Writing lessons

I feel a little let down by my high school English curriculum.  For six years I read countless novels, short stories, and plays, I identified themes in spot quotes, and I wrote five to ten page essays purporting to explore the deeper meaning of these stories.  Despite all that reading and writing, I have not been able to shake the feeling that I missed the day when the teacher discussed how to write a good essay (I missed very few days, so it must have only taken one or two classes).

I'm a huge fan of Tim Cahill's writing.  Cahill, who used to be a regular contributor to Outside Magazine, has a style that melds personal experience with history and often has you thinking about the future as well.  For non-fiction, he is one author I'd like to be able to mimic (another is Jon Krakauer, another contributor to Outside Magazine who writes with a very similar style).  Why didn't we read articles by Cahill in high school?  Why didn't we spend any time analyzing the writing techniques used in our endless reading list of the classics?  I suspect it was because my high school English curriculum was more geared towards making sure we could quote from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ("Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes.") than to develop an understanding of different writing styles and how to mimic them.  Not to suggest that mimicry should be the goal of any aspiring writer, but that it can and should be used as a valuable step towards developing one's own style.

Today I was very excited to discover an analysis of a typical article by Tim Cahill.  If you haven't read anything by Cahill, I suggest you get a copy of his first book, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, which is a collection of articles on topics as diverse as the Jonestown Massacre and Bigfoot sightings.  The aforementioned analysis is of a piece from Pass the Butterworms, a collection I haven't read, and is quite understandable even without having first read the article.  I will be reading this analysis several times to glean everything I can from it.  Hopefully it will have an effect on what you see here, but no one should hold their breath for that.

According to Stephen King, in his memoir/writing instruction manual On Writing, good writing comes from lots of reading and lots of writing with a few things like grammar and vocabulary thrown in (in other words, there is no formula).

With the exception of a few pages of Cujo when I was too little to be reading Stephen King novels, I've never read anything by Stephen King.  I was so scared of the shadows in my closet that I have avoided scary books and movies ever since.  And I'm not terribly interested in writing fiction.  I never would have picked up his writing manual except that my mother was so enthusiastic about it that she sent me a copy.  Once I started reading it I couldn't stop.  I was hooked by the second page, which I suppose is why he is a bestselling author.

The book starts with an autobiography that exposes his insatiable appetite for horror, a love of writing, and a determination to publish, all of which started from a very early age.  The second half of the book commences with a discussion of the elements of one's toolbox and relies heavily on Strunk and White's Elements of Style (he recommends that any writer own and study this book).  The better part of the writing manual, however, is about how to manage story, themes, background information, and research in writing.  He illustrates this very effectively with examples from his own writing history and samples of his writing.  The postscript is about getting hit by a car and how writing fit into his recovery.

My only complaint is that he assumes that the reader is an aspiring fiction writer to the extent that he instructs the reader to stop reading if he is not.  I found the book interesting, regardless of my non-existent desire to write fiction, because it demonstrates how one successful author cultivated his skills and develops his stories.  This book would be a welcome addition to any high school English curriculum.

Reading  On Writing made me want to read more of King's books, but I'm still a little afraid of the shadows in my closet.