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ellarien(Or: I was a sucky teenage writer!)
Various things that have been echoing around my f-list lately have had me thinking about my experience of secondary-school English, why it was so negative, and why I find myself at least somewhat sympathizing with those who are wary of academic approaches to their preferred reading matter even if I think it's inappropriate to express that wariness as public hostility.
To clarify for NorAm readers, by 'secondary school' I mean the school I attended from ages 11 to 18, which was a selective, independent, [i.e., private] girls' school with a heavy emphasis on academics and a teaching style that was rather old-fashioned even for the 1970s. It was also tiny, admitting sixty-odd pupils a year. In those days, the English O-level -- the external exam usually taken at age 16 -- was divided into 'Language' and 'Literature', and our school had an unusual system; the top half of the class, as assessed by the exam at the end of the third year, got to skip the Literature O-level and take the Language paper, which consisted of an essay and a comprehension exercise, a year early, after which we took a non-examined whistle-stop tour of English literature from Chaucer to Arthur Miller, instead of the in-depth study of a couple of texts required for the Literature O-level. After that, I happily never took an English class again, unless you count a few lectures on 'Scientific Communication' that came as part of my Physics degree course.
At age 11, I loved to read, and I loved to write. So why did I emerge at 16 still loving to read and write on my own terms, but with a deep distrust and dislike of the formal study of English in general and literature in particular, and with a general impression that English lessons were among my least favourite parts of the school experience, ranking only above the things (music, art, and sports) at which I was actively bad?
Part of it was that I had the same teacher for four out of those five years, and she and I didn't get along at all well. This was probably at least half my fault, but I had no such problems with any of my other teachers. To this day I can remember some of the specific instances where I felt she'd completely missed the point of what I was trying to do, or, I must confess, vice versa. (I'm still not convinced that graceless was the right word where I had ungraceful, even if the latter isn't really a word; at the time it didn't convey at all the same meaning to me, and it probably didn't fit the cadence of the sentence either. After thirty-odd years, I really should let it go.)
Part of it may have been that my primary-school teachers had encouraged and flattered my fiction writing to the point where I didn't really believe I had anything to learn about that. I even had external validation in the form of a couple of tiny cash prizes in writing competitions. I was shocked and indignant when my first secondary-school effort was criticized for lacking indented paragraphs, when the previous year I'd been ahead of most of my peers in being able to write compound sentences. Mrs. R's comments and put-downs stung all the more because I felt that English should have been my best subject. I cared about my writing, but not in the way that would have led to gracefully accepting guidance; I still have trouble with that. I firmly told my PhD supervisor, when I handed him my thesis to read, that I didn't want comments on the style.
Part of it was that the teaching of English leading towards O-levels was not geared to teaching the writing of fiction, but of 'discussion essays.' This was a form in which I had very little interest, and the less so because my few attempts in that direction always brought my own deeply-held beliefs and prejudices into collision with those of the teacher. In terms of ultimate usefulness to my career, I may have been right not to care about the essay form; there's very little call for that kind of thing in a Physics degree, and writing scientific papers is a rather different skill. Granted, it took a while to train myself out of wanting to impose a narrative structure on my papers: I much prefer 'Say what you have to say as engagingly as possible, and keep the reader in suspense about the ending until the last moment,' to 'Say what you're going to say, say it, and then say that you've said it.' So I learned nothing much useful about writing stories from my English courses, though I persisted in going for the fiction option in the essay component of the exam, because we weren't being taught that, and I learned little about non-fiction writing because it wasn't what I wanted to do. (Yes, I was a precocious brat, and I got away with a lot because I was good at exams, and I was good at enough subjects to have little incentive to improve in my weaker areas even if I had believed that improvement was possible.) I look back at my English composition books now, and I'm appalled by the stiff, pretentious, Latinate prose, but no-one ever told me that was bad, even though I had, sometimes, a sneaking suspicion that it would be better if I could write in a more natural style, without any idea how to go about it. The idea of trying to pick up hints from the texts we studied didn't occur to me -- or maybe it did, and I learned all the wrong lessons from the Victorians. Mrs. R. corrected the grammar of what she thought I was trying to say and left it at that. (Case in point: I once wrote: Crocuses opened there pure hearts to the sun. She corrected there to their, not realizing that I was actually trying clumsily for a poetic turn of phrase, and I really meant in that place, which was atrocious but not ungrammatical. At least, I think that's what happened. It's possible I retconned it rather than admit to such an elementary slip, even to myself.)
Then there were the comprehension exercises, which consisted of a passage to be read, followed by questions to answer, usually with a choice of mini-essays at the end. (Oddly enough, some of those mini-essay questions involved what looks now remarkably like incitement to fanfic, in the form of invitations to extend the story or retell it from a different character's viewpoint. We were told that these were harder than they looked and discouraged from attempting them, and even I usually heeded that warning.) I loathed and despised these, I remember, and I was deeply suspicious of the subjectivity of the whole thing; I might disagree with the teacher's interpretation, but she was the one giving the grades and there was no higher authority to appeal to, no book of answers or possibility of checking the working.
It wasn't that I disliked most of the texts in the literature part of the lessons, with a couple of memorable exceptions. (I was horrified and disgusted by Lord of the Flies, and a few years later by Sons and Lovers, but I had no problem with Dickens and Bronte and Austen, whom I was reading for fun anyway, or with Miller and Goldsmith and Shakespeare, Gerald Durrell and Arthur Grimble.) It may be that those texts that I disliked and was forced to read anyway soured me on the whole enterprise, but I don't think I greatly cared for the dissection of the ones I did like; it did, mostly, seem to me to be an attempt to destroy any pleasure in reading for its own sake by digging for things that only the teacher could see and that I wasn't convinced the author had intended to put there. There was one dissection I did enjoy; a Shakespeare sonnet (That time of day thou dost in me behold) where the metaphors and structure were obvious enough that I actually managed to decode it two or three layers deep all on my own. That might have been revelatory, but it wasn't reproducible; I tried, but I never could repeat the process on anything else.
I got good but not outstanding grades in the first three years, and made it into the no-literature-O-level stream, much to my relief. The fifth-year literature course was stormy, but without consequences because it had nothing to do with the all-important external exams; perhaps I'd have been less obstreperous about it if there'd been an official grade attached. (It didn't help that I was very intense about my faith at that age, and seriously offended by 'adult' themes and language.) I did end up borrowing the teacher's copy of Paradise Lost because I wanted to read the whole thing instead of breaking off after the first two books.
And then there's the bit that I've been wondering about lately. Is it that my mind just doesn't deal well with abstract and subjective concepts that can't be expressed as equations, graphs, and tables or programmed into a computer, and never was wired that way? Or was it just that nothing else in my education (which was very heavily geared to memorization and regurgitation of facts) required me to think that way, and I resisted learning it from my English teacher -- assuming she was actually teaching it -- because of the other issues? To this day, if I try to read serious literary criticism, or the sociology texts I've sometimes peeked at, or summaries of philosophical positions in history books, my mind skids off, unable to gain any purchase, unable to grasp that there's anything actually there that isn't either completely trivial or completely meaningless. I'm sure this means I'm missing things, even in what I do read with enjoyment.
So here I am, a professional scientist in my forties, reading fifty to a hundred books a year, making slow but steady progress -- at least in wordcount -- on my fourth attempt at writing a novel, utterly bewildered by talk of "Theory" as applied to literature, dimly aware of the difference between good and (very) bad prose but mostly unoffended by mediocrity, able to spot clever tricks with structure if they're blatant enough, somewhat apt to be bamboozled by unreliable narrators and only just learning to read Victorian novels from a standpoint outside of Victorian assumptions. (And most of what I do know, or think I know, about those things, I learned on the internet.) I do try not to dismiss what I don't understand, and I stand in a certain amount of awe of those of you who do have the hands or tools with which to grasp what to me is almost intangible. Could it have been different if I'd met a different English teacher when I was eleven? Of if I hadn't won a couple of small writing prizes when I was even younger? I don't know, but sometimes I wonder.
Various things that have been echoing around my f-list lately have had me thinking about my experience of secondary-school English, why it was so negative, and why I find myself at least somewhat sympathizing with those who are wary of academic approaches to their preferred reading matter even if I think it's inappropriate to express that wariness as public hostility.
To clarify for NorAm readers, by 'secondary school' I mean the school I attended from ages 11 to 18, which was a selective, independent, [i.e., private] girls' school with a heavy emphasis on academics and a teaching style that was rather old-fashioned even for the 1970s. It was also tiny, admitting sixty-odd pupils a year. In those days, the English O-level -- the external exam usually taken at age 16 -- was divided into 'Language' and 'Literature', and our school had an unusual system; the top half of the class, as assessed by the exam at the end of the third year, got to skip the Literature O-level and take the Language paper, which consisted of an essay and a comprehension exercise, a year early, after which we took a non-examined whistle-stop tour of English literature from Chaucer to Arthur Miller, instead of the in-depth study of a couple of texts required for the Literature O-level. After that, I happily never took an English class again, unless you count a few lectures on 'Scientific Communication' that came as part of my Physics degree course.
At age 11, I loved to read, and I loved to write. So why did I emerge at 16 still loving to read and write on my own terms, but with a deep distrust and dislike of the formal study of English in general and literature in particular, and with a general impression that English lessons were among my least favourite parts of the school experience, ranking only above the things (music, art, and sports) at which I was actively bad?
Part of it was that I had the same teacher for four out of those five years, and she and I didn't get along at all well. This was probably at least half my fault, but I had no such problems with any of my other teachers. To this day I can remember some of the specific instances where I felt she'd completely missed the point of what I was trying to do, or, I must confess, vice versa. (I'm still not convinced that graceless was the right word where I had ungraceful, even if the latter isn't really a word; at the time it didn't convey at all the same meaning to me, and it probably didn't fit the cadence of the sentence either. After thirty-odd years, I really should let it go.)
Part of it may have been that my primary-school teachers had encouraged and flattered my fiction writing to the point where I didn't really believe I had anything to learn about that. I even had external validation in the form of a couple of tiny cash prizes in writing competitions. I was shocked and indignant when my first secondary-school effort was criticized for lacking indented paragraphs, when the previous year I'd been ahead of most of my peers in being able to write compound sentences. Mrs. R's comments and put-downs stung all the more because I felt that English should have been my best subject. I cared about my writing, but not in the way that would have led to gracefully accepting guidance; I still have trouble with that. I firmly told my PhD supervisor, when I handed him my thesis to read, that I didn't want comments on the style.
Part of it was that the teaching of English leading towards O-levels was not geared to teaching the writing of fiction, but of 'discussion essays.' This was a form in which I had very little interest, and the less so because my few attempts in that direction always brought my own deeply-held beliefs and prejudices into collision with those of the teacher. In terms of ultimate usefulness to my career, I may have been right not to care about the essay form; there's very little call for that kind of thing in a Physics degree, and writing scientific papers is a rather different skill. Granted, it took a while to train myself out of wanting to impose a narrative structure on my papers: I much prefer 'Say what you have to say as engagingly as possible, and keep the reader in suspense about the ending until the last moment,' to 'Say what you're going to say, say it, and then say that you've said it.' So I learned nothing much useful about writing stories from my English courses, though I persisted in going for the fiction option in the essay component of the exam, because we weren't being taught that, and I learned little about non-fiction writing because it wasn't what I wanted to do. (Yes, I was a precocious brat, and I got away with a lot because I was good at exams, and I was good at enough subjects to have little incentive to improve in my weaker areas even if I had believed that improvement was possible.) I look back at my English composition books now, and I'm appalled by the stiff, pretentious, Latinate prose, but no-one ever told me that was bad, even though I had, sometimes, a sneaking suspicion that it would be better if I could write in a more natural style, without any idea how to go about it. The idea of trying to pick up hints from the texts we studied didn't occur to me -- or maybe it did, and I learned all the wrong lessons from the Victorians. Mrs. R. corrected the grammar of what she thought I was trying to say and left it at that. (Case in point: I once wrote: Crocuses opened there pure hearts to the sun. She corrected there to their, not realizing that I was actually trying clumsily for a poetic turn of phrase, and I really meant in that place, which was atrocious but not ungrammatical. At least, I think that's what happened. It's possible I retconned it rather than admit to such an elementary slip, even to myself.)
Then there were the comprehension exercises, which consisted of a passage to be read, followed by questions to answer, usually with a choice of mini-essays at the end. (Oddly enough, some of those mini-essay questions involved what looks now remarkably like incitement to fanfic, in the form of invitations to extend the story or retell it from a different character's viewpoint. We were told that these were harder than they looked and discouraged from attempting them, and even I usually heeded that warning.) I loathed and despised these, I remember, and I was deeply suspicious of the subjectivity of the whole thing; I might disagree with the teacher's interpretation, but she was the one giving the grades and there was no higher authority to appeal to, no book of answers or possibility of checking the working.
It wasn't that I disliked most of the texts in the literature part of the lessons, with a couple of memorable exceptions. (I was horrified and disgusted by Lord of the Flies, and a few years later by Sons and Lovers, but I had no problem with Dickens and Bronte and Austen, whom I was reading for fun anyway, or with Miller and Goldsmith and Shakespeare, Gerald Durrell and Arthur Grimble.) It may be that those texts that I disliked and was forced to read anyway soured me on the whole enterprise, but I don't think I greatly cared for the dissection of the ones I did like; it did, mostly, seem to me to be an attempt to destroy any pleasure in reading for its own sake by digging for things that only the teacher could see and that I wasn't convinced the author had intended to put there. There was one dissection I did enjoy; a Shakespeare sonnet (That time of day thou dost in me behold) where the metaphors and structure were obvious enough that I actually managed to decode it two or three layers deep all on my own. That might have been revelatory, but it wasn't reproducible; I tried, but I never could repeat the process on anything else.
I got good but not outstanding grades in the first three years, and made it into the no-literature-O-level stream, much to my relief. The fifth-year literature course was stormy, but without consequences because it had nothing to do with the all-important external exams; perhaps I'd have been less obstreperous about it if there'd been an official grade attached. (It didn't help that I was very intense about my faith at that age, and seriously offended by 'adult' themes and language.) I did end up borrowing the teacher's copy of Paradise Lost because I wanted to read the whole thing instead of breaking off after the first two books.
And then there's the bit that I've been wondering about lately. Is it that my mind just doesn't deal well with abstract and subjective concepts that can't be expressed as equations, graphs, and tables or programmed into a computer, and never was wired that way? Or was it just that nothing else in my education (which was very heavily geared to memorization and regurgitation of facts) required me to think that way, and I resisted learning it from my English teacher -- assuming she was actually teaching it -- because of the other issues? To this day, if I try to read serious literary criticism, or the sociology texts I've sometimes peeked at, or summaries of philosophical positions in history books, my mind skids off, unable to gain any purchase, unable to grasp that there's anything actually there that isn't either completely trivial or completely meaningless. I'm sure this means I'm missing things, even in what I do read with enjoyment.
So here I am, a professional scientist in my forties, reading fifty to a hundred books a year, making slow but steady progress -- at least in wordcount -- on my fourth attempt at writing a novel, utterly bewildered by talk of "Theory" as applied to literature, dimly aware of the difference between good and (very) bad prose but mostly unoffended by mediocrity, able to spot clever tricks with structure if they're blatant enough, somewhat apt to be bamboozled by unreliable narrators and only just learning to read Victorian novels from a standpoint outside of Victorian assumptions. (And most of what I do know, or think I know, about those things, I learned on the internet.) I do try not to dismiss what I don't understand, and I stand in a certain amount of awe of those of you who do have the hands or tools with which to grasp what to me is almost intangible. Could it have been different if I'd met a different English teacher when I was eleven? Of if I hadn't won a couple of small writing prizes when I was even younger? I don't know, but sometimes I wonder.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-20 09:22 am (UTC)the theory of writing is, in many ways, quite unlike thr theory of taking texts apart and interpreting them. I've grown up as the daughter of a litcritter and was exposed to the second from an early age, and it did in no way prepare me for writing. It's only now that I've studied writing intensely for the last ten or fifteen years that I'm beginning to see how I can use all those metaphors and other stylistic elements in my writing.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-20 04:32 pm (UTC)