provocations
Please welcome Gabriela Pereira, author of DIY MFA: Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, Build Your Community, to Writer Unboxed today! Gabriela is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur who wants to challenge the status quo of higher education. As the founder of DIYMFA.com, her mission is to empower writers, artists and other creatives to take an entrepreneurial approach to their professional growth. Gabriela earned her MFA in creative writing from The New School and teaches at national conferences, regional workshops, and online. She is also the host of DIY MFA Radio, a popular podcast where she interviews bestselling authors and publishing industry experts.
Today, she revives the MFA debate here at WU. In her words:
For the past eight years, I’ve dedicated my life to studying how writing is taught and learned. While I do believe the traditional MFA or typical workshop model we find at most writing schools can work for some writers, these pedagogical approaches are not universally effective. I believe that when writers take an entrepreneurial approach to their professional growth and education, they set themselves up for learning that gets results and helps them reach their goals.
You can learn more about Gabriela and DIY MFA on her website, and by following her on Facebook and Twitter.
MFA + DIY: An Entrepreneurial Take on the MFA Debate
It’s back-to-school season, and like every year, thousands of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed writers are flocking to academic campuses around the world, searching for that golden ticket that will turn them into authors. This ticket, of course, is the Master of Fine Arts (or MFA) and it is perhaps the most over-priced and un-useful degree in all of academia. I should know: I have one.
When I graduated with my MFA, I didn’t feel as though I learned anything in that academic environment that I wouldn’t have been able to learn in another context. My concerns with the traditional MFA are not just ideological or economic, but also pedagogical. There’s a lot of debate around the advantages and disadvantages of the MFA, but rarely does anyone talk about curriculum.
Over the past eight years that I’ve spent developing writing curricula, I’ve discovered a linchpin, a core factor that can make (or break) a writer’s ability to learn and improve her craft. This is the entrepreneurial mindset, and it means adopting processes and systems from fields outside of writing (like tech startups) and using them to improve your craft. To learn more about how to take an entrepreneurial approach to your writing, you can download a free DIY MFA Starter Kit, but here are three techniques you can apply to your writing right away.
1. Use Iteration to Improve Your Writing Process. Most MFA programs focus on the workshop model: You write something, get feedback from your peers and an instructor, and then you fix it. The problem with this approach is that it assumes you have no problem getting words on the page. The workshop model might help you improve the words once you’ve written them, but it does nothing to help you with the first draft (other than that terror of […]
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Please welcome back author Elizabeth Stephens, who’s here to further the discussion of a somewhat controversial but important topic: Should white writers craft protagonists of color, or vice-versa? A little about Elizabeth from her bio:
Elizabeth Stephens–a self-acknowledged weirdo who has been writing since the age of 11–is a mixed race (black and white) romance and science fiction author and reader of all things that feature tough leading ladies. Her newest release, The Hunting Town, came out July 16, 2017 and is a small town, mafia romance. Last year saw the publication of Saltlands, book two in her dystopian romance series which began with Population. She is a big fan of inclusion and her books always include kick ass ladies of color.
Her day job is in communications for public and private sector clients across Africa.
When she isn’t writing or day-jobbing she can most often be found reading, drawing, throwing pottery, watching horror movies, and protesting for causes that she hopes will make the world a better place for all.
Learn more about Elizabeth and The Hunting Town on her website (where you can find a free self-publishing guide), and by following her on Twitter and Facebook.
White Writers Writing Non-White Characters: Why I Vote Yes, for Commercial Fiction
I recently came across an article in which an author advocated that white writers should not feature characters of color as leading protagonists in their novels. This author made some compelling points that I believe are critical to consider for all writers of literary fiction looking to portray characters outside of their race. Are you a white author trying to tell the story of a disenfranchised Mexican immigrant? Maybe reconsider.
However, are you a white author of erotica looking to cast a dark-skinned black woman as your leading lady? Please, write on! Because when it comes to mainstream, commercial, and genre fiction, I would wholeheartedly challenge this author’s assumption. Characters of color do just as much for minority empowerment as the authors who write them. Thus, I urge this author and others who share the same opinion to place a small asterisk in their argument. Here’s why:
We need to acknowledge some (frustrating) facts.
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Image – iStockphoto: Surpass Pro
‘It’s Populism’
For several years, I was one of the local stars (God help the locals) of PBS pledge drives at a network affiliate in the southerly states of America. That was where I first encountered Doctor Who. More to the point, I encountered its fans.
On the Saturday night of my emcee duties, our phone banks were manned by the desperately devoted teens who watched the show with its awful MOOG-wheedling theme song (we played it a lot to trigger donations) and that infernal business about the flying police box you had to call a TARDIS or be laughed at for showing your Who-ignorant butt.
One of my duties as local star was to explain to our viewers that TARDIS stood for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space”–and to assure them that important concepts about the space-time continuum might be quite close to us as we yammered on about all this. The Beeb had been pumping this stuff into Her Majesty’s living rooms since 1963, you know, 30 years before the Maastricht Treaty. It’s a wonder Europe let them in, let alone out.
The Whovians taught me a lot about entertainment cults, although “cult” is too harsh a word for these kids. They were unfailingly sweet, thrilled, painfully awkward misfits. Most of them could drive a phone and take the pledges coming in, but that was about it. I’d catch glimpses on the monitor of myself in the studio, resplendent (shut up) in my tuxedo, interviewing ardent young citizens dressed in lots of cookware from their mothers’ kitchens.
In this era, stage fright still existed. It took nerve for our strange youths to face the lights and my microphone to tell us how much Who meant to them.
Many of these kids, you could tell, were cripplingly unpopular at school. Or simply invisible. And Who gave them a place in the universe. A place on a live PBS broadcast. We talked about their love for K9, the show’s endlessly annoying mechanical dog. More donations poured in from more misfits watching at home with cheese graters attached to their belts.
These were magnificent, brave young Time Lords and Companions, driven home after the show by the concerned parents of socially challenged children.
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Please welcome author Larry Brooks to Writer Unboxed today! Larry is the author of six novels and three bestselling books on fiction craft, including Story Fix and Story Engineering. A little more about him:
Larry is a career writer from the corporate sector who, like most of you, had nourished the fiction writing dream the entire time. When he isn’t writing, he’s involved with workshops and conferences at the behest of writing groups and clubs, and operates a story coaching service through his website, Storyfix.com. He also offers fiction craft videos through Vimeo.
We’re so pleased to have Larry with us today to drill down into what he says is the big lie holding writers back from actualizing their work in a timely, efficient, and full-bodied way. It’s a long read, but we think you’ll find it well worth your time. Enjoy!
The Big Lie About Writing Compelling Fiction
There’s a quiet rumor circulating among newer writers that professional authors know something they don’t. And that those famous A-listers (B-listers, too) aren’t giving it up.
This may very well be the case. Not so much as a conspiracy, but from a lack of an ability to convey—or a willingness to admit—that what they do can actually be explained, or that it can be taught and learned.
Too often they say this instead:
“I just sit down and write, each and every day, following my gut, listening to my characters, and eventually the magic happens.”
And so, hungry writers who hear this may lean into the belief that the craft of writing a good novel is inexplicable. That it’s something we are born with, or not. It is purely an issue of instinct. Maybe even that your characters actually talk to you.
The nights can get pretty long if you’re waiting to hear voices.
The real dream killer takes wing when writers conclude that there really isn’t anything to know at all. Rather, that you get to make it all up as you go.
And thus the Big Lie is born.
There actually is an enormous wealth of principle-based learning to be discovered and assimilated about how to write a novel that works. And there are folks out there teaching it, albeit with different models and terminology… all of which tends to coalesce into a singular set of interdependent truths.
Maybe it’s not a lie when someone repeats what they believe to be true. But belief, especially about the underpinnings of writing fiction, doesn’t make something true.
It may indeed be true for them. But not necessarily true for you.
Clarity requires understanding the differences.
There is no default best way to write a story, nor is there a prescribed path. Anyone who tells you that organic story development is superior to structured, principle-driven story development, including outlining, is wrong, regardless of their belief in that position.
And vice versa. Both are issues of process, and only that. They are choices, rather than an elevated version of conventional wisdom.
But with finished stories, any division between process and product vanishes. At that point, when you deem a draft to be final, what is true for one writer is suddenly true for all.
Clarity awaits in understanding the difference not only between […]
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Inside Duomo di Milano. Image – iStockphoto: Anshar
#CreditWriters
You may have heard me rail about how strange it is that authors are so bad about crediting their fellow writers.
Consider this sentence: “The Washington Post says the special counsel is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice.” That’s wrong. The Post doesn’t say that, its writers do. The Washington Post–newly returned to us as a crucial journalistic voice, under the ownership of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos–has never written a single story. Neither has The New York Times. Nor the LA Times. Nor The Sunday Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, or your local medium of choice.
People write stories. They’re our colleagues. That Post piece is by four of them:
There’s that sermon, then. Go forth and #CreditWriters, amen.
#PicturesMeanBusiness
Sarah McIntyre
Next, consider the difficulty that many in the business have had in crediting illustrators, too, of all the preposterous things. Part of the issue here is metadata fields. It became apparent at one point that templates didn’t always have a place to fill in the name of an illustrator on a book, which is ridiculous. The last thing the industry expected was illustrators? Really?
That’s never been an excuse for publishers who don’t put the names of illustrators onto the covers of books with authors’ names. Especially in children’s work, these gaffes cripple illustrators’ careers, making it incredibly hard for them to attract editors and design directors looking for new illustration work.
Many publishers are trying to address this, and we can applaud them. Consciousness is rising, thanks to the campaign led from England by the Seattle-born author and illustrator (and energetic dresser) Sarah McIntyre. #PicturesMeanBusiness.
So there’s that sermon. #PicturesMeanBusiness, amen and amen.
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Writer’s block is something I fear. After my readings when we open for questions, people often ask if I’ve ever had it and, when I say no, they ask what I’d do about it if I did. It’s not something I would think about much at all if it weren’t such a strong cultural concept. It’s called “writer’s block” as if it’s unique to writers and, possibly, inevitable. At one of these readings, I was sitting on a stool and imagined falling off, hitting my head, and being struck by writer’s block. I was terrified. Writing doesn’t need me; I need it. Could I be freed of that need one day by a blow to the head? Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be free of it. Writing for me will always be part-disease, part-cure.
And so I think about writer’s block a lot for someone who’s never had it. One thing I’ve realized is that it isn’t unique to writers, is it? Athletes suffer from some like-conditions, especially, it seems, baseball players. They get “the yips,” often messing up the simple plays like Mackey Sasser’s trouble with the easy throw back to the pitcher. In other fields, it’s simply called burn-out, and I’ve certainly seen writers who need to recharge, especially after major works. And, of course, writers stop writing for many reasons just as specialists in other fields lose interest in work they once found rewarding. But the word “block” indicates a thwarted desire. That’s what makes it scary – the engine is still running but the car is stuck.
John Dunne’s famous definition of writers’ block is “a failure of nerve.” It does take nerve to write. It’s a bold act, sometimes quite wild, and, to see a work through its often brutal process from-nothing-to-something requires commitment; it can also simultaneously be a glorious ride.
That said, I don’t like framing writer’s block as failure. There are times when writing – the time and space for self-expression – seems dangerous and/or frivolous. There are times when a writer is overwhelmed with life, maybe even trauma or profound grief, when the page is impossible. The writer, recently reeling from a difficult experience, can be too vulnerable to open up. The writer can be so necessarily focused on survival that writing can’t be rationalized.
It strikes me that writer’s block can happen when the need for self-protection is stronger than the need for self-expression.
Self-protection is an undeniably strong instinct. And if a writer is going through a traumatic period, writing can seem like a luxury. But writing has been a proven tool to help put trauma in the past where it belongs and it can help people – not just writers – rebuild and envision the future.
But self-protection for writers is a tricky thing. Sometimes it’s not about trauma – or not an obvious one.
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Image – iStockphoto: Celafon
Suiting Up for the Attention Economy
From time to time–many journalists know this moment—it feels as if several stories or trends you’ve been covering (or trying to dodge) start locking into place in some sort of shape or design or purpose. Call it “news relationship syndrome.”
This happened for me at the beginning of the month, and it brought together:
In Berlin, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo had introduced the idea of a “fifth wave” in book retail, and this is something that Jane Friedman and I wrote about in the May 3 edition of The Hot Sheet, our newsletter for authors. Tamblyn was concerned that industry players today might be breathing a sigh of relief and thinking that the digital scare has passed, that they can just “get back to publishing and making books without having to worry about the industry remaking itself.”
Tamblyn describe four historical “waves” of publishing retail:
And then he dropped his bombshell: “The fifth wave,” he said, “isn’t a format shift. And it isn’t a change in where books are sold or distributed. It isn’t subscription vs. single-title sale. It isn’t about how much a book gets sold for at all. Instead, it is the commodification and commercialization of attention.”
Welcome to the wars of attention.
And as we trundle out onto this unholy, “unpresidented” battlefield, I want you to think about this brilliant phrase that Tamblyn lobbed at us like a mic-drop: “It is an arms race of monetized attention.”
The mechanized (algorithmic) warfare around you is being waged by Netflix, Amazon Studios, HBO, Hulu, Showtime, everything on your Roku. Have you heard any of your fellow author-soldiers talk of wanting to get into the miniseries content armies? I have: at London Book Fair, when I spoke on a panel in the Author HQ program in March, the writers in the audience wanted to know about Hollywood. And Hollywood is trying to capture your reader’s attention as a prisoner of war.
“It is about the fight for time,” Tamblyn said. And it’s too easy, he said, to shrug and say that books have always “jockeyed with TV and movies and magazines and newspapers for people’s time.
“Now we live in an attention economy,” he said, in which thousands of companies “have a very clear sense of what people’s time is worth.” In other words, what they can charge for your attention, “what they would like […]
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This past weekend, I was lucky enough to find myself sitting in front of a Van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While sitting, I was also talking on the phone to a certain teenager whom I happened to birth in 2003. This teenager was 3,000 miles away from me and the Van Gogh, and he had called to ask me whether he should retake the Bio test on which he had earned a 10/25. He wasn’t sure if he should.
“I’m not sure if I should,” he said.
I looked at Van Gogh’s self portrait. He didn’t look well. Probably teenagers had impacted his mental health. I rubbed my ear and gave my inner Helicopter Mother a mental shove to make room for my inner Mother of Perpetual Pseudo-Patience.
The latter gently said, Do NOT tell him what to do. If you are always telling him what to, he will never learn how and what to do without you telling him what and how to do it. And then you’ll wake up one day and you will realize he is forty-eight years old and still lives with you and still expects that you will make him hash browns and a banana smoothie for breakfast.
“OK,” I said into the phone, “what are the pros and cons of retaking the test?”
Helicopter Mother rolled her eyes and snorted.
“I mean, it’s nice,” I continued, “that Ms. C. is letting you do a retake. Tell me what you’re thinking about your options.”
“I’m not sure what I’m thinking,” he said.
I tugged on my ear some more. I needed a Monet or a Manet or something more soothing than Vincent Van Gogh’s self portrait staring at me. How about one of those Degas dancers? A flock of those Degas ballet ladies would help neutralize the Wild West boy brain on the end of the phone line. Maybe.
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DISCLAIMER: The views presented in today’s post do not necessarily reflect those of Writer Unboxed or its other contributors. They are solely the opinions of the author of this post, and should not be read while flossing, practicing goat yoga, or ghost-writing a book for James Patterson.
Last September – before being eclipsed by our current all Trump, all the time zeitgeist – a flurry of conversations erupted across the internet focusing on cultural appropriation. Fanning the flames of this topic was a keynote speech best-selling author Lionel Shriver gave at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival. Regardless of where you stand on cultural appropriation, it’s well worth reading the text of her whole speech.
Taking the stage wearing a sombrero, Ms. Shriver quickly made it clear where she stood, lashing out at political correctness and flat-out dismissing the concept of cultural appropriation – particularly when writing fiction. She cited a recent incident where some college students were excoriated on social media for a cruel and hurtful act of “ethnic stereotyping” – because they had been photographed wearing miniature sombreros at a tequila-themed birthday party.
Ms. Shriver observed, “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.” She went on to offer numerous examples of important books that would not have been written if the authors hadn’t dared to explore experiences or cultures other than their own:
“If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to ‘appropriate’ the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.”
A disrespectful vocation
In her speech, Ms. Shriver pushed back – hard – against the notion of writers being somehow morally restricted to writing only stories that are “implicitly ours to tell.” Instead, she maintained that “any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.” Taking her defense a step further, she said:
“This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best. When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.”
Stating her hope that the concept of cultural appropriation is just “a passing fad,” Ms. Shriver worried that if writers restrict their work to only what they have directly experienced, “all that’s left is memoir.”
I agree – in theory – with much of what Ms. Shriver said. But it soon became clear that plenty of people didn’t…
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Image – iStockphoto: Orinoko Art
Query Their Skill Sets
It’s something of a “quiet provocation” I bring to you today—a point that lies deep within the industry: A lot of professional publishing people couldn’t write their way through a two-sentence blurb if their P&Ls depended on it.
Don’t worry, no names will appear here, I’m on a bloodless warpath.
But I was struck recently when a literary agent of considerable visibility in the industry contributed a blog post on query letter writing. Not that the world needs another word said, spoken, or thought about query writing, of course. Can’t we gather all the books, posts, and articles written on the tired, tortured, tedious topic of query letters and just yell, “Read Number 4,622!” when someone asks us for something special?
For our purposes here, never mind that the thing was about queries.
The problem is that the article was woefully badly written. Any agent worth her web site would have rejected the article along with the day’s query letters.
And remember that in many cases—maybe most cases—a literary agent is an author’s first editor. Some agents do deep developmental work on manuscripts. More do multiple copy-edit jobs on their clients’ texts.
As a journalist covering publishing, I probably see examples of bad writing from industry people more frequently than most do. Maybe I approach a publisher with a series of questions for an article or I ask an agent to give me a few paragraphs of descriptive commentary about a special book that he or she is keen to promote at a trade show. What comes back frequently needs a lot of work.
So there’s my provocation for you today.
If you go to a doctor, you assume that he or she knows the difference between ibuprofen and penicillin. So why, when you turn to a publishing professional, should that person not know the difference in its and it’s?
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Image – iStockphoto: Inner Vision
‘Get the Message Across More Forcefully’
Last week’s AWP conference—the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (February 8-11)—was the usual sea of campus-based students and faculty members, university presses, plus assorted services for publishers and authors.
Early estimates were of some 12,000 people being in attendance. The book fair area of booths and tables was said to have more than 850 outfits represented. And in roughly 550 sessions, attendees heard and debated issues, many of them based in questions of diversity. I wrote an advance piece at Publishing Perspectives on the program’s stated mission of inclusiveness.
Being set as it was in Washington, D.C., however, the political nature of so many of its admirable points of support for writerly egalitarianism was heightened. Some of the attendees participated in demonstrations of their political leanings. I’d guess that very few sessions went by without some mention, pro or con, of the White House administration a few blocks away.
From the hotel, I could see the top of the Washington Monument and the Capitol—they seemed farther apart than in the past.
I was on a panel called Current Trends in Literary Publishing, a session that’s put together and moderated annually at AWP by Jeffrey Lependorf of CLMP, the Community of Magazines and Presses dedicated to literary work and to literary journals in particular. With us were Katie Freeman of Penguin Random House’s Riverhead Books; Dawn Davis of HarperCollins’ Amistad; Literary Hub’s Jonny Diamond; and Michael Reynolds of the independent publisher Europa Editions.
It was Reynolds who, in reminding us that Europa Editions was originally founded in Italy, told the audience that current events are causing houses like his to reflect on why they choose to publish literary fiction. His house has a Turkish author, for example, who’s currently jailed by the regime there, as are many in publishing and journalism. And as the pressures of nationalism increase in many parts of the world, including the States, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, France, what is it about serious fiction that seems to resonate so strongly for so many?
“What about current events,” Reynolds asked, “makes it important to publish literary fiction?
“Do we need to provide more context?” he asked. “Do we need to frame our publishing program differently in order to get the message across more forcefully in this moment?
“In publishing literary fiction,” Reynolds said, “I think we all know that reading fiction—reading fiction in general—is good for our empathy. And I think a publishing program can think about social empathy, and global empathy.”
Several of us on the panel would go on to seize on that phrase Reynolds had given us, “global empathy.” My own key message to the event was very close to his but with that usual provocateur angle: I urged the room of several hundred people to take their belief in literary fiction—and especially in its peculiar capacity and internationalism to promote “global empathy”—and begin to speak more loudly, more proudly about it. I see this political era as a stark opportunity to demonstrate literary’s importance.
And that brings me to my provocation for you today.
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photo by Ryan McGuire via Flickr
It’s even hard to type that word, especially when thinking of oneself. Success. What is it, exactly? Specifically? What would it be like for you, in your life?
One of the things that I often suggest to writers when thinking about what their protagonist enters the story already wanting is something I call the “Eyes Wide Shut” test. Meaning: can you close your eyes and see, specifically, what would actually, really, literally have to happen for them to attain their goal? That is: achieve success. And, going even deeper, can you see (read: feel) what it would then mean to them?
And I don’t mean “feel” as in: they’d be happy, sad, bewildered, or that their heart would pound, tears would pool, or stomach butterflies flutter. But “feel” as in: what would they be thinking? What would they realize? What new insight would they have? And most potent: How is this moment different than what they expected it to feel like back when it was still a far off, much hoped-for goal?
Because there is almost always a massive difference between what we expect something will be like, feel like, and mean to us, and what it actually is like once we get there.
When it comes to success, the one area we don’t tend to focus on is this: the collateral damage. Not damage in the “you broke it” sense, but damage in the “now your life is going to change” sense. As Anatole France so poetically opined, “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another.”
Okay, that is a tad dramatic, but still. It gets the point across. And the thing about success is that it’s so easy to imagine it as a “destination,” when it actually forces us to keep moving, to up our game, do more, try harder. Because having achieved success means that now there is another mountain to scale, and the pressure is even greater. It’s an ongoing process that never, ever lets up.
Who knew? Not me.
I thought success was that moment when what you’ve worked hard for comes to fruition, and now you have time to kick back, to relax into it, and then, at long last, things become easier. I know, what a dope.
Which brings me to something that it is hard to say, on so many levels.
First, it’s hard to admit that one has had success. It feels brazen. Braggy. Like you’re Robert Goulet singing “C’est Moi” from Camelot (give it a listen, it’s hilarious).
But okay, here goes. I have had some success doing what I most love: talking story, helping writers zero in on the content of the story they want to tell, and busting the myths that keep them from it. I never thought I could have a book published. Now, I have two. I am asked to speak all over the place. It honestly astounds me – because not long ago I saw myself as nothing more than the schlubby woman in line at Trader Joe’s trying to […]
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My first year teaching high school English, I had a student in my sophomore honors class whom I’ll call Alex. Alex was the first kid I caught plagiarizing. The assignment was an RFTS–Reading from the Silence–an opportunity for kids to write an original anything: poetry, fiction, personal essays, song lyrics. I’d always write an RFTS too, usually a not-inappropriately-personal essay, some very terrible bits of fiction, an op-ed piece about the Oklahoma City bombing, a not-too-revealing poem inspired by the heartache of being dumped two times by one beau.
Each Friday, part of the class was set aside to share our RFTS writing. We’d turn the lights low and sit in silence until the first brave soul started reading his or her piece. Reading from the silence.
That was in Skokie, Illinois in the mid-nineties. At twenty-two years old, I was as green as could be. Even today I want to write apology letters to my guinea pig students in those early years of teaching.
But RFTS was, by most accounts, a big hit. Some liked the freedom of writing whatever moved them. Others liked to space out in a dimly-lit classroom. Still others liked that it was easy points; if the student wrote something original and thoughtful and legible, he earned 10/10. Some kids wrote a fifteen-page RFTS; some kids wrote a single, angst-filled sonnet about questioning authority or defying the school dress code. Some kids shared their work every week; some kids never shared.
My student, Alex, was not one who often shared during RFTS. He wrote analytical essays that felt like algebraic equations. He didn’t seem to love literature. He was a nice kid, a little nervous, but also kind, conscientious and intelligent. On his report card, I might have said the following: Alex completes daily assignments in a timely manner. Alex is an active participant in small and/or large group discussion. Alex communicates effectively. (1)
Alex also turned in an “original” RFTS that was the word-for-word lyrics of a James Taylor song. When I confronted him, he claimed innocence. Several times. Ah, and when the student doth protest too much, methinks there’s a confession to be made. (2)
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This past March, a man climbed an enormous sequoia tree in downtown Seattle. Refusing to come down, he threw branches, pine cones, an apple and other debris onto the police below. He stayed there for more than twenty-four hours, and by the time he descended, he had stripped many branches from the upper half of the tree. The damage to the sequoia was assessed at $7800, not including the cost of the time and resources used by the Seattle Police and Fire Departments.
The next day, I heard someone on the radio refer to this man as “the whackjob in the tree.”
Such casual use of this word, “whackjob,” delivered the one-two punch to my gut and to my heart. As someone with a diagnosis of Bipolar 2 (Bipolar Disorder being the condition formerly known as Manic Depression), I think quite a lot about how the language we use to describe those with a mental health condition allows us to ignore the hurt, marginalization, helplessness and hopelessness felt by those who struggle. Oh, the power of words.
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