Tag: writer’s notebook

Molly Backes on How to Be a Writer

Molly Backes, an author of young adult fiction, considers the question from a mother about her teenager, “She wants to be a writer. What should we be doing?”

Her first answer was, “You really do have to write a lot. I mean, that’s mostly it. You write a lot.”

But then she thought about it, and that’s where it gets really interesting:

First of all, let her be bored. …

Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. …

Let her have secrets. …

…

Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. …

Let her make mistakes.

…

Let her find her own voice, even if she has to try on the voices of a hundred others first to do so. …

Keep her safe but not too safe, comfortable but not too comfortable, happy but not too happy.

Above all else, love and support her. …

— Bakes (2011): How to Be a Writer

At the end she posts a picture of her collection of forty-two writer’s notebooks.

It’s a wonderfully written and well considered post that I’d recommend to anyone trying to teach writing and language, particularly if you take the apprentice writer approach. And, I’ve always been a great believer in the power of boredom.

Backes’ advice more-or-less summarizes my interpretation of the Montessori approach: create a safe environment and give students the opportunity to explore and learn, even if it means a certain amount of struggle and failure.

Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway is another great example of creating an environment that offers students the opportunity to explore.

It’s also interesting to note how differently writers and other experts think, yet how much their practices overlap. Mathematician Kevin Houston also recommends writing a lot when he explains how to think like a mathematician, but his objective is to use full, rigorous sentences to clarify hard logic, and less to explore the beauty of the language or discover something profound about shared humanity.

Sentience = life?

His thought turned to the Ring, but there was no comfort there, only dread and danger. No sooner had he come in sight of Mount Doom, burning far away, than he was aware of a change in his burden. As it drew near the great furnaces where, in the deeps of time, it had been forged, the Ring’s power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will. As Sam stood there, even though the ring was on on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, … – The Return of the King (Tolkien, 1955).

One of the ways students collect seed ideas for writing is by recording significant quotes from things they read in their Writer’s Notebooks; things that resonate with them; things they might want to respond to. I use this blog in a similar way. My notebooks tend to be filled with equations, sketches and diagrams, while anything I can type ends up here….

I’ve been rereading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for the xth time (where x is a number too large to recall). As the Ring crosses the mountains into Mordor its power grows and it becomes hard to control. If the ring represents technology and its bearer, at this point Sam, represents the common person, then we see the choices facing the individual in the modern society; either to take the ring and bear the consequences of using complex, powerful technology that you do not understand, or to forgo it and accept the loss of power that entails. Sam faces what we face every day, though usually we’re unconscious of the decision.

This is also, pretty much, the central theme of Jurassic Park (I can see that this post is turning into an intertextual essay, but we’ll see). Crichton expresses the point more explicitly when he has the mathematican, Malcome, diatribe about the lack of humbleness of the creators of Jurassic Park; they build on existing technology without spending the time and effort learning how to use it. Crichton’s character believes that in putting the time and effort in mastering something, we learn to respect it, and give more though to the morals and ethics of how and if to use it. Easy to use, genetic technology is the equivalent of the Ring. It is powerful, too easy to use, and can lead to disastrous consequences.

We’ve been covering the characteristics, patterns and needs of life this last week, and, in discussing what qualifies as alive and what does not, the question of robots and computer viruses came up. Well if software does become sentient, will we have to recognize it as being alive? There’s no end to the number of science fiction books and movies that address all number of aspects of this issue. The self-aware SkyNet in the Terminator is one paranoid end-member example, but I’ve always liked James Luceno’s catholic computers in Big Empty.

However, advances in intelligent computing have not achieved sentience quite yet, and it might be a while. Yet, it would be interesting to consider a world where everyone has a computer on the brink of sentience. Oh what power would we each have then. And if these intelligent computers’ (potential) characters are colored by their interaction with human individuals, the good, the bad and the ugly, what would happen when a billion pieces of software cross the sentience threshold all at once (with the latest and greatest software update ever)?

Writers’ rules for writing

The Guardian newspaper interviewed authors for their rules for writing fiction. The lists are quite interesting, and we try to instill many of the rules in our language curriculum:

Read it aloud to yourself because that’s the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear). – Diana Athill

Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary. – Geoff Dyer

Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all … – Geoff Dyer

Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no ­inessential words can every essential word be made to count. – Diana Athill

Some are a little odd:

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils. Margaret Atwood

And many make you think:

Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue. – Helen Dunmore

Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. – Geoff Dyer

Only bad writers think that their work is really good. – Anne Enright

I still have not gotten through the whole list, but Graeme Wood summarizes, “the rules sound haughty and dismissive, which is about what you should expect when you ask skilled craftsmen to reduce their craft to a few simple rules.” Yet to me, looking at a few of them at a time makes for a nice space for reflection on my own writing. It’s also the sort of semi-random trivia that my students seem to like. I know they’ll take issue with some of these rules, but that in itself would be make it useful.

For this reason, I like Jeffrey Tayler’s advice (which is not on the list):

[R]emember: None of us gets out of here alive. So don’t fear risks. Rebel. Be bold, try hard, and embrace adversity; let both success and failure provide you with unique material for your writing, let them give you a life different enough to be worth writing about.