Picture.Student Writers # 1: Invite your audience

  

 First in a series of architectural analogies meant to help student writers. 

 

  Walk my neighborhood, as I do daily with our dog, Sybil, and you will see a variety of interesting buildings.  The photographs in this series help me remember some basic principles of successful writing. 

 

Invite your audience.

I like this doorstep because of the two pots of purple flowers, the strength of the purple against the gray steps, and the clean lines of the whole entryway.  This house elegantly invites my eyes up the stairs to the arch at the top.  For example, since the pots sit against the house rather than on the street-side ledge, my eyes move from left to right--from unadorned to adorned ledge.  Simplicity also plays a role.  These steps have just two pots, and that's it.  This simplicity, in turn, establishes contrast between the gray steps and purple flowers. (Incidentally, the plant's leaves are dark purple.)  Finally, whoever painted these steps did a careful job.  The painter has applied the paint evenly, without any stray swatches or splatters.  The resulting clean lines complete the inviting nature of this entrance.

In writing, carefully paint the entrance to your story, poem or essay.  Invite your readers by giving them something to look at--something towards which their eyes will naturally move.  Start simply, with clear lines.  A cluttered stairway haphazardly composed may send them down the street looking for a more inviting entrance.

Literature and History in ancient Celtic culture

Woven into the fabric of the following passage from Alwyn and Brinley Rees's book, Celtic Heritage, is an idea I first explored in an earlier post (Literature and History, 26 March 2010) and will likely keep addressing in order to assay the validity and value of this distinction:  what literature does best and most distinctly among the written genres is evoke for us another world in which we can empathize with the people who inhabit it. Literature brings that world alive for us, re-creates it in us, and through that experience we enlarge our selves and enable connections between those selves and others.  Whereas history helps explain these other worlds, literature finds artistic ways to embody or enact them.

In the following passage, note the part in bold.  Ancient Celtic story-telling masters carried audiences with them into the world they were re-creating, re-inhabiting.  As an aside, I cannot help but also notice the legal status enjoyed by these master-poets.  In the West we no longer have kings as did the ancient Celts, but wouldn't it be nice, and smart, to elevate master-poets in a modern fashion.  We have made a mild start with poets at Presidential inauguration ceremonies and the naming of national Poets Laureate.  Thank you, Kay Ryan, and congratulations, W.S. Merwin.  
For a brief commentary on Merwin's path, see Drew Brachter's "Capital Comment Blog" (01 July 2010).  For fuller treatment, see the always-rich Poetry Foundation site (William Stanley Merwin).

There is evidence from the Celtic countries and from India that the poets were also the official historians and the royal genealogists.  The poet's praises confirmed and sustained the king in his kingship, while his satire could blast both the king and his kingdom.  There was a tradition that the learned poets (filid) of Ireland were once judges.  They were certainly the experts on the prerogatives and duties of the kings, and a master-poet (ollam) was himself equal to a king before the law.  Such priestly functions as divination and prophecy also came within the province of these early Irish poets who, it may be added, wore cloaks of bird-feathers as do the shamans of Siberia when, through ritual and trance, they conduct their audiences on journeys to another world.  It was the initiates with this power and authority who had the custody of the original tales, and they recited them on auspicious occasions, even as the priests of other religions recite the scriptures.

Rees, Alwyn and Brinley.  Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales.  New York: Thames and Hudson, 1961. reprinted 1991. 17.

Ha Jin on evoking empathy

In and earlier post, Language Study #3: empathy, I wrote about empathy's allowing people, including students,  to work alongside each other successfully.  Literature exercises one's empathy.  It has the potential to do so more than other kinds of writing (see Literature and History).  Students, I hope, come out of each encounter with more ability to imagine and, therefore, to empathize.

In his essay collection, The Writer as Migrant, Ha Jin remarks on this literary capacity.  The excerpt below comes from the chapter called "The Spokesman and the Tribe," in which he criticizes Chinese novelist, Lin Yutang.  For now, I offer this excerpt without further comment--except for the parts I have put in bold to emphasize Ha Jin's descriptions of the difference between novels and essays, and between successfully and poorly imagined literature.

There are two other weaknesses that must have stemmed from Lin Yutang's vision of himself as a cultural spokesman of China.  First, the narrator tries too blatantly to present Chinese culture to a Western audience.  There are passages that read like miniessays about Chinese women's education, Chinese medicine, and Chinese belief in the balance of the Five Elements in making marriages.  These passages are not blended into the dramatic context, block the flow of narration, and result in prose that feels crude and unfinished.  Such crudeness is not merely a technical blunder.  It reveals the novelist's inadequate vision.  Just as a creative writer should aspire to be not a broker but a creator of culture, a great novel does not only present a culture but also makes a culture;  such a work does not only bring news of the world but also evokes the reader's empathy and reminds him of his own existential condition.  If a novel by which the ambitious author will stand or fall, he should imagine what kind of cultural order the book may enter into should it succeed.  Lin Yutang obviously did not entertain such a vision and indulged himself too much in explaining China.  Throughout Moment in Peking, the narrative reveals that the book was written only for a Western audience.

Jin, Ha.  The Writer as Migrant.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 17.

Language Study #5: "details" of language

Ideally, students learn to understand details of language well enough to shape it themselves and see how others shape it.

The "details of language" occur in words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, pages and books.  They involve vocabulary, semantics, syntax and grammar.  The more students understand how to identify and use these details, the more they can shape language to their desired ends.  Important to instruction is recognizing both publicly and privately the satisfaction derived from such shaping.  That satisfaction does not come automatically, even in this particular sketch.  At times, the desired end or audience grows foggy and the writing gathers lines in a journal but little else.  Recognizing the trial-and-error, the drafting, the eventual nature of successful composition has become perhaps an even more important ingredient in today's writing instruction.  The fastfood/electronic/digital culture tends to reward instantaneous action.  The faster the better.  Writing, though, at least the kind that brings personal satisfaction to me, involves several stages of invention, re-invention and polish.  The shaping occurs over time.  Consider a book like John Wideman's novel, Philadelphia Fire, which sports across the page like one of its street ball stars on a West Philly basketball court.  Even such apparently free-wheeling approaches demand forethought, first runs at the basket, responses from fellow reader-writers, then a "tedious" return to the detailed choices about words, phrases and sentences.  What do you want to convey about the bombing of a West Philly neighborhood?  And to whom?  What style and arrangement of words will work?  What's available to me.

Language Study #4: be open to discovery

Ideally, through analysis and expression, students learn to appreciate the building blocks of individual and community health.

People see roles and identities for themselves.  For example, in NYC this summer [2002] with an unusually high number of guests, my natural interest in the city's transportation systems has blossomed into a heavy flower sometimes bending the stem of sociability.  I see my role as primary street guide who can scout and propose routes routes that, especially in this heat, will produce the least wear and tear on the group.  Knowing which bus or subway goes nearest which location saves people physical and psychological energy they can use to watch people, explore buildings or just enjoy the rhythms of the city.  As with most compounded interests, these led me to take my role and identity into unrelated arenas.  Here personality and its general inclinations overlapped with my perceived role this summer and my year-round identity as responsible one.  Ann's speaking to me about being "teacherly" served as a primary catalyst to seeing the guide-gone-awry phenomenon.  My own willingness and ability to consider my actions complement her expression.  These, then, are the building blocks of individual and community (i.e., family) health.  In schools, where students and teachers  enter a  prescribed learning environment, appreciating such dynamics allows the educational relationship to grow in healthy directions.  An openness to discovery characterizes genuine learning.  Teenagers face the challenge of recognizing this while forming their roles and identities.

mystery and metaphor: Anne Michaels's novel about grief, poetry and healing

A Greek Jewish stevedore from Salonika tells Jakob's father that "the great mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats."

For now, let's just say I am grateful for having discovered Michaels's 1996 novel, Fugitive Pieces.

Jakob Beers is a young Jewish boy who buried himself to escape the fate of his sister and parents during the Nazi violation of Poland.

He is uncovered, discovered and recovered with the help of Athos, a Greek geologist, who teaches him love and poetry.

After having finished the novel, I told my wife that I would like to start reading it again right away.  During the first reading, I had to balance savoring with progressing; I could easily return, but want to let the images, lines and intuitions settle before I do.

Literature and History

     People schooled and practiced in history, look at artifacts and listen to contemporary accounts, in order to learn about present and past human activity.  From these specifics, historians develop general descriptions and theories.  For example, they ask, “What patterns are emerging from this study?”  Their answers help everyone see the past, understand the present and navigate the future.
    People trained and experienced in literature, encounter stories, poems and other forms of literary art—in order to understand the individual human.  From these literary expressions, students build knowledge of our common experience.  For example, they ask, “Who is this person?” and “What does it feel like to be this person in this world?”  While using the artist’s guidance to answer such questions, literature students need to imagine precisely.
    In some literary circles, people discuss artistic merit.  Through scholarly debate, they try to establish the better or best story.  For example, they may claim a story has too much unnecessary detail or is too predictable. How elegantly, in other words, does the author sew together the various artistic threads?
    Such literary debate, however, has its limitations.  The more enduring value comes from conjuring, comprehending and appreciating the lives of individuals—for example, Gogol in Jhumpra Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake.  Although this first generation Bengali-American is named for the Russian author of “The Overcoat,” not until the final moments of the novel does Gogol begin reading this short story.  It has taken him thirty years to open the book—the book given to him by his father, the book that saved his father’s life, the book that gave him his name.  Lahiri’s novel helps readers understand why it took Gogol so long to turn to page one, and how his experiences mirror those of other individuals struggling to make a new home in a new country like the United States.