Spirited Writing

I want to talk a bit about "real life" language.

I've uploaded three images below. All three are screenshots of a post from an Instagram account that belongs to Callen Hearne (@callenhearne). For what it's worth, he has 12.9K followers and his account is public, so hopefully it's OK that I'm sharing these images (if not, someone please let me know and I'll ask permission). I actually don't follow him, but I do follow his wife Abbi, who has an even larger following (50 thousand). They're in the wedding photography business but their niche is "adventure wedding and elopement." They're young, mid-twenties, married, living half the year on the road in their van, traveling with their dog Charlie. I preface my comments with this information just so you have context. 

The post I happened upon is a picture of the Yosemite sky, taken sometime in the wee hours of the morning. The image is stunning, but it was Callen's message that interested me, as well as one of the comments that followed.

Callen's writing style is slangy and original, filled with its own dialect and grammar. It's unfiltered and genuine, a Gen Y guy talking to the universe, to his followers, to anyone who wants to listen, including this 60-something community college English professor.  

Callen Hearne isn't writing for a grade. He's just writing. He's developed his own voice, which is authentic, unconventional, funny, honest. You don't grade this kind of writing. You enjoy it. Listen to it. Laugh with it. Cry with it.

I skimmed some of the comments and one in particular stood out. She writes, "I'm in college and sometimes my brain just needs to read something like this." Then she adds, "Thanks for helping my head stay creative and my language spirited."

"Sometimes my brain just needs to read something like this."

Sometimes English teachers' brains need to read something like this. 

Spirited language.

Authentic language.

Original language.

Language unencumbered by rules or red ink.

I love this kind of writing. 

I wish I could write this way. 

I wish I could teach this kind of writing.

English teachers assign papers and essays. We take note of missing commas and periods. Misspellings. Fragments. Slang. We comment and edit and correct. We try to encourage and inspire but aren't always successful.

It's becoming clear to me that some of my students this semester won't pass my class, though I'll do my best to help them succeed. But even if they don't, can't, or won't pass, I hope, at the very least, I can encourage them to write anyway. Encourage them to "talk to the universe" in their own voices. In their own Authentic. Original. Spirited. Voices.

LINKS

The Hearnes Adventure Wedding and Elopement Photography

The Hearnes Instagram

Dillard on Writing and Revising: "It's Not Holy Writ!"

We began this semester in English 50 by reading two pieces by Annie Dillard, the first, an excerpt from her book, Holy the Firm, about a moth that flies into a candle's flame; the second, an essay called "How I Wrote the Moth Essay--and Why."

There's a lot to love about Dillard's approach to writing. I especially love that she has amassed and indexed over 30 of her own journals which she relies on for her writings, her personal Google database, if you will. I also love her remarks on writing and revising:

On getting started:

How do you go from nothing to something? How do you face the blank page without fainting dead away? To start a narrative, you need a batch of things. Not feelings, not opinions, not sentiments, not judgments, not arguments, but specific objects and events: a cat, a spider web, a mess of insect skeletons, a candle, a book about Rimbaud, a burning moth.

What do you do with these things? You juggle them. You toss them around  . . . you need bits of the world to toss around. You start anywhere, and join the bits into a pattern by your writing about them. Later you can throw out the ones that don't fit.

On revising: 

[Revising] requires . . . nerves of steel and lots of coffee.

It doesn't hurt much to babble in a first draft, so long as you have the sense to cut out irrelevancies later.

The most inept writing has an inadvertent element of suspense: the reader constantly asks himself, where on earth is this going?

Usually I end up throwing away the beginning: the first part of a poem, the first few pages of an essay, the first scene of a story, even the first few chapters of a book. It's not holy writ.

Revising is a breeze if you know what you're doing--if you can look at your text coldly, analytically, manipulatively.

On engaging her readers:

I try to give the reader a story, or at least a scene (the flimsiest narrative occasion will serve), and something to look at.

I try not to hang on to the reader's arm and bore him with my life story, my fancy self-indulgent writing, or my opinions. He is my guest; I try to entertain him. Or he'll throw my pages across the room and turn on the television.

My favorite: "It's not holy writ."

More important to me, working with students in a beginning composition class, is growth. Show me where you started, I tell them, show me the messy trail that began with those first scribbles in your writing journal culminating in that nicely formatted (MLA!) final draft. I'll read the final draft and give it a grade, yes. But if I don't see a finished product that's much different from the early drafts, the final grade suffers.

I tell my students this, but I'm not sure they hear, not sure they care.

First draft, narrative paragraph.

Some do, though. I was pleased to see a few students getting the idea in a fairly inconsequential early writing assignment, a narrative paragraph, describing a place they'd visited. They brought their paragraphs to class, but I didn't collect them. We talked about Dillard, on hands and knees in her bathroom, peering at the discarded remains of sow bugs ("those little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in houses, and die round"), earwigs, moths ("wingless and huge and empty"), that have collected behind her toilet, beneath a spider's web, and marvel (I did, anyway) at the writer's interest in things most of us would sweep up or vacuum away. There, in the detritus, a story, a narrative, a life lesson.

What do you see? What does it feel like? Smell like? Look like? Show me!

I allocated class time to experiment on their drafts, then sent them home to revise ("It's not holy writ!"). The next class session, I collected both drafts, and read them yesterday.

Revised draft, narrative paragraph.

Some got the idea. I saw scribbles and notes on the first drafts, incorporated into the second, and gave them 10 points for trying. A few students turned in two drafts, virtually identical. I deducted 5 points for not trying. The occasional student rose to the challenge and wowed me. Carina's, I show here. Students like this make it all pretty much worthwhile.

Recommended Reading: A Word or Two About Stephen J. Dubner

Just finished reading Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, by Stephen J. Dubner. Prior to that I read his earlier book called Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief, a fascinating autobiography of (as Dubner puts it) "three noisy souls." 

I tried to get my dad to read the latter, and I think he gave it the good Boy Scout try but evidently gave up. (I asked him when we got together at Christmas if he'd finished it and he shrugged and said he lost interest. My dad is nothing if not consistent: he just isn't interested in religion, no matter how articulate, honest, funny, or intelligent the writing.)

For the record, "articulate, honest, funny, and intelligent" doesn't even begin to describe Dubner's writing. His pedigree is obviously first-rate (here's a link to his bio), so I'm not sure why my dad would snub him. Dubner could probably write about garbage disposals and still be engaging.

I love the way he writes. He's brutally, painfully, excruciatingly, honest. At times, reading Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed even, for Dubner. His behavior comes across as stalking to the reader, despite the fact that he insists he's not a stalker. The title of one of his chapters is, in fact, "I am Not a Stalker!" (The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks.) Yet the very point of this book is to examine the cultural phenomenon of hero-worship. If the confessional nature of the book makes the writer--admittedly obsessed if not infatuated with his childhood hero, Pittsburgh Steeler running back Franco Harris--look foolish, so what? Dubner's a journalist. At their best, journalists report objectively on what they see. If they're being fair, if they're doing their job, the reporting can and should be brutal. Why should he be less brutal when he's the subject of his own reporting? 

At the end of my copy of the book, there's a section called P.S. that includes additional essays by the author. Several of these essays are those that were published in the New York Times Magazine having to do with various sports-related topics: John Unitas ("Steel-Town Quarterback"), football stadiums ("Stronger Than Steel: The Demise of Three River Stadium"), and so on. 

Reading these marvelous essays, one understands why Dubner's an award-winning sports writer. He's an amazing stylist. His metaphors are so fresh, so unusual, so fitting, one can only assume he spends hours conjuring them. His attention to detail boggles the mind. He must literally take notes on life. 

My new ambition is to write half as well as Dubner writes: to take personal risks, to be honest, to call it as I see it, to record life as I live it, to see if, perchance, I have anything left to say.