Writing Is Hard, And Other Things I Sort Of Know

For me, one of Macrorie's most striking realizations is the sheer difficulty of writing. He seldom comes outright to say it, but all of his examples of poor  creative writing display the same problem: fiction is as prone, if not more so, to the pitfalls on Engfish. Vague, stilted writing is everywhere in fiction, particularly in young writers searching for their unique voices. As a writer searching for my own voice, a solid 98% of what I write is Engfish. Not all of it is irreparable, and I am a much better editor than composer, but the act of composition is still largely an exercise in imitation.

The poem he referenced on page 125 reminds me of poetry I read, and wrote, in high school. It sounds like genuine emotions that the writer was struggling to express by using someone else's form; the author did not yet have the craft for originality, so s/he used a pre-existing form as a vehicle for authentic feeling and in doing so reduced those feelings to trite cliche.

In those passages of Macrorie's where he gets at this struggle, at what I think is the heart of his arguments, I can truly empathize with the students he writes about. It ties in beautifully with my own Capstone project, in fact, as I was working on the early pages of my novel draft as I worked on finishing Uptaught. It was painful. When I write I feel like I am unlearning clunky, outdated style with every sentence. Sometimes it takes me a page to find a tolerable vein in which to continue. Sometimes it takes until the final paragraphs. Writing is an excruciating practice for me, where the pride of composing a series of pages that say exactly what I mean just barely outweighs the incredible frustration of failing over and over to get even the most minute details to come across with any subtlety. It is a level of communication for which I was not trained and which I have struggled to master alone.

As for the book as a whole, I found its frustration with the university system to be a clarifying experience for many of my own frustrations but ultimately unhelpful as a guide towards better teaching. Macrorie's class structure was innovative for his time and clearly worked well, but it sounds like every other advanced composition class I've taken. Macrorie never seemed to explain how his system would benefit other writing classes and disciplines. My main (and really only) complaint about this book was that Macrorie seemed more interested in venting his anger at the system than in finding a multi-lateral solution, if one can even be found. He talks about his early text book attempt critically, recalling how he uses a half-baked system with no successful examples to defend his methodology, yet here he advocates for a system that shows success, but only in one field. He offers ideas, such as examining the assignment's constraints before blaming students for awful papers, that could easily be expanded, but the methodology he focuses on (having students write for themselves) is difficult to work into specified writing curriculum such as tech or P.R. writing. I feel like Macrorie has an excellent system who's full reach is underdeveloped in this book.

Other thoughts on Uptaught:
I don't know how I feel about the racism metaphors. I feel like no matter how horribly teachers treat students they will never approach the systematic rape of culture that was (and in some ways still is) racism in the U.S. Macrorie was stretching with this one.

Ménage à trois: Thoughts on the Third Way Pt. 1

Author's Note: My copy of Uptaught arrived this afternoon, just in time to coincide with the worst of my current head cold. At the time I am writing this, I am only on page 55. Provided the Black Plague lifts its grasp on our house, I will be finished with the reading and in class tomorrow. If not, it is because I have no desire to be a living contagion for the rest of you.

On to business, I suppose what comes most readily to mind as I begin this book is the last of my Honors College classes at this fine University. The class is called Honors Read and the objective is for my class to decide on one (or two) new texts for the next year's freshman seminar. While this in undoubtedly among the most noble of calling's for MSU students, my classmates (and by extensions, I suppose, myself) are more than a little pretentious and plenty self-involved. We took this class because we, like Macrorie, knew something was missing from our Texts and Critics curriculum and by God we knew how to fix it.

The first week of classes has been filled with unlearning our own preconceptions of what makes books worthwhile and good and what things we desire in our literature. Like Macrorie and his students, we need to let literature happen to us, at least for a little while, rather than telling our books and our classmates what is best. I anticipate this will be tricky because it requires a combination of certainty that our book (or film, article, or paper) is a great fit for the class, and the open-ended faith that Macrorie learned to teach his students, the willingness to welcome discomfort and alien presence into our lives and allow it to change us. 

I am better by far at certainty than I am at flexibility, which is why Macrorie's writing gave me pause.

What he encourages his later students to do to find their voices is to relax themselves and let the writing happen to them. The idea that not only does everyone have a story, they have the capacity to share it is sadly as alien to me as it was to the teaching student who told him that writing could not be taught. Like Macrorie’s students, I have grown up believing that a bad writer could become passable, maybe even tolerable in a field he enjoyed, but never good.

What Macrorie’s Third Way achieves is a system for encouraging storytelling as an extension of feeling rather than a method of composition. The difference being, as visible in his approach, that his students are all storytellers in one way or another, but few of them believe in their ability to be compsers.

Compositions are great art. Beethoven was a composer. Shakespeare was a composer. Joe Shmo might amount to a hack if her works for it.

But we tell stories all the time. Fairy tales for children who won’t fall asleep. White lies to our parents or teachers. Fishing, hunting, drinking, partying, living stories.

For me, the power of Macrorie’s message is that we should not harness people skills of memorization and composition, but give them a chance to set their stories down and unravel them, to find out what makes them good and enjoyable.

To end, I will leave you with this. As a freshman in college, I was appalled when, in my first class with a teacher (let’s call her Professor A), I received my first essay and it was bleeding red. I was a champion essay writer. It was my thing. I did not fail essays. Frantic, I flipped to the back, where the rubric was, and found a cheerful (for all the blood colored ink) 92% with lavish praises for things I had done well. That was the first time I had ever really received constructive criticism on a paper. High school teachers, I have come to assume, can’t labor over “sufficient” papers to make them excellent, so they gave me my “A” and sent me onto the next level. Professor A took every opportunity to make me a better writer and I appreciate that “good” writing was never enough for her. She, and later professors, subscribed to Macromie’s disdain for dead sentences and pushed me beyond her own rubrics and onto better papers.

Author’s Note, the Second: Here, I end my now bizarre rambling’s, because my Nyquil is making the screen do funny things.