Crest Fallen

Or: learning how to write after teaching it for 40 years.

I taught English language and writing for many years, graded thousands of essays, raged at the inadequacy of the way we are taught to teach it, and now for the first time in my life am dipping my toes into the waters of actual writing every day for myself, maybe for a few others. And I’m finding it way more difficult, and myself feeling more vulnerable, than I ever expected the experience to be.

Not that I thought it would be easy. Of course not. I am only too aware that writers who can arrange millions of psychic, verbal, emotional, and informational pieces into coherent, complex, satisfying wholes are a species apart from me. I could no more write a novel than get from Earth to Jupiter and back again in a day. But, on my recent 70th birthday, I thought, maybe I could pump a short essay out every day or so, as a discipline, as a this-is-what-I-have parting ode to the world in the wake of an early breast-cancer diagnosis. (Stage I, early, small; I’m fine for now. But the diagnosis does focus the mind.)

I used to tell my students that we often find out what we think only when we begin writing it out. I knew this was true, and it is. As Theodore Roethke wrote, “I learn by going where I have to go.” So it doesn’t alarm me, in theory, to find myself changing directions in a piece of writing, or to discover that where I thought I was going with it was wrong. It may lie like a dry bean in my mind until I begin to water it, at which point it turns into a wisteria plant twining all over the place. But it is a little scary, and humiliating, when I realize that I was … wrong. Just wrong about my first idea. I don’t actually think what I thought I thought. I think something different. This is aggravating in the extreme.

So a few weeks ago I put something on Substack about Truth (a large subject, I admit) and within hours I realized it was wrong, it was dumb, and it was out there for all the world to see. It felt like when in my girlhood a flimsy cotton skirt would be blown up to my waist by a prurient breeze. The effect had nothing in common with Marilyn Monroe, though.

I had to think my way through it. I had to go back and realize that the capital-T truth is not always, or even often, knowable until time has passed, points of view are expressed, a sort of average of them is taken; flat-out lies are dismissed; and the whole thing settles. See there? I just added something more that I hadn’t thought of before. This writing thing is dangerous. You never know where you’ll end up.

However, despite my crest having fallen somewhere in the vicinity of my left nostril, I’m going to keep plugging away at this. Surely, with practice, I’ll get better.

Getting better means taking the time to 1) have an idea; 2) gather information and verify it; 3) work the idea out in writing; 4) not continue with an idea if it presents contradictions; 5) rework and revise until it makes sense; 6) review and polish.

Jeeze, I’ve taught this so many times. Why did I not apply what I knew?