Experiments in Applying Butt to Chair

Wrote about 740 words in an hour. Handwritten. (Sometimes I handwrite, sometimes I type. Switching back and forth helps jog my Creative Voice. I let it decide which to do at any given moment.)

Not my highest word count in an hour, but I did have a brief stretch in the story where I haggled over word choice and phrasing. I try to not get bogged down in such things, but there are times when I really have a way I want something to sound, and my first few attempts aren’t quite getting the rhythm. So, I try out a few different options: moving words around, switching out phrases, writing sentences, scratching them out, then writing new ones, etc.

I told myself I wasn’t moving from my chair for one hour, and lo and behold, it worked. I sat in my chair for one hour and wrote a decent chunk of words. Now I am writing this blog post, so more words abound.

Today was a day off from teaching, so this one-hour, uninterrupted writing time is a bit of an experiment. I usually rush to write a few hundred words in the morning before work, but this is the first time in several weeks where I’ve had a quiet afternoon (no children at home), and I’ve been able to write. I wanted to see if I had the focus and stamina to sit and write for an hour without interruption, and the answer is yes. I can do it. I can probably take a ten-minute walking break and do it again for another hour. I can foresee myself doing this for three or four hours in a day, if I had such chunks of time. I might even try it later this afternoon, when the kids are home from school, to see if I can do it with a little bit of noise and distraction hovering around.

I can see myself doing this day in and day out. A day spent writing.

I can’t say I’ve cracked “writer’s block” or anything (hahaha, far from it!), but I will say that I’ve gotten better and better at finding strategies and methods to be more focused and confident. A few years ago, sitting and writing for two or three hours sounded good in theory, but I had a terrible time actually doing it. I would jump on the internet for “just a minute” and end up there for hours. I would tell myself to go down to my computer and write, but then a million other things would suddenly become extremely urgent, and I’d do all those other things instead of the one thing I told myself I wanted to do.

A few years ago, I worried that I simply wasn’t cut out to write professionally because I didn’t have the discipline or work ethic to make it happen. When I did have hours upon hours of time on my hands, I squandered it.

Today, in this butt-in-chair experiment, I’ve seen that I AM capable of blocking time for writing, doing the writing, and getting the writing done. And wanting to do more writing. Keeping the chain going.

I definitely need to replicate this experiment many more times before I can confidently say my work ethic has improved, but today was a good start. Today showed me I can do it if I want to.

Knowing Stuff

I’m trying hard not to frame this is a “back in my day” vs. “kids these days” thing. I don’t know that people back in the day were more culturally literate than they are today. I suspect not. And cultural literacy changes as culture changes, so the references to things that meant a lot to my parents’ generation or my generation may simply be outdated and that’s cool.

But I do think there’s value to knowing stuff. Not necessarily pop culture ephemera that may wax and wane depending on the year, but deeper stuff. Mythologies. History. Arts and culture that have withstood the test of time. Not just European and American culture either. All cultures and art that are part of the great human repository of imagination and ideas.

But knowing stuff is important. Knowing stuff is how we come to know more stuff; it’s how we come to create more stuff and imagine more stuff and do more stuff.

When I listen to my children talk about their school days, when I see what the curriculum is at our school’s curriculum night, I’m always struck by how little time is given to science and social studies. I often wonder if they are learning about great artists and art movements, great composers and musical genres, mythology, folklore, history, etc.

I really should ask; that’s on me as a parent for not inquiring. I should ask because I do wonder. I think the reason I don’t ask is because I’m afraid the answer is, “Not much.”

Again, I’m not saying things were better when I was in elementary school. I was naturally inclined to be curious about stuff like Greek mythology and the Middle Ages, so I read a lot of that stuff on my own. I can’t disentangle what was my own study from what we did in school. My memory’s not that good.

Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap book posits that the lack of content-based curricula in American schools has been a detriment to education overall, and maybe I’m inclined to agree because of my own biases in the matter. But when I speak to my high school students about things I assume they know — like who the Greek Olympian gods are, or where Iran is, or what art movement we associate with Vincent Van Gogh, or when World War I took place — I’m always astounded by what they don’t know. I suspect that Wexler’s book is on to something.

Again, I’m not saying it hasn’t always been thus. My high school teachers were probably appalled by the ignorance of my generation too.

But even if this is not a new problem, I still kinda, sorta think it’s a problem. Or, if not a “problem,” then at least something we could try to address.

For my older son, who is in second grade, the lack of any systematic delivery of content and information has been a detriment to his enjoyment of school since almost the beginning. He finds school boring partly because he wants to KNOW STUFF and his school doesn’t seem to be able to deliver the goods. He’s immensely curious about geography, prehistory, paleontology, archeology, earth science, and biology. He’s curious about mythology and folklore and monsters. We provide him with books, let him watch documentaries, share our knowledge with him in conversation, but these are all things that happen outside of school. For him, school is almost a distraction from the real learning, which he does on his own at home.

I’m not particularly worried about my children when it comes to cultural knowledge-y stuff. As their parents, we’re able to provide what doesn’t seem to be coming from the school.

But as a teacher, I do kinda, sorta do worry and wonder what I can do to help. I suppose I might give students a chance to learn this information in my own classroom. I’ll admit, this feels daunting because I’m supposed to be “covering” all kinds of other stuff, like how to write. And it’s also daunting because the way we learn about stuff now is to search the internet, and I’m more and more convinced that what we really need to do is go back into the children’s section of the public library and read those books instead.

I wish my high school had a portal that could take my students directly to the local library so they could easily read books and magazines instead of websites. We don’t even have a library in the school where I teach. The access to books is incredibly limited. Even if I wanted to have my students study Greek mythology, we have no ability to do so without hopping on the internet.

Perhaps the solution is to design a research project that demands they use only books. It’s possible. But as with all things education, there’s the question of, “Is this worth it? Is this the best use of our time?” I don’t know the answer. I do know I like books, and there’s more to be learned from reading a stack of non-fiction kids’ books than we might realize.

And yes, I sound incredibly stuffy by simply rejecting the internet out of hand. I understand the Luddite vibes I’m giving off.

I don’t care. I think we need to do some kind of RESET with our students. Give them a solid base of “stuff” — learned from books — before we let them back onto the web. Once they have that base, they can be more discerning and critical about what they encounter online (though nothing’s foolproof); but the goal isn’t to help them figure out which websites are “trustworthy” and which are not. The goal is to get them some knowledge about the world. A base with which to start. Then they can start the process of being critical about sources and biases.

Or not. Maybe I’m just cranky. These are the times in which the so-called problems of education seem insurmountable, and yet, maybe all of this is a tempest in a teapot and none of it really matters.

I do feel an urge to set some general principles and challenge the students to follow them.

  1. If you have a question, sit with it for a while and try to come up with your own answers before looking elsewhere.
  2. If you have a question, have sat with it for a while, and are ready to seek answers outside of yourself, look in a book first. Look in lots of books. Go to the library and ask the librarian for help in finding these books. Also, as an option, TALK to a trusted someone who is more knowledgeable and wiser than you.
  3. After reading books and talking to others, go back into your own thoughts and consider what you’ve learned. Weigh it all against your own ideas. Ask more questions and repeat the steps.
  4. Old books are good to consult. Magazines and newspapers (in print) can count too.

I’m not sure if these general principles are even feasible in this day and age. But they might be worth the challenge. I should challenge myself to follow them too.

What’s the stuff I don’t know? What’s the knowledge I could use a refresher on? Which section of the children’s library should I explore first?

Let’s All Read Tanith Lee

If you had asked me about Neil Gaiman before recent horrific news broke about his abusiveness, I would have said I was a fan.

Not a huge fan, but a fan. I liked The Sandman comics, liked Neverwhere, liked the movie adaptation of Stardust, liked some of his children’s books, liked the movie adaptation of Coraline, liked Neverwhere.

But even more than being a fan of his work, I was inspired by him. His prolific career. His advocacy for libraries. His ability to write in several different mediums, from comics to film to novels and short stories. Probably because I myself am NOT prolific but aspire to be, I’m inspired by those artists who ARE prolific: Bradbury, Andre Norton, Brandon Sanderson, Gaiman. And Gaiman’s brand of dark fairy-tale-esque fantasy suits my sensibilities quite a bit. I’ve never loved anything he wrote, but I definitely liked a lot of it, and even more importantly, I was inspired by it.

I can’t deny my inspiration, as much as it sickens me that I was inspired by such a creep.

The accusations against him are absolutely horrible and sickening. I don’t really have anything to add other than I hope his crimes are punished and his victims find healing.

But the accusations of plagiarism that Kristine Kathryn Rusch mentioned in her latest Patreon post were total news to me, and now I see that perhaps even the ways in which Gaiman’s work inspired me were a lie.

I have heard of Tanith Lee, but I haven’t read anything by her. Now I see that this negligence needs to be remedied ASAP. If Gaiman was stealing her ideas and her style this whole time, then I was getting inspiration from the wrong person. I should be reading Tanith Lee. I WILL be reading Tanith Lee.

And because she too was prolific, I have a new writer to admire.

Let Gaiman fade into shadow and infamy. Let him face both human and cosmic justice.

But let’s the rest of us go read some Tanith Lee.

I Like Essays!

“Listen, we all hate reading essays. Nobody likes reading essays. Nobody likes writing essays either.”

This was spoken by an English teacher at a conference I attended earlier this week.

I knew what he meant. I think we all knew what he meant. I’m not trying to be obtuse by ignoring the context of his statement. But when he expressed his aversion to both reading and writing essays, I couldn’t help but shake my head.

Yes, I know he was talking about student essays (as far as the reading part goes), and he was primarily talking about the literary analysis-type essay. And I know that as far as the writing of essays comment, he was also talking about the essays he probably wrote in school, i.e.: the literary analysis-type essays.

Again, I’m not trying to be obtuse.

But behind the context, I think this teacher was expressing something all-too-common in our world, so utterly shaped by formal education as it is, and that is the idea that essays — both as a genre of writing and a genre of reading — are boring.

And yet, I read essays nearly every day — not student essays — and I read them for fun, of my own volition. And also, if that weren’t enough, I also write essays many times a week. I may call them “blog posts” or whatever, but they are nevertheless essays. They are non-fiction works of prose exploring an idea or topic. This, right here, that you are reading, is an essay!

Teachers and schools are the main culprits in this slandering of the essay. We’ve set up school and the way we teach writing to utterly suck all joy out of writing essays. And we hardly ever give students fun essays to READ (meaning essays with voice and opinion and about interesting topics), and even when we do occasionally give them such essays, we don’t encourage them to write something similar with just as much voice and opinion and interest. The best we do is give them the personal narrative essay assignment, but often enough, we don’t show them any personal narrative essays that are fun to read. If students are lucky, they’ll get to read some in an AP Lang class, but most students, unfortunately, do not take that class.

So they (and their teachers) are stuck with this notion that an essay must be this planned-out thing, with five paragraphs, intro/body/conclusion, all life and interest sucked out of it, and not worth anyone’s time.

I’m guilty of it too. Partly because the expectation from both parents and students is that “real” writing is learning how to write literary analysis; the only writing that matters is the kind of writing that college professors in the humanities will ask of students. But even college professors in the humanities don’t necessarily want these kinds of essays! But parents and students think they do.

And even more than that, the literary analysis essay can, in fact, be a wonderful thing to both write and read, once the writer lets go of this notion that it is a drudge, and the reader actually reads one worth reading.

Some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my reading experience has been reading essays by folks like Susan Sontag or Roger Ebert or Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace. Whip-smart people with idiosyncratic opinions who can write in inimitable voices: What’s not to like?

My students are always astounded when we read some crazy essay from the pages of The Best Non-Required Reading series, and I point out that, yes, that thing you just read is an ESSAY. That brilliant piece of writing about Tonya and Nancy is an ESSAY. Essays are fun to read. They can be incredibly fun to write if you push aside the notion that they are some sort of school exercise but are instead the way people communicate their ideas, knowledge, and opinions to others through writing.

Half the stuff we watch on Youtube are “essays.” People talking to the camera their thoughts and opinions about a topic. If you were to take the spoken words and put them on paper, you’d pretty much have an essay. And there is absolutely nothing about the essay as a form that says you have to be objective or remove all personal voice or treat it like a lab report. Some essays might need to be written like that, but surely not all. The essay is one of the most flexible and versatile of non-fiction genres there are. To reject the essay is to say, “I don’t like reading about other people’s ideas or opinions.” What kind of dull, incurious person would you be if you said that?

Anyway, I’m still annoyed with this idea that essays are “boring.” And if we all know the type of essays that get assigned in school are boring to write and read, then why on earth do we keep assigning them? Why do we keep approaching the art of essay writing as if it’s some bland, cookie-cutter thing?

I’m all for teaching students about how to support their claims with evidence. I’m all for teaching students how to connect their ideas through a line of reasoning. I’m all for teaching students how to write a thesis. But NONE of these things are boring unless the ideas in the essay are boring. So maybe we can also help students realize that they have the power to write about interesting things. We simply have to stop demanding dullness and give them the freedom to write what they want.

Yes, yes, we need that essay on The Great Gatsby because we’re reading Gatsby and how else can we ensure the students read Gatsby unless we make them write an essay about Gatsby?

Okay, fine. Write about Gatsby. I have no issue with an essay about Gatsby. But let the student choose the purpose of the essay. Let them choose the audience and which voice is appropriate for that audience. And then let them write based on those choices.

A persuasive essay to the English teachers of America to stop making kids read The Great Gatsby.

A personal narrative about how you used Sparknotes and other internet sources to skip reading the novel and still fooled your teacher, and how this kind of thing is fairly common (and I bet even your English teacher has done this before in her time as a student), and why reading Sparknotes can be a good thing, actually, because at least you have some cultural knowledge about Gatsby even if you didn’t read it.

A character analysis where you compare Nick Caraway to the month of December. Or Daisy Buchanan to Las Vegas.

A profile on a modern-day Tom Buchanan, some rich asshole who gets away with everything, and in the process of said profile, you indict the entire American obsession with billionaires and the destruction it has wrought.

I don’t know: there are lots of ways to write an essay about Gatsby that aren’t just “What does the green light symbolize?”

Or, you know, don’t write about Gatsby at all and let the students write about something else. If you’re worried that they need to prove their knowledge of Gatsby, give them a test. Don’t slander the essay in your attempts to assess their reading.

And before we even get to these kinds of literary essays, we should be letting students experience the fun of writing about things that interest them, things they have opinions about, so they can learn that essays are not boring. We should encourage them to write with more voice and personality first before we show them how to tweak that voice to fit the purpose and audience of something intended to be more “academic.” The academic essay is only one type. Let’s get them comfortable with the others first before we move into the headier and more challenging ones.

Let them love essays the same way they might love writing stories or poems. Then they might come to love the literary analysis too. Tell them they’re writing the script for a Youtube video analyzing some random Easter egg in their favorite TV series. After they do it, tell them they wrote an analytical essay. Or have them write an essay analyzing the lyrics of one of their favorite songs. Then tell them that’s the same thing others do when they write about books or poems. That this writing is what we call “literary analysis.” But give them choice. Let them write from their interests. Let them see that the “essay” does not have to follow some made-up “format,” and that it doesn’t have to “be” any certain length. Let both the students and their essays be free from all this useless baggage.

I only learned this when I started blogging. I had kind of learned it in my own AP Lang class as a student, and thankfully it stuck with me through college and adulthood, where I learned that I could write college essays about things that interested me and in my own style as long as I was aware of what my professors expected and didn’t veer too off-course.

But once I started my own blog and wrote about topics that interested me in whichever way I pleased, that’s when I really began to see that essay writing was so much more than academic writing. The lessons of my AP Lang class resurfaced and I saw that this was “real-world” writing. I could do this for an audience. I could do it for money. I could do it simply because I had things to say and the essay was my avenue for saying them. And people — people I had never met before in my life — would read them. For fun.

I like essays. I like to read them, and I like to write them. And I feel bad for anyone who hasn’t had such freewheeling pleasures.

Typing Offline

I really want to get a classroom set of word processing machines for my students to type up their drafts after working in their notebooks. Many of them struggle with writing legibly, and they like the comfort of the spell-check function (I know I do too!).

But I don’t want them accessing the internet, partly because it is distracting and takes them out of flow, but also, more immediately, because some (many?) students have decided to use ChatGPT (and equivalent) to “help” them do their work.

I’m so adamantly opposed to LLM (and other forms of generative “AI”) that I want to remove all temptation and access. If they want to use it in their non-school lives or as adults, I can’t stop them, and whatever, God speed, I guess. But in my classroom, where I value human work and the connection that comes from sharing our written thoughts and stories with others, I want an “AI”-free zone.

Also, I cannot believe more people aren’t talking about the environmental and energy-related issues that come from these AI companies. It’s staggering! All so we can have ChatGPT write fan letters for us? It’s insane. Talk about a solution in need of a problem.

If I was given a fan letter written by some LLM, I would not only be uninterested in it, I would be deeply saddened that someone even thought I would want to read what some language-predictor machine burbled up from its store of (copyright-protected, by the way, and nobody gave it permission to use those) words.

It’s all so meaningless. That’s what saddens me about students turning in “AI”-generated essays and creative writing. It’s a waste of my time. I don’t care about “perfect” grammar or sentences that “sound” good but are devoid of any real meaning or human feeling. I want to know what my students THINK — what THEY think — about their own ideas and experiences.

Of course, what hampers all of this and drives students to use ChatGPT is grading. Once a grade is involved, the pressure is on to get that A, so they will do whatever they need to in order to achieve it. When you try to de-center grading in the classroom, they don’t see the point in trying and don’t do any work. It’s the conundrum of modern schooling. The grade is all that matters; it’s the currency that allows students to get into college, and then once in college, it’s the currency that allows them to graduate and get a job.

Writing, for instance, often has little-to-no importance for students. They don’t see the point other than it’s another hoop to jump through. Sadly, I’ve seen students not even care when the writing piece is something personal or something they’ve chosen to write about. They still don’t see the value.

This is not every student, mind, not by a long shot, but it’s enough to be discouraging. And it’s also enough that it makes me want to get a classroom set of THESE so that students can still type their words, but they must type THEIR words and not the words of some machine.

Anyway, I need about $7000 for a classroom set of twenty. Not sure how to get a grant or donation to pay for that (I’m not even sure the company who makes the word processors has twenty of them waiting around for some random teacher to buy), but it’s a goal for me this year.

I want to emphasize the process of writing, the tactile quality of writing by hand, of communicating through words and pictures, comics, collage, letters written in one’s own hand, doodles, and yes, even typed stuff, but typed stuff that is typed on a keyboard and generated by a human mind and heart.

I want to center our humanity in the classroom this year. Learning is about more — so much more — that getting a grade, getting into college, getting a job. I want to help my students NOT surrender their humanity to a machine.

And I want to hear the clickety-clack of keys typing without any interference from the internet or the corporations who want us all to “embrace” a technology we didn’t ask for. That’s my rant for the new year. Now how can I find seven grand?

“The Writer’s Journey” by Vogler

I got this book from the library about a month ago. It’s due back soon, so I thought I’d make an effort to finish it before then.

I was supposed to read Vogler’s book for a screenwriting class way back in my freshman year of undergrad, but I never actually did. I was very much anti-Hero’s Journey at that time. I’m still not quite sure how I feel about the concept even now, but I thought I could use a bit of a refresher in story structure, and despite my ambivalence about the “Hero’s Journey” with a capital H, I’m interested in archetypes and symbols, and Vogler’s book offers some interest on that score. The archetype stuff is very general, but again, I felt like I need a refresher. Sometimes a re-acquaintance with ideas we already know is helpful; we might see something new in studying them again, or we might see how these ideas work differently within our new context.

Since I’m in the midst of writing a noir fantasy novel that’s leaning heavily on certain tropes and types (while at the same time trying to put my own spin on them… the same dance we’re all doing, basically), I’ve enjoyed reading through Vogler’s descriptions of types like the Shadow, the Shapeshifter, and the Trickster. My main character Grettir has been a bit of all three archetypes so far, and I’m curious why that is. What made me craft a hero who is all these other types at various times? What’s happening under the surface in my imagination that I’m trying to explore?

I can definitely see how my other characters might fit into these frameworks too, and already I’m getting ideas for how I might lean into these archetypes a bit more.

What I like about Vogler’s approach is that he doesn’t prescribe how we should use these archetypes or structures. He’s quick to point out ways in which great stories often subvert or subtly shift these elements to fit the story that’s being told. These are frameworks not prescriptions or dictates. I like that element of freedom, recognizing that every story will be shaped by the teller and the needs of the tale.

The other thing I like about the book is a bit towards the end where Vogler compares the artist’s process of writing and creating to the hero’s journey (hence the title: The Writer’s Journey). What are my Shadows? Who are the Tricksters on my journey?

These questions are not simply cute metaphor. At least for me, they enliven the creative process, showing how this journey into imagination and storytelling is a transformative experience for the writer (and hopefully for the reader too). Not that every story needs to be “important.” In fact, it’s not about the finished story at all because that way leads to writer’s block and frustration.

Instead, the “writer’s journey” framework helps me see that what I’m doing isn’t pointless or stupid. No matter how my stories “turn out,” the act of creating them is what’s important. It’s a journey, after all. The emphasis is on the journey itself and not the finished product. It’s about the writer and her transformation as she goes on this journey.

In some ways, this is what I love about telling stories and writing in general. It’s about what it does to ME. Yes, I hope for the audience to have a good time and get something out of it, but that part is out of my control in the grand scheme. I can write to the best of my ability and hope the audience responds, but I can’t make them have a good time. I can only try.

But for myself, the writer, I do have control. By putting words on a page, I am embarking on my own journey. I’m telling myself the story. I get to face the ups and downs of the adventure, both in the tale I’m telling and in my experience of writing that tale. The act of writing is the journey. I will face Shadows and Threshold Guardians, find Mentors and Allies, and ultimately, if I finish the story, I will face the Ordeal of Critical Voice, defeat it, and bring back the Elixir of Life.

(All these terms are covered in Vogler’s book as part of his analysis of the Hero’s Journey, particularly in films; he cribs a lot from Joseph Campbell.)

Anyway, this is what struck me as I read through as much of the book as I could before it had to go on its own journey, back through the return chute at the library.

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