Everything Comes From Seed

I'm not quite halfway through The Best American Essays of the Century, a book that I bought at Bookman's for nine dollars in trade credit over a year ago, maybe more. I bought it because I teach people how to write essays, and I have a philosophy of learning that involves learning from examples, and examples labeled "the best" by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan are worth learning from. I gave myself permission to read an essay a day or so. I have not kept that pace, but I do find the time to read here and there, so I'm slowly making my way through.

I have made discoveries while reading this book--really, while piling the readings up in my head, one essay by one essay, each a few years down the road from the one I read before it, each a record of how ideas are moving along the century.

1. Race Relations and Civil Rights permeate much deeper into the soil of American History than I realized (or was taught, really). It seems like one of every three or four essays tackles some varied perspective on minorities and majorities in our nation. The four that stick in my head are W.E.B. Du Bois's "On the Coming of John" (education, black/white, poverty), John Jay Chapman's "Coatesville" (repentence of racial crimes whose perpetrators were acquitted), Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (education of a different, social, everyday sort), and Langston Hughes's "Bop" (pop culture's roots in dark dark things)

2. Writing that is worth reading is the process of a careful mind exploring simple moments, questions, or ideas. The ideas themselves do not need to be complicated. Hughes lays out a conversation between two black men about bebop music. James Agee, in "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," puts the evenings in his boyhood neighborhood under the poetic miscroscope. E.B. White writes about revisiting a lake, a place that he visited with his father, as a father himself in "Once More to the Lake." These are not complicated things, but the essays are beautiful, exact, detailed, and careful.

3. Organization is any structure an author uses to prop up his ideas; there are no rules--only control. I've told students before that, while teachers may ask for certain parts of particular structures, in the real world, all that readers ask is that the author seem like he is in control, that he knows where the writing is going. However an author can do that is okay by the public. These essays are examples of that. Wright goes so far as to build his essay in sections marked by roman numerals. They are conversational in tone and include dialect in dialogue, and are of varied length, but the roman numerals shows the reader that Wright knows where he's starting and stopping. He knows the limits of each story, and he lets each one live fully within those limits.

I think these discoveries could work to benefit a class full of learning writers.

The fact that race relations is such an integral thread to American life could spur a class to write about their own experiences living in multicultural environments, about their own life-lessons about "how it is" in terms of stereotypes and racial interactions and what can be done to move "how it is" toward "how it could be."

The idea of growing an essay from a simple idea could be important to the direction given. The work a student should do is not the work of diciphering an assigment; instead, it should be the work of taking a simple question or idea (either given by a teacher or unearthed from life) and mapping it, dissecting it, exploring it, and recording what is found.

Organization and control may be the most difficult to grade, but may also be fun to teach. It would allow a conversation between teacher and student in which the student is the owner of the idea--and of the presentation of the idea--and the teacher is the mentor+audience. In this mode, the student can discover and attempt to record, and the teacher can react, ask questions, and give gentle suggestions to mold people who can control the wild ideas in their heads that sneak around like mice or flail like loosed fire hoses. The only rule is: learn to control the idea, to package it so it can be unpacked and understood.

And They See That It Is Good, So They Try To Cram It All Into Their Allotted Two-to-Three Pages

Focus is one of the most addressed issues in the DV Writing Lab. Often, student writers come in with a draft that they cranked out at home and ask us to "check it." What they mean is: Find my mistakes, oh writing nerd (basically, if not in those exact words). What they need more times than not, however is: focus.

I usually make people talk through their papers before we read them to see how much control they have of their ideas apart from the pages on which they flung their words in a coffee-infused, television-distracted, text-message-interrupted whirl of keystrokes. I ask them, "What is your paper about?" It's a simple question based on the precision of the second-person pronoun that ninety-nine percent of the time results in a student regurgitating the question or prompt given them by their instructor, or spitting out a one-to-three word phrase such as "construction" or "global warming" or "legalization of pot."

The former could go anywhere, really, but the latter, after combining their answers to my questions with a quick review of their essay, leads to a discussion of the idea of focus, a slippery rascal that is deceptively simple ("focus" is not some esoteric literary term) to the point that it could be slipped into a lesson on writing by a teacher and assumed to be understood without a hitch.

Even the student could assume they get it. They fill a few pages with their thoughts on construction work. They tell some stories, build their credibility with experiences working alongside construction-working fathers and injuries earned with the mis-hit of a hammer (or even worse, injuries observed in coworkers involving nail guns or falling _____ stories). They slip in a sentence here and there about how the foreman's job is to keep people safe and make sure the job gets done, and they have an essay on Why They Want To Be A Foreman. Done done and done.

Here is where one of the more important discoveries about writing I've made while tutoring full-time comes in. They assume that, because they did not talk about anything but construction, they have achieved focus. The problem is that the essay is not supposed to be a collection everything they know about construction (or global warming or pot or anything else). It's supposed to explain why this certain author wants to be a foreman on a construction crew--not a worker and not the project manager, but the foreman, who has specific responsibilities and duties.

The stories about smashing thumbs and nearly missing getting impaled with nails were interesting and detailed and appeared to be on topic, and they could be, if the student sees how to focus. Everything goes back to the central idea. Everything. If it's in the neighborhood, that's not focus. That's blurred edges.

This happens with essays about mothers and fiances, jobs and family vacations, hopes for future jobs, favotire holidays, scars, characters in books, and everything else that students are asked to write about. They see stories they want to tell or facts that they think would be interesting or information that they assume is indispensable and try to get it all down on the pages, all of it all of it all of it, and it's too much because they thought about the general topic, but not about what they are specifically saying about that person or thing or idea.