LEARNING TO WRITE

My first literary effort was.....

  My first literary effort was a poem for my mother. In the third grade, for Valentine’s Day, I cut out a red heart from construction paper and put my thumb print on one side. The other side read:

                        When we’re watching tv/And you’re in your seat/You’re always nice enough/To get me something to eat.

 Thus some of my future themes immediately appeared: family relationships, mass communications, and bodily appetites.

            When I was 12, I tried to write my first novel. This novel was about a left-handed major league pitcher named Janet. I was, of course, left-handed. I wrote one page about Janet to discover that writing is hard. How did people fill up the pages of a whole book?

            So in high school I went back to poetry, because poems were so short that I figured anyone could write them. My best poem began, “I am lost in the night of life.”

            I had gone to a poor country school where the English teacher would say Listen at me, y’all, so in college I had trouble passing first-year English. But what IS a theme? I kept asking the professor. You know, a THEME, he would say, a THEME, as if I were slightly deaf. But I just didn’t get it. The only prose I’d written in high school was a one-page character analysis of Lady Macbeth. I liked Lady Macbeth. The professor gave me a paper written by another student - it was about Faulkner’s short story “Wash” – and explained that she’d pulled out all the references to color and light in the story and discussed them. But why would anybody do that? What was the point?

            After two years in college, I quit and went to work for an insurance company, where my job was to write letters to old people telling them why they weren’t going to get their pensions in language they could understand. I finally began to learn something about writing. I had to dictate these letters, and the cleanest prose, I found, sounded surprisingly like someone talking, only much clearer and focused. And I learned that the effortless quality of good writing requires a great deal of effort.

            I was, in effect, acting as a translator from legal to human language. But all writing, I had started to grasp, is a form of translation. I hadn’t learned the word ineffable yet, but later I understood that every written sentence is an attempt to describe the ineffable. What comes through our senses and emotions and inner eyes is far too much for these words strung one after another, like beads. But when writing is carved into taut, surprising shapes, something can happen that surpasses the crudity of translation, and our words become prisms, where the chaos of experience gets separated into bands of color and light.