Any former band nerd will tell you that their music teacher saved their lives.
I “friended” my 5th-grade music teacher on Facebook a few years ago. He was my first real mentor; my first genuine role model (besides my parents — yes, I was “that” kid. The geeky one who still sought her parents’ approval.) Those first years in band marked an era of the band room becoming a safe haven for me and my fellow nerds — a truth that would hold for the remainder of our formal education.
We were your stereotypical nerds as our educational years plodded on, but we weren’t perfect students either. We skipped class in high school just like the “cool kids,” only instead of smoking behind the school, we hid out in our music room and practiced our fugues. We fit in with each other. We saved each other from having to go through school without anyone who cared or understood.
It was a special kind of camaraderie.
My 5th-grade band teacher was the catalyst for the connections and friendships I made in school — if I hadn’t joined his band class, I’m not sure where I would be.
Possibly smoking behind the school and skating by with average grades, but I digress.
When I found out he was on Facebook, sending a request to be his friend online was a no-brainer. He was always really quiet, but likeable. I knew a few things about him from my school days: he was divorced, had a son, and liked to sail. Normal grown-up stuff that didn’t really matter to me much as a kid.
But I had no idea how trying his life had been through the years.
His last few years were probably his toughest yet, although he never openly complained about any of it. One good thing that has come of his woes, however, is that he writes about them — well, he writes about them vaguely, and I mean that in the best possible way.
He pens little morsels of goodness about his thoughts and healing processes (his mother recently passed away after a lengthy illness, and he was by her side for the months prior to her death.) He created a blog where his words of grief and loss have been compiled into one glorious assortment of masterful writing that has frequently brought me to tears.
He was my band teacher, but I had no idea that his ability to capture the emotion of a musical piece translated to the written word as well, and I admire the hell out of the way he transfers his grief to words.
I’m a writer; this should be something that comes to me in an effortless way, but that isn’t always the case. My words lack the emotive effects that I so wish they could conjure but so frequently fall short of.
His words, though; they have flow and mystery and grim beauty. They take me to the tall grasses and quiet solitude of the country, where he spends so much of his time and often writes about. His writing reminds me of places I’ve never been, of houses I’ve wanted to live in, and of lives I’ve never led. He takes me to his mother’s deathbed, to the secrets she whispers in his ear, finally, as she takes her last heartbreaking, rattling breaths.
His writing dips and bows and is simultaneously emotionally bold, yet subtle. Quiet. He writes from the heart, which seems by comparison alone to run deeper than my own, and it all seems so annoyingly effortless for him.
I wish I could write like that.
I wish I could write so freely and beautifully without painstakingly picking apart every word or phrase. My writing feels cheap and dull next to his, like the IKEA knock-off to his vintage antique armoire. I realize I mostly write about diapers and temper tantrums and mommy tummies these days, but I still want my words to touch the hearts of my readers on an emotional level.
I want to move my readers. I want tears and introspection. I’d settle for a giggle or two in a pinch, but I want more.
Mostly, I want to write beautiful prose like the authors I admire. I want to capture the complex gentility of worthwhile men like Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I want to capture the heartbreaking, desolate devotion of Heathcliff for his Catherine as Emily Brontë perfected in Wuthering Heights.
Yes; I realize that these are some seriously lofty goals. Is that a bad thing?
I want to wield that level of skill, so I’ve done some serious soul searching and genuine research. I’ve picked up a few tips after analyzing the writing I love, including my ex-teacher’s, to find out what it is that moves me as a reader and consumer of all that glorious prose.
And because we’re all in this together, I’m sharing it with you. Let’s do some learnin.’
“Write what you know,” but do it better
As writers, we’ve all heard this advice before. Writing what “you know” is so vague, though, as such a frequently offered piece of advice. It’s so open-ended, and not in a good way.
A better way to say it: write what is “you.” Write the way “you” write — the way you speak.
The way you think.
You can learn this lesson from the pros, especially those who practice stream of consciousness in their writing. Stream of consciousness is a narrative style that presents the writer or character’s thought processes in the non-linear way our brains think. It involves a lot of repetition, looping, sensory observations, and sometimes bizarre or even excessive punctuation.
That doesn’t mean that you sit down and blurt out whatever nonsense pops up in your brain when you write, though. The world doesn’t need to know that you forgot to switch over the laundry in the middle of establishing your first subpoint in your piece about Romanian orphanages, for example.
It’s better if I show you. Here is an example of stream of consciousness from Virginia Woolf in her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway:
“For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? Over twenty, — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”
Virginia Woolf was a master at this narrative art, but she wasn’t alone. Within her elite club of stream-of-consciousness experts, you’ll find some great names like James Joyce (Ulysses 1922,) William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying 1930,) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes From The Underground 1864.) I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of company I want to keep as a writer.
My friend’s blog also contains a number of stream of consciousness examples that capture this idea:
“A first date. An empty bed. Smoke in the night. There are no letters, no words for this. We are untethered, afloat. No map, no road, no floor, no walls. I’m leaving. Dust drifts aimlessly. I do. We whirl ecstatic. There’s been an accident. We slump, bled dry.
Scorched echoes of nothing.”
Apart from the incredibly subtle usage of other writing techniques, such as the underused epistrophe, this passage has such a flow to it; a simplicity that covers an extremely complicated series of life events. It also has an element of that stream of consciousness that I mentioned, and it all blends together so beautifully.
Try this kind of thing every now and again and see where it takes you, and remember that when you’re writing, you’re actually creating. That in and of itself is an expression of creativity, so run with it — you’re a creator, after all. Use words that you use, words that flow, and don’t try to force it. If you’ve never used and never will use the word “indefatigable” when you talk, don’t use it when you write.
And don’t try to write like other people — you can only be you.
So, be you, and excel at that.
“Imagery” is more than just images
I grew up with this girl who was always better than everyone else at everything. She was pretty, too, which made us mere mortals pale in comparison, but there’s a reason I’m bringing her up, besides mildly bitter teenaged envy.
She’s now a world-renowned journalist who travels the globe and writes about children being freed from slavery and fugitives fleeing from war zones. She writes about the human part of the world’s biggest travesties, and she does it well because she writes it in such a way that you feel as though you are right there, breathing in the dust and despair. It’s heartbreaking and terrible and truly amazing writing.
Writers are pretty good at describing things. We can write about a beautiful spring meadow or the bloody demise of our hero’s worst enemies. Our brains can dream up just about any scene and we have been blessed with the skill (on some level) to describe it with acute, detailed accuracy.
But we often forget that there are other senses beyond sight.
The best writers in the world (including my brilliant journalist friend) bring their readers into their stories by using imagery — describing the sounds, smells, tastes and feels of whatever they’re writing about — in their work. I’m guilty of forgetting this very important piece myself, but my 5th-grade teacher reminded me of it unintentionally as I read this passage in his blog:
“She breathes deeply, settled with herself now that she is ready to open these long-rusted gates. And again, another breath, another long, lingering taste of untainted air, air that will soon taste of smoke, of fire, of fear and of loss.
I wait, utterly silent, my chair mere feet from her pillow. The sun is shining and the ducks are back, pecking through the snow. The stained glass window suggests that all will be well. The hospice nurses pad quietly by, delivering solace to the broken. From the lounge, a far-away tinkling piano plays hope to all who will listen.”
There are sounds, tastes, and feelings in this short portion of the story, and the effect of this imagery is staggering. I don’t know about you, but when I read this, I’m right there; my chair mere feet from my dying mother’s pillow.
Bringing a variety of senses to your writing will only make it better, as long as it’s in earnest — you can’t force every sentence in your writing to contain all five senses because that would be weird. But you can use them liberally when it’s helpful to set the scene, so to speak, and it will change the way your reader sees (and feels) the setting or experience they’re reading about.
Helping your readers experience your story through the eyes, ears, scent and touch of your narrator or character brings it vibrantly to life, because that’s how we experience life — we use whatever senses we have at our disposal.
With this knowledge, you can touch your readers in a way you probably haven’t before, and they’ll remember the way your writing moved them.
Use metaphors (as long as you can do it well)
Sometimes the best writing is metaphorical.
Scratch that — the best writing is almost always metaphorical.
My husband has an annoying habit that really applies here. He is a lover of analogies and I think they help him navigate his life, because whenever we have a discussion or disagreement about something, he has a pile of them sitting in his inventory just waiting to be whipped out to help make his point. It’s extremely annoying.
Analogizing can help nail down a point, though, and metaphors do the same thing in writing.
Using vibrant or bold imagery and metaphors when you write helps to, quite literally, colour the scene or experience you’re writing about. For example, my old teacher, sitting at his mother’s side as she whispered her final wishes and lifelong secrets, was in pain; cutting, jarring, emotional pain. His mother was soon to pass on to a place where he could no longer reach her. It was hard, and he could simply have said as much.
“Hard.” That hardly covers the experience. It doesn’t do it justice at all.
Instead, he shares his experience using metaphors that make it very clear how he was feeling at that moment:
…I listen. I absorb this new, fractured light. It changes me. It changes her. And while she is giving away these shards of glass, daggers that shine with a razor-sharp edge, she is becoming brighter by the giving, and her shadows are retreating.
She’s shedding new light on a life he thought he knew and it’s shattering, the pieces cutting him like daggers, but she needs this. He lets her words cut through the shadows, to cut through him, because she needs it.
Using imagery like that really encapsulates an experience or feeling and, when used well like this, can make or break a piece of writing.
It’s that powerful.
Be genuinely genuine
My teacher doesn’t claim to be a brilliant writer. He doesn’t even call himself a writer, actually. His blog is merely a journal — but it’s effective.
He’s writing because it’s therapeutic. Many people write journals as a means of therapy, and sometimes those journals are shared, although usually, they wither away secretly in their writer’s private computer folders, never to be seen by another soul.
I know I have a journal like that — you might, too.
My teacher chose to make his journals public and I’m so glad that he did because I think his approach to grief and loss is so incredibly relatable. When I read it, I’m experiencing so many thoughts and feelings that I can only imagine I would feel in the moment.
The way we experience life is private, usually. It’s something that many of us hold close to the vest. Even what we post on social media is filtered through, well, filters, but also through a self-imagined lens of perceived reality that we like to put out to the world.
It’s not real reality, though.
Our silly fears and bizarre habits never really make the cut. Our deepest and heaviest moments aren’t often posted about because they’re too much to handle in the moment, let alone over social media. Even if we post about it, the words and pictures don’t do it justice, and that’s why people often stick to private journaling for the less attractive parts of their lives and personalities.
My teacher’s blog is about grief, essentially, but it’s become more than that. He’s put himself out there in the most vulnerable way possible. In his blog, he’s started to uncover other heavy times in his life in which he found the weight of it all resting on his shoulders.
It works, though, because it’s genuine. People love genuineness — it gives them the courage to try it out themselves.
I think it works because he’s human, and he’s showing his readers just how human we all are during trying times. We, as humans, experience a variety of complex and confusing emotions, and that’s why this blog speaks to me and to others he’s shared it with so powerfully. It’s a blog fueled by his grief, but really it’s about all human emotion — the good, the bad, and (especially) the ugly.
After reading his writing on the subject, though, I think grief might be the most complicated emotion of them all.
. . .
There are so many more examples of great writing in my teacher’s blog, as well as in the writing of the authors we all admire, and we can learn so much from them. I think the most important advice to take from this, however, is that no matter how you write, make sure it’s you doing the writing.
You’re writing from your heart and soul — and mind! — and that’s where it ultimately has to come from in order to be genuine and readable.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: your mind is your most powerful writing tool — use it! Let it do what it does best. Let it work and conjure up the most beautiful ways to say the most beautiful things you want to say.
You might be surprised at the masterpiece that comes from the depths of that incredible organ.
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This post was previously published on ILLUMINATION.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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