Tell Me a Story

 

 

Not long ago, I was thinking back to when I majored in writing in college. I remember the thrill of my first English major course, and the college seniors who had been avoiding said class for four years. I was a second term freshman. They couldn’t understand how someone in their first year managed to get into a majors course until I explained that I’d exempted the first Freshman English course by exam, and only had to take a hybrid course meant for those who had passed that exam. The exam had been easier than my fifth grade final exam when I was 11, and the hybrid course had been a total waste of my time.

In walked the teacher, a character with shoulder-length white hair, a floppy leather hat and a white Snidely Whiplash moustache. To round out his costume, he wore military boots, leather trousers and a Hawaiian shirt. It was the ‘70s. You never knew what you would get.

“So, you people want to write?” he asked. We nodded. “Then what are you doing here? You should be out there writing.”

He told us he wanted 40 pages from each of us by the end of the term, and it didn’t matter whether it was one 40-page piece, 10 4-page pieces, two pieces of 20 pages each or any other grouping, as long as he had 40 pages by the end of the term. He did caution us that we should turn something in by the mid-term since he had to send out reports on whether we were passing at that point, or in jeopardy of failing the course.

Classes consisted of him regaling us with what he loved or hated in literature, his critique of currently popular songs – he hated Terry Jacks’ song, “Seasons in the Sun.” He thought that song represented the absolute worst version of what people thought was poetry.

He also read our works for critique in class. My first piece, a 4-page short story, was told from the perspective of a 4-year-old girl, and he asked if I’d mind reading it myself since he didn't feel he could do it justice. Always the performer, I stood in front of the class and read it – like a 4-year-old girl.

He had me stop at the end of each page to ask the class if they knew what was going on yet. At the end of the first page, there were no hands up. The same happened at the end of the second page. At the end of the third page, perhaps 5 hands were raised. I thought they simply weren’t paying attention. But the gasps at the end of page four let me know they had been paying attention, and hadn’t expected that ending. Remember, they were 21 or 22, and I was 18.

We lived on critiques in that class. He never really liked my ending, and I wrote several versions, trying to find something he thought worked, but I never found what he was looking for.

He talked about teaching in a mental health facility, and his favorite poem written there was, “We’re all here because we’re not all there,” that one of his students there wrote. He had that hanging from a shelf in his office.

The one thing that never happened in this class was any teaching of rules for writing. I’d been taught sentence structure – including diagramming sentences – and paragraphing in elementary school. In high school our teachers mainly ruined books for us by finding the setting, character types, the denumond, foreshadowing and all the rest of the lit major tripe, but no one ever taught us the art of writing,  and what things really needed to be in a story. I thought that’s what college would teach me. The closest we got was the teacher saying, “Show me; don’t tell me.”

Most of my writing classes, other than the ones for my second major in broadcast journalism, were like that. I had a mandatory article-writing class, and I really believe there are rules to writing magazine articles. But if there are, I was never taught what they are.

The closest I came to any rules was in a biography writing class. I hated that class, mainly because the teacher assigned us to read five biographies of 300+ pages each in addition to the useless book he’d written – teaching a class is one way to sell your work – in a 10-week course. Needless to say, this dyslexic slow-reader didn’t finish any of the assigned books during the term, try as I might. Also, the class was two double periods a week  in the late afternoon. Not prime time for attention.

 The teacher would drone on about biographies he’d written, “interesting” facts about other biographers, and essentially nothing on how to write a biography.

This teacher expected us to pick up writing styles from reading these biographies and then write a piece imitating that style ourselves. For example, after reading a biography of Henry Luce, the creator of Time magazine, we were supposed to write something in “Time style.” I had never read Time Magazine at that point, and having only gotten partially through the biography, I had no idea whatever what “Time style” was. Ditto for other styles. Weren’t we supposed to find and develop our own style?

One assignment required us to interview a friend and write a biographical piece based on what we discovered about them. I did, and I was rather proud of my work. That is, until I got my paper back with a low grade on it and a note that this was not even believable fiction. He thought I’d made the whole thing up. I went to talk to him, assuring him I’d written what my friend had told me of his life, but the teacher was unwavering.

Based on my experience, I decided that if he was going to accuse me of writing fiction, that was precisely what I was going to do for my final assignment. I made up a character, and wrote about his life. I gave him a family and friends, and had interesting things happen to him based on things I’d observed in life, or things I wished had been part of my life. He loved it. I got an A for the paper, and a note saying that this is what I should have been doing throughout the class. I couldn’t believe I’d pulled that off on what was supposed to be an experienced teacher.

I had my answer and my style. From that point on I considered what I did was fictional biography. Most of my novels – except the children’s novels – bear that out.

At no point in my undergraduate education, either as a writing major or as a broadcasting major, did I ever learn any rules for writing fiction. I graduated thinking it simply had to be believable, but there was no specific format for novels.

Years later, when I decided to take a writing course on children’s novels, I discovered the hole in my writing education. The instructor talked about outlines, story boards and formats that applied to children’s literature. Wait, what?

Story boards were for films. I had done those (badly, since I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag) in film class.  Outlines were for writing term papers. I’d been forced to do those in college. In fact, in one class, we had to hand in our outlines first, then write the paper, and I was taken to task (and lost points on my grade) because there was one topic I originally thought would be in my paper, but wasn’t because there was no information on it. I tried to explain this to the teacher when I discovered this, but she wouldn’t allow me to revise my outline. I have always thought of outlines as fluid, especially when you discover, based on information, that it would be better in a different order. How one is supposed to know, before researching, that some information is simply not out there, is beyond me. I don’t have that much magic.

Apparently, all children’s stories are written according to a specific format – or at least those written for preschoolers are. When I took the children’s story course, I’d already written one preschool book, and it didn’t follow any format, with the exception of the line my tiger used to each animal he met: “Thank you very much, but I think I’ll have to eat you now.”

Early elementary school books also have a format of some sort. One rule is that they don’t have chapters, but they do have pictures. That hadn’t been my experience of books growing up, with the exception of the readers we had in elementary school.

Children looked at my books and remarked, “Oh, it’s a chapter book.” Aren’t they all? Apparently not. “Where are the pictures?” I can’t draw, and when I was starting out reading, there were few, if any pictures in the books I read. I now suspect I was in the wrong section of the library. I had already written four books for grades 3-5ish, and hadn’t followed the rules. Perhaps they were for the 10-12 –year-old set, although I thought the vocabulary and the “voice,” if you will, was too juvenile for that age group. But, oh well, as long as someone wants to read them, I’m happy.

I was raised on sarcasm. Perhaps that’s what shows through in my children’s books. I was also raised with Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Flintstones, and The Jetsons TV programs. When I write for children, I’m conscious that an adult will likely be reading the story to a small child. I don’t want the adults to be bored the way my mother often was when reading stories to me. A bit of tongue-in-cheek can go a long way to unexpected enjoyment.

I’ve often lamented not being allowed to even apply to a university that would have been better suited to my majors, but perhaps that lack of education suits my tendency to think outside the box (there’s a box?), and create a different, if unorthodox, idea.