Photo credit: Navy Blue Stripes on Flickr
Today’s blog is sort of the companion piece to my guest post over on LaVonne Ellis’ blog, which you all should go read because she runs a wonderful blog and is truly one of the most thoughtful writers that I know online. In my guest post for her, I say that I never had any desire to be a writer growing up, which is true. I didn’t keep a diary, I didn’t write for fun, and I never had any thoughts about becoming a published author. I consumed piles and piles of books, but none of them made me want to write.
I think I felt like published writers came from this special pool of genetic material and I just wasn’t part of that. It never even occurred to me to try to write until much later in life.
The tricky part is that when I look back at my childhood and teenage years, there were these little sneaking indications that I might be a natural writer. Today I present, briefly, the strange and bizarre encounters that quietly drive someone to become a non-fiction and marketing writer:
When I was in third grade, we had one of those little picture book assignments. They gave us those pre-made books with the little two sentence dotted lines and the spaces to draw in, and we had to make a book about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone else wrote books about how they wanted to be firemen, or police officers, or lawyers or doctors.
I wrote a book about how I wanted to be a ninja turtle.
I wasn’t picky about which one. I remember my teacher asking me why I wanted to do this, and I logically laid out the argument that being able to kick ass and eat pizza all the time seemed like a reasonably solid lifestyle choice.
I’m not sure if my mother remembers this at all, but I suspect she still has the book, and I suspect I can imagine just how embarrassed she was as a result of it all.
Cut to eighth grade, where we are given our first ever non-fiction writing assignments. We did a year long history project that year studying the local river and its history, and part of the culmination was a nature essay that was done during a field trip to the local park near my house.
This would have gone over better with a group of pre-teenagers if it had not been freezing cold and pouring rain that day at the park.
Never one to be deterred by whining students, my English teacher dragged us all out there anyway in our raincoats along with our notebooks and pens. I perched myself on a wet rock looking out at the river, and tried to write quickly so I could go back to the bus and get warm.
It was a ten minute walk from my house, and all I could think about was how nice it would feel if I was home in my kitchen with some hot chocolate and a book. All around me my classmates were writing about the beauty of the water as it sparkled, the cute baby ducks, and the wonder of the large trees in the park. In other words, they were writing to imitate what they had read, even if it didn’t reflect reality at all. The more I thought about it, the more the situation pissed me off.
I finally got angry enough that I scribbled down a quick essay on how miserable this trip was, and how ridiculous this assignment was. I wrote about the muddy river that probably had tires in the bottom, and then added a lengthy description of how even the ducks looked like they would prefer to be inside. I then tore the essay off my notepad and threw it in the pile and forgot about it.
A week or so later, I got pulled aside by my teacher after class. I naturally assumed I’d failed, but I also didn’t much care. I prepared myself for the lecture as he handed me back my essay, and flipped to the back and was floored to see that I gotten an A. He told me that his daughter had helped him read through the essays that the class had done, and had excitedly picked mine out of the pile. She’d loved it, and so had he. I think it was the first A I had ever gotten in his class.
My first real introduction to storytelling came in high school, and was spurred by a part time teacher named Mr. Welch.
He was known for being a little kooky, for lack of a better word. He was a Vietnam vet, and he had a reputation for being bizarre and unpredictable. He wasn’t afraid of confrontation, and he certainly wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. I took a class on the psychology of fairy tales with him, and then a mythology class the next semester.
Mr. Welch was someone who fundamentally believed in the power of stories. He wasn’t into stories in the fancy literary sense; he was more interested in the ancient archetypes that we still experience on a daily basis. I vividly remember him demonstrating this ability when he told my mythology class a very candid story about his Vietnam experiences that was terrifying and completely inappropriate for high school sophomores. He was the most honest writer and speaker that I’d ever met, and I loved his classes because of it.
Early on in my first semester with him, I decided to take up his attitude of brutal honesty.
I stayed after class, and frankly told him that I loved his class, but that the first essay assignment was dumb and cliche and I didn’t want to do it. Most teachers would have taken issue with my attitude, but Mr. Welch just sat and considered me for awhile.
To my surprise, he agreed that the assignment was stupid, but he explained that it was standard and that he didn’t have control over the assignments, just what we read. He offered to give me free reign over my own assignments, but also warned me that he would grade me at a higher level if I chose to write my own essays. It was a very adult bargain: more freedom in exchange for more responsibility.
I didn’t write another essay using an assigned topic with him for the next two years, and I worked harder than I’ve ever worked at writing in my life to make sure that my essays were up to his standards. I learned to write thoughtfully and honestly, rather than try and fit my writing into any pre-set parameters. It was an early lesson in writing and the concept of Right People.
I had originally drafted this post to include a neat little marketing lesson at the end, but I realized as I revised that I don’t really have one. If there’s a lesson here, it’s about honesty, being yourself, and that if you do all of those things consistently and loudly, then your Right People will find you no matter what.
Great marketing writing and great non-fiction writing is really about being honest with yourself and others, no matter how uncomfortable or counter-cultural that may feel at the time.
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