"What happened to the book links and Paypal buttons?" Paypal ganked too much information about the personal identities of people whose identities are not being released on the Internet. If and when that's fixed, linking Paypal to a completely new bank account associated with none of those people's individual identities, then the Paypal buttons at this site will work again and the daily book reviews will return. I am still reading and selling books in the real world--just brought in a copy of Alias Grace this morning. The computer shows that a lot of you aren't missing the book reviews at all. It also shows that other people are. So we will work on setting up a new, securer Paypal account.
Meanwhile, another cyberchore I've started doing is sorting out the unread e-mail in my main e-mail account, much of which consists of links to Associated Content posts from 2009. Dead links, that is. And then at home I've taken up the long-put-off chore of reading through the notes I took in high school toward a novel I never wrote.
From grade five or six on, I wrote short children's stories, typed them up on a typewriter, and read or told them to children I baby-sat--my natural sister and her little friends. The children and their older siblings were fascinated. I also worked sporadically toward the goal of writing one or two good full-length novels for and about children, and sometimes my brother and I worked on one that he wanted to write. Then in high school I brought home some second-rate school stories from the school library, and my brother and I got into writing parodies of bad young adult novels. One of the depths of bad comedy that comes to mind involved a character being dumb enough to attempt suicide as a statement, by leaping out of a window--a first-floor window--but she did get seriously scratched and bruised, falling into a rosebush. Let us draw the curtain of charity over those stories. None of them ever reached full novel length, and that was a good thing.
Meanwhile, at school I was observing the raw material for what I thought might become a decent school story--competition between students at different grade levels when they were together in "open" classes. I started taking notes. Sort of.
What I actually wrote would have made no sense at all to anyone else. It doesn't make much sense even to my sympathetic older self. On one line I'd write "I like this class" or "Teacher A is okay." Ten lines down the page, "This class is so boring," or "I wish Teacher B hadn't retired. A isn't doing as good a job."
As I read these pages at fifty, three thoughts keep coming to mind.
One of them is "Who ever told this child she could write? What motive could they possibly have had?"
One is "Rereading things you wrote at the age of fifteen is a way to relive your adolescence--at least, part of it--the part where you wanted to die of embarrassment."
One is "Why did I fail to burn this rubbish at least thirty years ago?"
The answer to which is, of course, "So that I could see how what my teachers kept saying, in college where they finally looked beyond punctuation and tried to read what we wrote, applied to my writing too."
My English 101 teacher used to plead, "Try to write down every detail you see and hear, or remember seeing and hearing. Let readers make their own value judgments. Write what you see and hear, and then you can go back and remove all the details that are just taking up space."
My English 102 teacher used to growl, "Nobody wants to read about you any more. This is English 102, where we do real research. Save your feelings for your diaries. Write about what you learned."
My Music 105 teacher used to remind us, every time we had to write about the live concerts we were required to attend in the evenings or the records we listened to in class, "I want to see all the technical musical terms you can work in. Don't keep on about the 'I liked, I didn't like.' Tell me what you can hear the musicians doing."
In college I did not take the time to go back and reread those high school class notes as a bad example; I just tried to follow instructions and write things the teachers could stand to read.
Now, thirty-some years later, I do remember some--but only some--of the things I was seeing and hearing that prompted those useless notes like "This class is okay." I even remember what I was thinking. "We are reading about Europe. A guest brought in some photographs and souvenirs from her trip to Switzerland. The room where she stayed in a chalet was very dark. It had a scenic view of a steep, icy, melodramatic mountain. I wish she had brought some of the actual chocolates instead of a Polaroid snapshot of them" would have taken longer to write by hand than "This class is okay." Sitting in the class, I'd think that in the evening, at my typewriter, I'd have time to work these memories into my fictional story; for the moment "This class is okay" ought to be enough. And then I'd go home and, mostly, not work what had really happened into the fictional story.
Back then young writers had a problem that has to be less of a problem now. Then as now, it had been pouring down words all day at school and I wanted to do something with the other parts of my brain. Then as (I hope) now, teenagers had a few chores and responsibilities at home. I was the eldest child; my mother had less energy than I hope the mothers of most young writers have, so my natural sister had probably been bored witless all day; she expected to be entertained when my brother and I got home, and our parents would always order us to find a way to amuse her the minute she set up her whine. But also, back then, everyone typed on an actual clattering typewriter that my whole Highly Sensory-Perceptive family could hear all over the house. Much as my siblings wanted me to write full-length novels, much as my parents theoretically liked the idea of a teenager writing a full-length novel however dreadful--in practice, nobody wanted to listen to that typewriter. Everyone, including me, had a powerful unconscious motive to distract me from writing more than a page or two at a time.
All good writers have to type, or worse yet hand-write, every single letter in every word, several times until all the words fit together. There are writers, like Walter Scott, who reportedly spent a few hours working out the plot of a novel and then just wrote as many words as his publisher wanted--and his publisher liked fat novels--and hardly ever revised anything; those writers can usually be recognized by the feeling you have, while reading their books, that their books are at least twice as long as they ought to be. There are writers who are able to write out an outline and then write a page or two, one scene of a novel or one section of a nonfiction book, every time they have a free half hour, and come up with a readable book at the end. That's a gift. Those of us who don't have it have to rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite some more.
That's why I was an early adopter of word processing technology. I wasn't really geeky, didn't care about programming my first couple of computers to do anything but process words, and snapped up Word Perfect and Microsoft Word when those came along. I got into computers just to reduce the wear and tear writers inevitably put on our housemates' nerves.
Now that I have a computer, do I remember enough of what really went on in those "open classes" to write about the unofficial competitions, grades nine and ten against grades eleven and twelve, and grade nine against grade ten? Probably. Will I write a novel about it? Possibly, if convinced that the world needs another school story. But as I read my notes, I feel more internal motivation to write about how to take notes that are not a complete waste of time.
Nephews, as you live through your own material for young adult novels in high school and college, please take notes on what you see and hear (and perhaps smell) outside your head.
Your older selves will be able to add "...and s/he was feeling bored" if you take the trouble to write about what made that class boring.
"The recording of the classical opera sounded tinny, with soft passages she could barely hear in between the parts with a lot of people shrieking and bellowing at each other."
"The algebra teacher pulled down all the window shades any time the hag noticed a fellow looking out the window, where the ornamental trees he'd helped plant last month were starting to bloom, after he'd already done the stupid review problems."
"Scarlet fever was going around, and for once Tracy Jones with the perfect attendance record had not been able to get the family chauffeur to come to school--was the chauffeur ill too?--and the wall of gigglers behind which I hide my Snarky Class Notes were taking bets whether Jones was going to faint or vomit, but Jones only sat up front looking glassy-eyed."
Those are (fictionalized versions of) three of the possibilities that came to my mind as I read one of my "This class is boring"'s, and not even I, as an adult, can feel enough empathy for the bored and boring teen-troll who wrote "This class is boring" to care which one it was.
More advice for writers? I reviewed this book years ago; I still have one copy, and perhaps some day I'll sell that one.
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