Old thoughts revisited

I started re-reading Stephen King's "On Writing," today after several years, and it brought back some old memories. Not having much to do with Stephen King, but let me explain.

I highly recommend King's book about writing as a craft, because it lacks the normal pretension of most instructional books. To put it simply, he explains himself and his writing from that perspective. The book describes his process, rather than THE process. Because, quite simply, there is no THE way to do anything. I'm not even a big Stephen King fan, because I find the horror genre rather boring. I have read some of his work that I really enjoy, but a large portion of his collection is irrelevant to me. This is not a criticism, because he is one of the more capable writers of the last 100 years. It often seems that critics believe being popular equates with a lack of talent. But King knows his audience, and that is his strength.

Part of his book reflects on his brief teaching career, which made me remember some of the things we all went through in our English courses. I remember thinking at the time (and even did a senior project on the subject,) that english courses in many ways ruin the subject for most of the students. Think back to your first memory of books. Do you see Dr. Suess? Where the Wild Things Are? Goodnight Moon? (which I still don't understand)

What are your early memories? I liked books, I liked stories, I liked being read to. I liked books. So did you, or most of you. Or anybody who discovered video games a little later in life. What happened to our enjoyment of books in school?

Well, we read books that we didn't necessarily like. This is all well and good, because you have to read different types of things to understand the language. But on top of reading some of the least interesting and more critically acclaimed literature of the last century, we analyzed it to oblivion. And frankly, if you think about any topic long enough, it gets boring. We weren't allowed to enjoy the books we read for the story, because the story wasn't the important part anymore. The essay about the story was the important part. And that is bass-ackwards if anything ever was. Why do english teachers justify their jobs by focusing on every part of a novel other than the reason it was written? It's the story, stupid.

On that note, let's talk about writing. I used to write essays and have to agonize over a thesis statement so that I could submit that before I was even allowed to write the essay. My entire idea depended on my teacher's opinion of a single sentence. What do we think about people who form an opinion on extremely limited information, such as a single sentence? It's moronic. Like voting for president based on their tie.

Now I get that writing an essay is different from creative writing, and the importance of learning grammar before attempting more serious work. You can't know when it is appropriate to break the rules until you know the rules. Sometimes a fragment is a good sentence, sometimes it's the best sentence. Usually it's not, and you have to learn why before you can make that distinction. Also, structure is important because it keeps you on topic, and focuses your efforts. But seriously, how many teachers did we have growing up who read the first sentence of every paragraph (Thesis, topic sentence, topic sentence, topic sentence, conclusion) because they didn't have time to read the whole thing? And what did this teach us about writing?

Maybe we learned some grammar, maybe we learned some focus, maybe we even learned how to write our college application essay. But what did we lose? The story. Even an essay on the availability of widgets in India has a story to tell, and if we only learn structure we have no idea how to convey that idea. We lost the reason for writing in the first place.

That's the biggest problem with "school english," it takes away the purpose of language from our tools of communication. Books lose their story when we're searching for a thesis statement in the first chapter. Writing loses the beauty of communication when what we say is less important than where we say it. It's like an actor who knows exactly where to stand for their scene in a play, but has no idea what to say. Yes, you need to know where to stand, but it's more important to know why you are standing there.

Little children love sitting on their parents laps to read a bedtime story, but too often they lose that love when a teacher tells them that the why and how of a book has nothing to do with the story.

But hey, that's just me...