So I started a new class the other day and my professor who I have had 100 times it feels like asked us to write an in-class essay about something we hate, and what from our childhood made us hate it. I hesitate to post this as my brother told me the other day the "point of blogs is for people to make other people feel bad for them" But I'm trying to teach myself he doesn't know everything and this is NOT intended to make anyone feel bad for me, but once again anonymously post something. The feeling of being anonymous, at least to some people here, is somewhat exhilarating, and somewhat helping me take a step in the direction of letting people read what I write. So here is my essay in response to my professor, who has always hated my writing style. -
Fleck’s back I tell my friend last night. She decides to switch our order of two glasses of wine into the whole bottle. She knows I’ll need it. She doesn’t ask me to explain, she doesn’t ask who he is, or why I care he’s back. She knows. I pull out my computer and we get down to business. I explain what will be required of me in the next few essays. We talk about how I’m going to get around it. We both know I’m not going to get around it. Getting around Fleck is like getting around a slow-walking fat lady in a crowded mall, it just isn’t going to happen. I’m going to have to write what he wants me to write and how he wants me to write it. I’m going to have to allow him to use his expertise to critique my every word. Expertise, that although incredibly extensive, differ extensively from my own style of writing.
After our second glass she suggests that I throw the towel in and give him what he wants. If he wants me to write about a place, write about a place. Pick a place and forget everything else and just write about it. She suggests several places but she knows I won’t go for it. She knows I won’t write something I don’t feel. Yet she knows I won’t share something I do feel. So she shuts her mouth and orders more wine.
It’s not exactly Fleck that bothers me. After all he is a professor teaching a writing class and I can’t exactly expect him to not make me write. I can’t expect someone him or anyone else for that matter to understand this. Except the girl across from me ordering the wine, I can expect her to understand it, because well, by now she’s drunk and should understand everything, and because she’s been there, through most of it. Editing papers I’ve written that share my feelings, and then watching me erase half of it before I turn it in. She’s listened to me wine and cry over in class impromptu writing, and how put on the spot I feel. She knows better than to ever try and read over my shoulder as I write. She just understands the depth of where this started and how it has grown.
Growing up there were two things I could do, and do well. I could read and I could write. Now by writing I don’t mean spelling correctly or even forming grammatically correct sentences. I could write. I perhaps was one of the few third graders who had developed a style. I couldn’t say a good style or a bad style but it was my style. I loved to share my writing; I knew how to capture an audience. I would write twenty page stories while the rest of the class had four pages. I would write my classmates into my story, making them feel apart of it as every good reader always wanted to be. They would linger on my every world of some stupid “The Dinosaur Ate the Third Grade” story. I for one second, the quite girl in class got to be the star. I got to be good at something really good, not just people saying I was good. My mother would make me stand up in front of her friends at parties and read the things I wrote. And people liked it, not just saying so, they liked it. I filled up journal after journal, mostly of stupid little girl talk like my first crush and arguments with my mother, but it was, or so I thought, really good stupid little girl talk. It was always good writing, all the way through middle school when I used to stand up at writing night where parents would come to hear kids read, and wow them. My mother always came. She might have missed a hundred soccer games and a hundred more softball games, but my mother never missed, not even one time, me reading my writing. Parents she didn’t know would find her after these readings and comment on pushing me harder, getting me published, and sending my stuff somewhere. I rewrote Our Town in current times, I did a mock of Forrest Gump’s “Life is like a box of chocolates” Only it was called “Life is Like An Artichoke.” I had my style, and as I wrote more and more I found my voice.
The problem was the distinctness of my voice and my style and my inability to turn them off. Every paper I wrote was distinctly me. The style was mine. I wrote ungrammatically and wasn’t sure how to turn it off. My sentences were run-ons, and fragments. When I tried turn them off nothing sounded right to me anymore. When I turned them off it wasn’t mine.
In my opinion high school is the time where children begin to come into their own, to find themselves. Whether or not it should be this way, children become part of groups or clicks. You are either the baseball player or the art kid who wears all black and sneaks outside to smoke cigarettes or other things. I knew I couldn’t be the soccer player, I was good when I was little because I was fearless, but I was reaching a time where I need skill not just aggression. I quit softball because it was time to face the facts that I just plain sucked at it. So I was going to write. Write my fragments all over the place, write my voice, write my style. Write because I could be the best writer and never have to worry about being the best number two.
I didn’t write in high school, and I really didn’t write again. When I did, I didn’t share it. I tried out for the honors English class my school offered. We had to write an in-class essay in response to a piece of writing we were required to read. Only I didn’t feel the reading, so I couldn’t make myself feel my writing. But I wrote. It didn’t matter what I wrote, and this day I don’t remember what I wrote. I just know that what I wrote wasn’t good enough. That someone decided it was ok to take away from me the one thing I had. The one thing I was the best at. Someone decided that my fragments, and lack of subject verb agreements meant I couldn’t write. Someone decided I should burry my style and my voice and write more like everyone else.
I did a few years back, begin to write again but I write for myself. I write what I want when I want. It’s still the same style and voice I had in third grade only I am less confidant about sharing it. I still despise writing for teachers, on subjects I feel anything about. This is my business, and to me the equivalent of asking a rape victim to take off their cloths and allow someone to critique them.
I’ll never know what to do in this situation. I cannot ever allow someone to do to me what was done so many years ago, however I cannot allow myself to write some other voice or other style. Allowing someone to grade my writing is to me allowing someone to grade how I look, or how I walk, it is just me. It isn’t going to change.
So when I say Fleck is back, it’s not so much him I mind. It’s the fact I will be faced with a decision. Do I make up something that isn’t me, and write in a voice which isn’t mine and a style that lacks fragments and run-ons? Do I adapt to what I can tell is more of his style. He would say no, as any good teacher would, but as any human knows we like what we like, and think is good, what we know as good.
I figure I drink more wine, and hang out with my friend more. And listen when people tell me all good writing is not liked by all. And I allow him to make suggestions or critique me, and inside I learn to teach myself again that I am good, and I can capture an audience even if it was only a classroom of thirty third graders or the people at my mother’s parties. After all who is really qualified to judge the value of my writing except me…
