Summer's End

I’m writing this on a thin border between times. On one side is the three months of summer, and on the other is the four months before winter break and, really, the nine months until I graduate. Believe me, it’s a difference big enough to deserve a border wall, at least when you go to Grinnell. Even though I spent this summer working full-time, most of my time was still my own. Any day of the week I could sit down to do something and get bored or finish it before some task demanded my attention. Time works differently in the school year, less like air and more like food: a commodity, not a given. And right now I’m sitting on a skinny strip of hours between the two periods. I’ve had my first class already, and am still attached enough to the summer not to jump into studying right now. But tomorrow I’ll get a fresh load of homework, and jump right into my school state of mind.

To be clear: I like school. I can’t wait to start on the reading lists, especially since I have two English classes and one Humanities class this semester. People in high school often told me that college would be this sort of constant work, usually in a scared-straight type speech, but so long as you legitimately like what you study, hours of work can be pretty fun. I’m writing this in cubicle #306, my second home for the past three years, and it feels good to settle back into the familiar space and remember all the great novels I read here, novels I probably wouldn’t’ve read (or at least not as well) if I didn’t have a due date to finish them by and a papers to write on them. And what free-time I do get in college is sometimes better for being carefully budgeted. Long dinners with friends or Saturday night Dungeons and Dragons sessions feel all the more special with the contrast between how I spent all the rest of that day.

Of course, it’s easy to say that now, when I’m bored of free time the way I am at the end of every summer. Later on, when I’ve read so much that words will barely stick to my mind and every minute I give to myself feels like a small crime, I know I’ll long for summer. I’ll think that I could accomplish so much, write ten novels and read a library and have so much fun, if I just got to choose how I spent my time. Which is more than a little ironic, given that right now I’m begging for the school year to give me structure and focus and purpose. It’s been like this ever since my first year in college, though I think I can only see the pattern clearly now that I’m in the last quarter.

For over a decade my nuclear family of students and professors lived on the academic calendar, where time starts in September, ends in May, and goes on hiatus from June to August. That era ended when Micah got a year-round job last year, but I’ve gotten so used to academic life that I’m glad I won’t be leaving it any time soon (since I’m trying for a teaching certificate). As wide as the swings are from summer to school and back again, I love how there’s a gasp of fresh air each time you cross the border from one to the other. And there are comforts in each: days spent biking around Edina, following garage sale roadsigns if they appear and intuition at each crosswalk if they don’t, and night when I need two jackets and a hat to walk from my warm, high cubicle in Burling Library to my cozy room, where I’ll dedicate my rare free time to something dumb on Netflix.

My Stupid Theory of Writing

Trust me, I don’t want to write this. I actually can’t stand it when people try making writing into a science, with graphs and rules and taxonomies, and I know that’s exactly what I’m getting into here. But, even as I specifically tried not thinking about it, this idea kept on occurring to me, growing a little whenever I let my mind drift off in that direction, until it became something coherent and maybe even true. I really hope it isn’t true, because these sorts of literary theories always make the world of storytelling feel narrower, as if you could learn everything you need to know about it in one short essay. But I might as well write it out and see how it works.

The first part of this theory came to me when I was reading submissions for Inklette’s fifth issue*. I’d read more than five hundred stories and essays by the point, and voted to reject about ninety five percent of them, which struck me as oddly harsh, given that I had something good to say about most of the rejects, and a lot of misgivings about the ones I voted for. So I scrolled back through the comments the other editors and I had made, looking for some common thread between what we accepted and rejected. What I found was oddly precise: practically every comment was about the piece’s writing, plot, characters, or meaning. I began to imagine these four elements in a diamond formation, with writing on the bottom, plot and character in the middle, and meaning topping it off. Writing fit on the bottom because it was the most grounded, the closest to something concrete: word choice, comma placement, sentence construction, that sort of thing. And meaning is on top because it’s the furthest of the four from the text: reducing thousands of words into a pithy sentence telling what it’s all about. Character and plot are in the middle: not as anchored to the text as writing but not as far from it as meaning. The four also work as a nice process for understanding writing: you discover the character and plot from the writing, and you discover the meaning from the character and plot.

Moreover, I discovered that we forgave a lot of stories with flaws in the writing or meaning, but character and plot were essential. Often I started a comment that would end rejecting a piece with “The writing is beautiful, but…” or “I really agree with what the author is saying here, but…” There’s more to it than that, of course. It’s hard to take any other element seriously when the writing is bad, and we’ve accepted our share of nearly plotless stories (not so many without well-defined characters, though). But, for a time, that was that, a nice little diagram that I didn’t trust and hoped to never use.

But the theory came back last night when I went to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with my dad, and when the movie still felt like it was beginning well past the two-hour mark, I realized that I’d never seen another movie like this. Oddly, though, it’s a pretty common structure in books: hundreds of pages exploring characters that leads to little catharsis, if any, in the last couple pages. At first I thought it was just because books tend to have more creative freedom or more space to sprawl, but even most low-budget art movies I’ve seen are better paced than your average meditative novel. After contemplating this for a while, I found the sentence that I would call my thesis, if I believed it: each genre is crafted to fit one of the elements of writing. Poetry is writing, drama is plot, fiction prose is character, and non-fiction is meaning.

This part takes a little more explaining, so I’ll go over them one at a time. Poetry’s defining feature is technically its line breaks, but looking at what is and isn’t considered a poem, I’d argue that it’s really that poetry doesn’t need to have a narrative. When prose goes without narrative (in dervish essays, for example), it’s usually either called poetry or a genre-hybrid. This lack of narrative lets poetry focus on the words and their sounds more than any other sort of writing, which is why techniques that play with sound like meter and rhyme are the hallmarks of this genre.

Non-fiction being tied to meaning is a little harder to defend, since it’s such a broad category, encompassing everything from autobiographies to instruction manuals. But, despite that diversity, non-fiction writers almost always state their point much more clearly than poets, novelists, or playwrights. It’s considered good form to have a thesis statement in most types of non-fiction, it’s often forgiven in creative non-fiction, but any creative writing workshop will chew you out for saying exactly what you mean. 

The middle two are even more difficult to pull apart, but I think my conundrum over Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s slow pace shows the essential difference between fiction prose and drama. Novels can go on for thousands of pages without anything happening because prose has the agility to notice a frayed thread on a jacket, zip back twenty years to remember how your favorite goldfish died, and return to present within a sentence. Only our minds are so fluid, and what better way is there to get to know a character than to follow the path of their brain for a little bit? This particular skill is why it’s rare to see a totally objective omniscient narrator in fiction prose.

When I say drama, I mean anything with a script meant to be read out loud. It used to be only theater, but now the designation has stretched to radio shows, movies, TV, podcasts, and so on. As far as I can tell, it just gets plot because there’s really nothing left. It can’t convincingly bring you into a character’s head like fiction prose, craft an argument like non-fiction, or draw your attention to the sound of language like poetry. So it goes for plot, the dumb, cheap thrill of stuff happening to humans, the middle child of writing that most workshops ignore and most critics condescend. 

Okay, I’ve kept it together for about a thousand words now, I think it’s time to stop holding this limp argument upright and let it collapse on its own. Poems don’t need narratives, but a lot of them have one anyway. Plenty of non-fiction meanders without getting at any real meaning. Why do I want to write fiction while my brother Micah wants to write screenplays, even though he’s better at characters and I’m better at plot? Can all of these elements really be equal if it’s a compliment to call an artsy book or film “plotless”**? How can you judge meaning when, in the best works, it’s impossible to come to a definitive answer? Worst of all, none of this analysis says anything about the power of writing or the reasons why we read, and nothing at all about emotion. It’s so universal that it hardly holds true for any particular work and so general that it’s hard to mine one useful bit of information out of it.

But even if this theory doesn’t explain everything, at least it does something. It gives plot a place at the table with all his overhyped siblings, which I appreciate. It might be a starting place for analyzing a work, not a perfect one but still better than my common strategy of saying, “Yeah, I liked it…” and then staring blankly as I try to find the words to articulate why. And it’s instructive for writers in how it reveals each genre’s temptations. It’s natural for prose writers to gravitate towards long and tedious stories about people who just sit around and think, or for poets to experiment with making sounds and evoking sensations without striving for anything else. But I think, to be a truly good writer in any genre, you need a deep understanding of the four elements I laid out here. Not that that’s all you need to be a good writer, since I’m just pulling this all out of my ass anyway.

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• On that note, submissions for our ninth issue are open now!

** I actually have an answer to that one: whenever someone calls something plotless, it either just has an unconventional plot or it’s a boring, stagnant, probably pretentious piece of garbage.

Children's Books Review

Most of my job this summer was reading children’s books aloud. In doing so, I rediscovered the complexities and nuances of children’s literature, which is almost always strange, rarely simple, sometimes beautiful, and occasionally super dumb. Allow me to share some of said revelations in the form of brief reviews:

The Pencil, by Allan Ahlberg: This whimsical romp with an anthropomorphic pencil doubles as a creation myth in which the pencil-God lets an evil eraser destroy his first world and creates a second, identical one, except that none of the perfect clones remember their own deaths.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak: It’s one of those books that’s so common that you forget how strange and beautiful it is until you sit down to read it again.

Double Trouble in Walla Walla by Andrew Clements: Written exclusively to screw with adults who make the bad decision to try and read it out loud.

The Little Mouse, the Ripe Red Strawberry, and the Hungry Bear by Don Wood: I used this one to teach first graders what an unreliable narrator is, and it actually worked (which, while satisfying, makes my English degree feel a little less valuable).

Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton:  I loved this one as a kid, so it was a real nostalgia trip reading it, but it was sort of dated in how it presented coal-powered shovels as the wave of the future and made destroying natural beauty to make way for highways seem like the noblest pursuit a man or machine could have.

The Remember Balloons by Jessie Oliveros: It handles Alzheimer’s in a complex way, but still focuses on emotions that children can understand and relate to. And even the abstract premise of memories represented by balloons, which is never explained, comes easily even to Kindergarteners.

Billy’s Bucket by Kes Gray: The rare children’s book where the moral, that you shouldn’t condescend kids’ interests and feelings, is actually directed at the adult reading it rather than the child. Kids still love it though, since everyone loves being right.

Living in New York

I just got back from a trip to visit my brother Micah in New York, and even though I only stayed three days, nearly everyone I met on the trip asked, “So could you see yourself living here?” and nearly everyone I talked to about the trip upon coming home asked, “So could you see yourself moving there?” Not to complain about people asking the same questions, they didn’t know, and it’s actually a pretty obvious question to ask. After all, living in New York for a bit is sort of a requirement for young people in this country, or at least young people aspiring for careers in writing.

If I wanted to, I think I could properly convince anyone that I really did want to live in New York. From Micah’s apartment building alone I could see how centuries of people had layered meaning on the place, each leaving behind little artistic flourishes, like little stained glass squares on the edges of one window in the staircase, but not any other, or the crooked tile pattern in the lobby. Space is precious in such a crowded place, giving little details a sort of worth you don’t find in Iowa, where most of the state is filled with the same damn crop. I can imagine that there’s a real wonder to living in New York: looking out your bathroom window and seeing the street seven stories below or looking around any neighborhood and thinking that this place is so old and half-broken but still handling so many people.

But that’s a kind of appreciation I only found after I came back to the Midwest. During my actual time in New York, I mostly just felt overwhelmed. I like to imagine that earth is a knowable place, with a maximum capacity of one thousand humans at most, so being on a subway or street with more people than I’ve ever known made me tremble a little. Partly because of my social anxiety, which I was diagnosed with a year and a half ago and still haven’t entirely gotten over, I can’t imagine living in a city with so many strangers. Sure, such a crowded city makes space feel valuable, but it makes any particular human feel much less so under the city’s mass. This isn’t to say that I didn’t like the people of New York (I don’t think you can judge an entire community, and anyway I just interacted with Micah and his mostly ex-Midwestern roommates), but I don’t think that I could ever be one of them.

I took on the role of a self-aware small town rube during my New York trip. When Micah jokingly asked me how it compared to Grinnell, I’d say something like, “Well, it certainly has a more sophisticated subway” or “Not quite as much corn.” But, as obviously different as New York is from the tiny Iowa town where I live, probably the closest thing to the pressure of being on a crowded subway I ever felt was, paradoxically, running to the edge of town on my first week at Grinnell and realizing how small it really was. How there wasn’t anywhere in town where I couldn’t reach a cornfield in ten minutes, and from then on there was just more corn nearly forever. The feeling lessened as I got used to the town, but never entirely went away. It’s hard to describe, but this feeling was unnerving, approaching horror, and I felt it both in Grinnell and New York, one place with too little and another with far, far too much. Best as I can tell, it’s some kind of imbalance.

And when I think of balance, I think of Edina, Grosse Pointe, or Waco. The only thing they have in common, aside from being places I’ve lived, is that they have just the right density: the people are spread thin, but wide enough that the edge is always out of reach. In other words, they’re sprawling and suburban, which are two qualities that people universally seem to despise. It’s a well-worn cliché to to characterize the suburbs as phony or artificial. People seem to be divided as to where the real world is, the cities or the small towns, but no one sees to think that authenticity hides in the suburbs, least of all Micah. He even wrote one of his college essays on how he hated the Waco sprawl, quoting the lyrics from the Arcade Fire Song “Sprawl II”: “Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / and there’s no end in sight, / I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights.” So why is it that I only feel comfortable when there’s no end in sight?

This has ended up being an extension on what I wrote last week. That post was about cartoons, this one is about suburbs, but in each case the source of conflict is the same: I’m scared that I’m addicted to the familiar. I don’t think I brought that post to a very satisfying conclusion, and I don’t think I’ll end this one well either. If I only live where I want to live, then I’ll spend my life in mid-sized towns and suburbs. Staying where I’m comfortable seems cowardly, but moving somewhere that I don’t like, specifically because I dislike it, seems foolhardy. Luckily, this isn’t a decision that I have to make just yet, and it probably won’t ever be a pure choice between the known and the unknown; life is always more complex than that. Still, it’s a question that unnerves me and that I can’t quite answer.

Infinity Train and Nostalgia

I’m mostly an adult by now, I think. At least in the important ways. After all, I did spend the bulk of my summer working eight hours a day, five days a week, living on my own and cooking for myself. Though, on closer inspection, most of those eight hours at work were spent playing tag or reading children’s books to second graders, and my self-sufficient diet was entirely comprised of noodles and turkey sandwiches. And anyone who reads this blog regularly knows well enough by now that I have a lifelong obsession with Bionicles. So yeah, my adulthood is, at best, contested.

I bring this up because this week I have yet another reason to doubt my adulthood: I’m stoked out of my mind for a Cartoon Network miniseries called Infinity Train. I found the pilot episode on youtube during my first semester at college and became an online soldier through a number of fake accounts to pester Cartoon Network into green-lighting it. Despite making fifteen or twenty new email addresses for this purpose, I don’t think I’ve ever told another physical human being that I’m into it. That’s because, as comes with the territory of being on Cartoon Network, it’s a kid’s show, and a consistently silly one at that: there’s a fart joke in the first two minutes of the pilot, and the main characters are a girl, a robot, and a talking dog. I could add that it’s more complex and darker than it sounds: it pits a sensible child against a senseless world in what I think is a metaphor for how growing up is mostly an understanding of a lack of knowledge rather than the omniscience we all imagine adulthood to be as kids. And while that’s true, it’d be a lie to say its status as a cartoon or a kid’s show was just a coincidence. I like it because it’s kid’s show.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’ve always felt a lot of shame about that. Even when I was a literal kid, I always felt like I should be striving for something more mature and sophisticated, and in high school I illegally streamed my favorite cartoons, even though I could’ve seen them for free and without virus-risk on the TV downstairs, just because I didn’t want my family to know what I was watching. I’ve even been dodgy around admitting that I watch anime, even though most of those shows are made for adults, because it flows into the same kind of stereotypes as watching cartoons: a nostalgia-addict basement dweller living a grotesque kind of prolonged childhood because they can’t live a real life. More than anything, that’s what I’ve been afraid of being, maybe because I partly am. In my first fall at college, learning to live on my own and hearing professors say over and over “I will destroy everything you think is true,” I was flailing around for anything to make me feel like a kid again: spending hours rediscovering my childhood home of Waco on Google Maps Streetview and watching old videos I’d uploaded to Youtube in middle school. I didn’t even plan to go to church in college, but after a disappointing Saturday night at my first college party, I needed to go somewhere familiar, and I found a place a block from my school where they sang the same hymns and read the same passages as I did seven times a week throughout my childhood.

The problem with nostalgia is that, since you can’t communicate your childhood to anyone else, you can’t really defend anything you like. I’ve kept my cartoon and anime habits secret because I have no idea if I like what I like because it’s good, or because it’s familiar. It gets even tougher when it comes to religion, and I can’t defend why I’m a Christian instead of any other faith except that I grew up learning the gospels, and by now it feels so important that I can’t abandon it. 

The closest I come to a conclusion is that no one is really any better. No one ever makes a clean break from their childhood and sees the world in objective eyes. Even people who go out of their way to grow up, saying things for maximum shock value and calling out anything they don’t like as immature, are just as influenced by what came before as the rest of us. Maybe I cling a little harder to my childhood than most people, probably because I was blessed to have a pretty good one, but that doesn’t make what I like any less real. 

This borders on the old “art cannot be judged, everything is subjective,” argument, which is terrifying to anyone trying to make art or writing or anything beautiful (me, for example). But that’s not quite what I’m saying here. Infinity Train is excellent, at least six out of ten episode in. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s got a gripping story that feels like it’s come out of my most vivid dreams and nightmares. And yeah, on top of all that, it’s a cartoon, and maybe that’s why I like it. But that doesn’t make anything else that I said untrue.

Kid Problems

Tomorrow is my last day working with kids at SLICK, a school-daycamp hybrid for students in Grinnell. At the risk of falling into the formula of all college students completing a summer job/internship between their junior and senior years, it was a life-changing experience that gave me clarity on what I want to do for the rest of my life. Before, I thought of teaching as a way to make a living that would give me a little time in the summer to devote exclusively to writing. But working with second graders this summer has been so rewarding, fascinating, and downright fun that I’m excited to be a teacher as a career in its own right, and am considering scrapping my plans to teach high school and moving to middle or elementary school. 

A couple times throughout the summer, I’d come home at the end of the day, waste a little time scrolling through Facebook, and come across an article on my newsfeed with a title something like “The Kids of Today are Entitled, Selfish, Lazy, Rude, and Dumb, and it’s all Because of Smartphones” (I’m not sure if that was the title of an actual article, but I don’t doubt it; these thinkpieces are never exactly subtle, even in their titles). There would be an intense moment of cognitive dissonance where I’d think back on my day at work, playing tag and helping them read and trying to settle playground feuds of Shakespearean complexity, and wonder how these writers came to this conclusion. 

Even though I instinctively didn’t trust these articles, their arguments actually sort of made sense, even given my good experiences with kids of this generation. They claim that constant exposure to phones, tablets, and computers have shattered kids’ attention spans and addicted them to instant fulfillment. I can’t say that any of the kids I worked with were particularly focused or patient, at least not without a little bit of help. They weren’t well behaved either; I don’t think I’ve ever gone through a whole day without telling one of them to pay attention or sit still or stop throwing rocks at each other. So why aren’t I onboard with this critique?

First off, correlation isn’t causation. Kids today are surrounded by technology. Kids today are bad at sitting still and following directions and doing complex tasks. Okay, but instead of assuming that one created the other, maybe the first thing to ask is if kids have ever been remotely good at sitting still, following directions, or doing complex tasks. You only have to look at old-school fables about kids who mouth off in class or forget to say their prayers at night and then get eaten by a witch or something to know that discipline has never come naturally to children.

But maybe these articles are still right, to some degree, at least as far as their actual arguments go. I don’t doubt that, if you compared kids today to kids in the 1950s, they’re less focused and obedient, and maybe part of that is new technology. (Part of that might be that beating children is generally frowned upon these days too, but not as many people write internet thinkpieces about that.) Honestly, I wouldn’t mind if kids spent a little less time on screens. What I really hate about these articles, I realize now, is how they take a statistical trend and use it to flatten out the personality of every child in America.. This leads to a much larger problem, I think: pretty often adults don’t see kids as human*. We see them alternately as cute decoration, fragile eggs that will only hatch properly if kept in the right circumstances, sepia-tone photos of innocence, or, in the case of these opinion-piece writers, wild animals in need of domestication. They’re none of those things; they’re humans, all of them. I’d say a kid has as a personality as unique and an internal life as rich as any adult’s by the age of four. Like adults, they have flaws too, anger and malice and envy, and sometimes entitlement or laziness. And, like adults, they each have dignity and each deserve respect. The main complaint of these opinion-piece writers seems to be that kids today are too disrespectful, but I wonder if any of the writers have ever stopped to think about the times they’ve disrespected kids, by exploding at them with hardly any provocation or demanding perfect obedience simply for having a couple more years of experience and a couple more feet of height. I admit that I’ve disrespected kids this summer. I’ve made light of their emotions and expected them to follow rules I never clearly articulated. Lately, I’ve tried to apologize to kids whenever I disrespect them like that. Some of my fellow teachers have warned me against this. Apparently being a teacher who apologizes is a death sentence in a classroom: it labels you a pushover and invites kids to see how far they much power you’ll cede. Maybe the other teachers are right, but it doesn’t seem fair to judge kids without holding yourself up to at least the same standards.

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* I’ll admit that, as someone who isn’t a parent, I probably don’t have a whole lot of credibility here.