere.”

Josh Billings: “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.”

Archibald McLeish: “A real writer learns from earlier writers they way a boy learns from an apple orchard: by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off.”

Philip Johnson: “Creativity is selective borrowing.”

John Updike: “My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge, but to come and steal.”

shakespeare: poet or plagiarist? July 9, 2009

Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, dipped his quill into a vast reservoir of sources: the poetry of the Roman, Seneca, and the plays of his countryman, Plautus; Plutarch’s Lives and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles; a veritable Who’s Who of Italian writers; not to mention Chaucer, Spenser, and numerous popular English authors whose names have been lost to history, while their plagiarist lives on as the greatest writer of them all. In fact, Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have scoffed at the very idea of dramatic originality; theirs was a time of dramatic license. To tell a new story was no particular achievement, but to tell an old one better than anyone else—that was the sign of true wit! To some extent, this is the very nature of literature. The great stories—myths, archetypes, religious narratives—have always been with us, gaining resonance with each retelling.

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“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. Bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something utterly different from that from which it was torn…A good poet will borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”

T. S. Eliot

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Given his level of productivity, it’s no wonder that Shakespeare “outsourced” his plot development. In twenty-four years, beginning at the age of twenty-five and ending shortly before his death at age fifty-two, he wrote forty-three plays, most of which are acknowledged to be the preeminent works of their kind. Who had time to come up with all those stories?

Scholars debate whether a councilman’s son from Stratford-on-Avon with little formal education could have written Othello or Romeo and Juliet. There’s no evidence that Shakespeare ever left England, much less traveled to Italy. But he didn’t have to. He lifted the entire plot of Romeo and Juliet from an English poem by Arthur Brooke, which was itself based on a novella by the Italian author Matteo Bandello. It’s all there: the Italian hill town, the feuding families, the lovers, the masked ball, Mercutio, Tybalt, the nurse, the friar, the poison draught, the fateful dagger. Othello, the story set in Venice of the Moor who fell from grace, was taken from The Hecatommithi, by the Italian writer Giraldi Cinthio.

Shakespeare didn’t need to speak Italian to write Othello, any more than he needed to speak Greek to write Julius Caesar, or to have read history at Cambridge to write the ten history plays. All he needed to do was set his genius loose on already-existing material. And what better age to have lived in, if one were a borrower to be, than the Renaissance? It was an age of intellectual and artistic apotheosis, an age when the flowering of science, art, philosophy, and religion sent inspiration floating into the air like so much pollen. In the literary garden, spelling, syntax, and even the words themselves were germinating, and Shakespeare cross-pollinated the seeds, harvested the blooms, and tied them together in lush bouquets. But make no mistake; Shakespeare was far from the only genius of his day. Among his contemporaries were Michelangelo and Machiavelli in the South, Dürer and Bruegel in the North, Martin Luther and Thomas More (who, incidentally, coined the word “utopia”), Spenser, Cervantes, and Vasari, an art historian who coined his own word: “Renaissance.” Shakespeare’s was a time of dramatic license and, happily, no copyright laws. The goal was not to tell a new story, but to tell an old one better.He plucked language from the air and from the mouths and pens of others, and sculpted it as nimbly as Michelangelo sculpted marble.

If we were to use the plays as a mirror of the man who wrote them, we would see reflected in the glass a glover, a falconer, a scholar, a lawyer, a soldier, a spy, a madman and a murderer, a nobleman, a ne’er do well, a lover, a fool, a villain, a hero. In short, we would see a human being. But, was he the man from Stratford, or the Earl of Oxford? Christopher Marlowe? Francis Bacon? All of the above? None of the above? It is possible, given one’s perspective and one’s predilections, to see in the mirror almost anyone. In the court of bardolatry, every plaintiff has a case. Some believe that the Earl of Oxford had the education, the training, the contacts, the skill, the ego, the ethics, and, apparently, access to a whole lot of parchment paper. So clever was the Earl that, in anticipation of his own death, he amassed a stockpile of dramatic works and arranged to release them at regular intervals, like a car on literary auto-pilot, for ten years after his own death! This author, however, prefers to apply the principle of Occam’s Razor to the case of the polymorphous playwright. The simplest explanation is the most likely: the man whose name is on the plays is the man who wrote the plays.

Ultimately, it is impossible to say for certain who the Author is. Does it matter? We study the plays not for the mirror they hold up to the Author, but for the mirror they hold up to humanity. What we can say with certainty is that they are among the treasures of civilization. They were written, they survived, and they continue to fascinate and astonish us four hundred years after their appearance on the stage and in print. That’s quite a legacy for the man we call Shakespeare, whether he was literature’s most accomplished writer or its greatest thief.

the write stuff: a short tutorial for developing writers July 7, 2009

Writing is a way of dealing with not knowing. We use writing to analyze, to evaluate and to deliberate, to imagine, to muse, to reason and to rationalize, and, most importantly, to express what we think and feel. Even in a world dominated by the bits and bytes of technology, writing is a primary way for humans to communicate with one another, and it is among the most important skills a student will take with them as they move from school to work.

Writing is a process. Once you master the process, you can apply it over and over again, whenever and to whatever you write, whether you’re writing bumper stickers or biographies, a resume or a research paper.

They Always Say They Can’t Think of Anything to Write

Love of language is inborn. Young children delight in the sound and the rhythm of words. They acquire new ones quickly and effortlessly. They create and combine them in a positively Seussian way, bending their limited vocabulary to fit the shape of their limitless world. And they are, as any parent knows, unafraid of expressing what they are feeling and thinking at the very moment that they have those feelings and thoughts. So what happens between childhood and adolescence to make most students cringe when faced with a writing assignment? Why do students struggle to fill a blank sheet of paper or a blank computer screen? I think that one of the reasons is, quite simply, tedium. You can’t pour water from an empty vessel, and you can’t get kids to write unless you romance them a little first.

Writing combines both thinking and doing, so the first step is to get the student thinking. Literature is a tried and true stimulator and, contrary to popular belief, it does not itself have to be great to inspire great writing. All writers need catalysts to jump start their literary engines, and all will tell you that they spend the greatest part of their time reading in order to write. I’ve found that a student who loves the raw material will find that writing about it is easier. I want them to love the book they choose to read, and this means that they should have the freedom—for the first time in a long time—to pick the genre, the subject, the author, and the style of their reading assignment. Romance novel, science fiction, or detective story? Travelogue, biography, or autobiography? Collections of essays, books of poetry, or even magazine articles? Any of these forms of literature will provide the raw material we’re looking for, as long as the student expresses a passion for it. (Mock Danielle Steel if you must, but that woman understands pacing and exposition.)

Once the student has chosen the material, I spend a little time discussing how to read like a writer. That means being on the lookout for stuff to steal. Not to plagiarize, but to dissect, to examine, to take apart, word by word, in order to discover what makes it so wonderful. Reading like a writer means looking up unfamiliar words; collecting metaphors and similes; recognizing recurring themes; identifying the protagonist, the antagonist and the story arc; and storing away those fascinating tidbits of information that a really good read provides without ever seeming pedantic.

Before a writer—any writer—pens the lead sentence, he or she pre-writes. Pre-writing is fast and fun and spontaneous. It is not complete sentences and correct spelling and proper punctuation. Pre-writing is a way to explore ideas, emotions, opinions, beliefs, questions, and mysteries. Once the student has read the raw material, I spend the first full session helping the student record his or her impressions. An important part of this step in the process is free-writing, a quick and easy way to find out, literally, what is on the student’s mind. I model brainstorming techniques, like discussion and dialogue, elaboration, interpretation, and connection, that magic moment when a leap of imagination pushes the writer past an ordinary and expected idea to an extraordinary and unexpected concept. What I do not do is sort, censor, choose, replace, or eliminate. That happens later.

Organizing

Now that we’ve collected all these impressions, it’s time for the student to organize, grouping similar and related observations and identifying areas that call for further research. I review the tools that they already know for organizing information: outlines, charts, notecards, lists, Venn diagrams, and story webs. We talk about the various structures that writers use to convey facts and feelings: sequencing, comparing and contrasting, cause and effect, question and answer, problem and solution, and description. And we determine what the student is going to write about. Because this is a student-driven process, and because I believe that an engaged student will always have something interesting to say, I work with the student to find a discreet topic for their writing, rather than assigning a topic. A science fiction novel might lead to a paper on archetypes of good and evil, or maybe the student who chooses to read a young adult problem novel will choose to write a personal narrative of her own.

Which brings me to an important point. I teach students how to write by showing them the process that writers use. A good writer is a good writer, no matter which genre they’ve chosen as their own. The student who learns to use the process to write a personal essay will also be able to use the process to write a research paper because, while not all writing is good, all good writing shares certain characteristics. Good fiction and good non-fiction have intention and a clear point of view; both utilize details, active verbs, specific nouns, and figurative language; both include catchy leads and smooth transitions; and good fiction and good non-fiction both follow a narrative thread, be it expository or imaginary.

A Careful First Draft Is a Failed First Draft

Writing the Rough

By now, the student will be an expert on whatever piece of literature or non-fiction she has chosen. She will have read, discussed, conferred, synthesized and organized and re-organized. The time to write has come. Enough work has been done on the front end to ensure that there is plenty of material, and I encourage students to write without stopping, without editing, without concern for form or structure, and—take a deep breath—without notes. Why put aside all of the hard work now, just when you’re ready to write? One of my goals is to help students recognize the moment when the information they’ve gathered has begun to jell into ideas. At first, these ideas may be simply a great opening line, an opinion, or a metaphor. Some students plunge right in, unafraid of what they may find on the other side of their pencils; others need more support and a deadline under which to work. Either way, the best way to write a paper is, well, to write. At this point, we take comfort in Ernest Hemingway’s eloquent aphorism, “All first drafts are shit.” The next step is re-writing, and if you haven’t written anything, you can’t re-write it.

Never Pity Your Manuscript

Revising the Draft

After several sessions writing the draft, this step offers the student the chance for revision, the chance to review their ideas and to refine them. In fact, the best revisions are the biggest, not in terms of style, but in terms of understanding. An author is one who can judge his or her own work, find it wanting, and rewrite it. Then maybe even rewrite it again. The student will learn to assess his or her own work, to ask does this paper say what I intended? Does it make sense? Is it clear? Does it flow? Are the ideas in the right order? Are there missing ideas? Do I like it? And the best way to answer these questions is simple: read the work out loud. Of course, I help answer any questions the student might have; I guide them and point out where she may have gone wrong and, more importantly, where she has gone right. But, ultimately, the student is responsibile for producing a coherent, well-written piece of writing.

Editing

Now, we’ve reached the point that most people consider writing; in actuality, editing pertains only to the mechanics of writing, rather than the writing itself. I think that “writing” is really everything that has happened up to this point. Now is the time to polish what has been written. As I help the student edit, I revisit technical writing conventions, like footnoting and titles. I review grammar, syntax, word usage, and, of course, check spelling. This part of the process is, in essence, preparing the document for presentation or publication, even if it is for the eyes of the student and his or her parents only.

my teaching philosophy July 2, 2009

In the family room in the house where I grew up, against the back wall behind the black leather couch, there were floor-to-ceiling shelves on which my parents displayed family photos, knick-knacks, and books. I don’t remember being forbidden from reading what were clearly “adult” books, nor do I remember being encouraged to pick up, say, The Female Eunuch or Roots, but they were there, and one day, for reasons past recollection, I plucked a book – at random – from the middle of the shelf on the right: The Secret of Santa Vittoria, by Robert Crichton. Neither a classic in the canonical sense, nor an especially great work of literature, the book nonetheless changed my life. It turned me from someone who could read into a reader.

At the time, I was probably thirteen or fourteen years old, and the moment I opened the parchment-colored cover of The Secret of Santa Vittoria marked the moment I ceased to read like a child and began to read like an adult. Which is not to say that I read with an extra-ordinary level of perception, or even that I understood half of what I read (for I never went back to “young adult fiction”), but rather I suddenly understood that books have a kind of power that transcends text: beyond plot and setting and character and point of view, out past theme and style and language lies the entirety of the human condition.

What started with The Secret of Santa Vittoria became an obsession. I read obsessively because I was – and I continue to be – obsessively interested in life. I read because it is in books that I meet and get to know people who would otherwise be unknowable to me; I travel to places that are otherwise unreachable and watch events unfold that would otherwise remain unobserved. There are books I read when I was nineteen that I have reread at twenty-seven and again at forty-one, and, each time, it is as if I am reading a new book. The very act of reading reconstructs what is being read; the book changes because I have changed. The Jane Austen I read at seventeen is not the Jane Austen I read at thirty-seven because I am not the same reader. And what I learn from Emma and Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood and, perhaps more importantly, about myself is deepened by each reading. Only one thing remains immutable, and that is my love for the written word.

I once heard the late author John Updike say in an interview that in order to be good at anything you have to believe in it. John Updike believed, in his own words, in giving the mundane its beautiful due. He believed in family and love – or at least sex – and in the inevitability of failing to find or keep them. He believed in the Everyman and in his natural habitat, the suburbs. And I believe in his books. I believe in all books.

In books can be found the answers to almost any question one might ask. What does it feel like to be in love? To be at war? To be a black man in a white country? To drive across the country in a beat-up jalopy with your best friend? To live on a failing farm during the Depression? To chase a mythic whale across the ocean? To murder your father and marry your mother? All of these questions are really just one question: What does it mean to be human? That question is both worth asking and worth answering. It lies at the heart of every English class I have ever taken, and it lies at the heart of every English class I hope to teach.

For the past four years, I have made a career of helping students fall in love with literature. It is not easy. It is hard to help an adolescent of today understand how Willy Loman’s death is relevant to what is happening in America now, at this very minute, in the still-rosy-fingered dawning of the Age of Obama; how cognitive dissonance is the Achilles heel of all tragic heroes and how unrealistic expectations can be as destructive as a terrorist attack. It is hard, but I sincerely believe that it is possible to kindle a life-long passion for reading and that that passion can ornament an entire life. And maybe the trigger lies not in Death of a Salesman, or Lord of the Flies, or A Tale of Two Cities. It might be that the switch can only be activated by To Kill A Mockingbird or The Sun Also Rises. Or by Harry Potter or the Twilight series. I believe that for every reader, there is a Secret of Santa Vittoria. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a book is a book is a book. I don’t think it matters how kids fall in love with reading, just that they fall in love.