weak off

Well, I've been out of the country for a week, but now I am back and working again. I will be starting up the blog tomorrow, Wednesday, with some pictures and a little bit about where I've been and what I'm up to.

See you tomorrow.

another meltdown

By Nick Sweeney, Grade 12

Well, Mr. Smith has had another meltdown about YA. I would tell you what he said to me during his long tirade yesterday, but you know I do not cuss.

Now, I am no longer allowed to use the term "YA" around him at all. It doesn't matter, he has left again. This time, he's out of the country, and he's given me specific instructions about what to do for him on his blog and website.

At first, he wanted me to dissolve them entirely, but he mellowed out just before we put him in the car for the airport.

Anyway, I should be here for a while. And, do not tell anyone, but I may be writing something about that topic which he has forbidden me to mention.

-- Nick S.

growing up

Some people need to grow up.

Not my kids. I asked them a long time ago if they wouldn't mind staying small forever, but they grew up.

Maybe I shouldn't have fed them.

Maybe I shouldn't have let them learn things and get experiences and develop a view of their own.

I think my writing has grown up. I know it has. Because I started writing books for my own son to read... and look at him now, he's six-foot-three.

Damned food.

But I can't keep running around the same track for him. He's growing up. He's a Young Adult. And he's six-foot-three. I think he would beat me up if I wrote a book for him about the last girl to get asked to the dance in junior high school.

And I would deserve it.

I say this because kids do grow up.

Some grownups get stuck, though. Some grownups who'd "discovered" YA way back in the day, and then decided that YA was the greatest thing on earth get stuck running around the same track. They think kids never grow up. They measure all YA against the yardstick of the first YA that really hooked them in -- the one about the lonely girl who's desperate for the cute boy to ask her to her first seventh-grade dance -- and they think that all YA equals exactly that.

That's another thing I hate about YA. The stuck-on-the-treadmill YA readers. You know who they are. They mostly act as fan-peeps for stuck-on-the-treadmill stories that always start off and end up at the same stations.

It makes things easy.

It makes life wonderful.

But kids grow up. Even kids who are only 16 years and 16 days old, like my son. He knows that not everything always works out. He knows that happy endings are passing moments. He knows that some things happen to you and you just aren't going to get over them in 375 pages or 16 years and 16 days. And he wants someone to tell him about those things.

And he's not even grown up yet.

research on writing

I have been reading some interesting stuff lately about common practices and beliefs in teaching writing in our public schools, and some of the research kind of irks me a bit.

I'm hoping that we are moving into a trend away from all this "holistic" and "natural process" stuff that I really believe has gotten our kids into a heck of a lot of trouble with literacy in the past 30 years or so.

Here's something I came across: One of the principle foundational ideas supporting current practices in writing instruction was expressed by researcher Janet Emig in 1971. Emig studied what professional writers and students in school actually did when they wrote -- the "process" of writing. She emphasized the notion that ideas were more important than correctness. Her study showed (and let me tell you how much I disagree with this) that writers who concentrate on technique when drafting initial copy, do so at the expense of their creative ideas and their writing will suffer as a result.

I think this is kind of interesting in a couple ways. First, it clearly has a lot to do with the nothing-is-wrong-so-feel-good-about-yourself misguided philosophy underlying so much of public education in America in the last several decades.

Second, I just don't buy it. Emig said that "good writers" disregarded notions of accurate technique and correctness, and what she and her followers prescribed became the process that all writers should employ.

Well, that's not how I do it. In my world, ideas, creativity, and technical correctness do not compete for preeminence in the process, and none of those elements are inferior in their necessity. That will mess you up every time.

or not

I was asked recently to discuss the "best advice" I'd ever received about writing or being a writer.

I have a really hard time deciding on "bests" of anything. I just can't do it. I don't have a "favorite" anything, either. Not color, food, animal, time of year... nothing.

But I could list my top three bits of advice people habitually give about writing that I think are terrible rules to live by... and here they are:

1. "You have to have a thick skin." I've said this before: Having a "thick skin" is exactly the opposite of what makes a writer. Being insensitive, unfeeling, insulated from things going on around you is the perfect step one to being a crappy writer. If, when the great big giant THEY, say that but mean that you have to let rejection and criticism slide off your back, well... that just can't be done. It's nice to think about, I suppose, but every writer feels criticism. There's just no getting around it.

2. “Show, don’t tell.” I think most people who say this don't really know what it means. It's one of those generic criticisms when someone reads something they know is crappy, but they can't precisely say why (or they want to avoid telling the truth). The bottom line is that all writers are storytellers, and, as such, there are going to be passages in any written prose that are more "telling" than "showing." Telling is sometimes absolutely necessary, and something that is pure "show" is going to be a wordless picture book. Don't even try arguing that point, because you'll be wrong. Now, a good writing coach will be able to talk about passages that "show" and those that "tell," and why one may be more effective, at times, than the other. But it's just like the "avoid passive verbs" mantra. Both of them are B.S. "talking points" memorized by hacks.

3. "Don’t quit your day job." Why not? Sometimes, putting yourself out there and experiencing the unpredictability of human beings and day-to-day experiences is something that can't be matched in terms of its ability to help shape a writer. You want to talk about writers who've done exactly that and the work they later produced? We could spend all day. Take a risk. Trust me. Quit your day job. Then tell us about it.

if i ever did

Well, it's Friday, right? Some days, I actually have to think about what day it is. It's been a very good week. Really cool things are happening, which I hope to be able to reveal here soon.

Next week, I'll be leaving the country, too... for a secret, undisclosed location. So, in honor of all that, I thought I'd do something I've never done before, but lots of bloggers do from time to time. I'm going to post a "Summer 2010" playlist of 10 great new music singles -- some of them from people you may have never listened to -- that were released in 2010. Here you go:

1. Go Outside -- Cults
2. Youth -- Beach Fossils
3. What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had To Go This Way) -- Wolf Parade
4. Heaven's On Fire -- The Radio Dept.
5. Chinatown -- Wild Nothing
6. Kings Of Animals -- Small Black
7. Post Acid -- Wavves
8. Pow Pow -- LCD Soundsystem
9. Odessa -- Caribou
10. Leave Everywhere -- Toro Y Moi

That's one hell of a playlist.

the girls' club

I have author friends who believe that the publishing industry is anti-male, and I disagree with them that there is a gender bias as far as writing is concerned. Now it is true that there are an awful lot of women in the publishing industry -- agents, editors, marketing, and just about every other player you can name, but there's no agenda there -- to me, it's just a reflection of what our schools have subliminally -- and overtly -- told boys for the past 30 years.

In addition to the message that schools are delivering -- that reading is a feminine pursuit (see the Teacher Librarian report), and the way that boys are being "expected" to learn: through cooperation, collaboration, reflecting, and all kinds of other processes that are boy-hostile, there are other factors which predict significant declines in boys' achievement in education and the opportunities that arise from academic skills. I do worry that the decline of reading in the home, male role-models as readers, together with the combined effect of the innate attraction boys have to spatial, competitive, and physical modes of learning may, as Judith Kleinfeld suggests, push boys toward evolving into a social and economic underclass.

The reason boys are not writing as many books as girls is that boys, in general, have bought in to the idea that reading and writing are feminine pastimes. So we have a chicken/egg conundrum here. It's not because the grown-up girls who edit, agent, and publish YA won't let the boys over to play.

Studies by people like Michael Gurian, among others, show that girls enjoy reading books about boys... you know, boy stories... just as much as boys do. But boys don't enjoy reading what they perceive to be "girl stories" very much at all (as a general characteristic of the population).

But if there is a conspiracy afoot at all, it has far less to do with the publishing/writing business than it does with our public schools and the efforts that families need to be making: taking personal responsibility to help their own children -- boys and girls -- succeed.