About the Professor

What qualifies me to teach you anything? If my lessons and examples aren’t enough to convince you, here’s a quick biography.

 

I graduated in May, 2012 from a college in the Midwest with a BA in English with Creative Writing. After tutoring under A.W. Johns for three years, four of my short stories were accepted for publication in the literary magazine, The Knickerbocker. Two of those stories won the short fiction contest in 2010 and 2012. I have an excuse for 2011, but excuses, excuses, excuses. I dabbled in poetry, but I have no rhythm and it shows. But at least my messages were clear. As part of the class, a poem was printed and illustrated in a book. The artist did a great job capturing the tone of the poem. With the theme of a Pilgrimage, I wrote about moving west, Manifest Destiny and all. The artist made the cover look like wood paneling and the pages are aged. The art is simple but poignant. It doesn’t illustrate the poem, but it complements it well. I’ve written grants for non-profits and earned the NFP organizations a collective $6,025. Friends received $10,000 in scholarships after I edited their essays. During a semester in Bangor, Wales, the school’s lit mag, Pulp, published me, and a local newspaper published a piece of flash fiction. I audited a class under Lisa Blower, who won The Guardian’s best short story of 2010. I was the best student in the class, at both analyzing fiction and writing it. During my last semester at college, they awarded me the Calliope Prize for creativity in the classroom.

 

Over the past two years, I wrote two novels (Ben Dau: Marked and Nothing Fazes a Ghost) that I’m seeking publication for. Each has gotten positive responses from agents; however it is “an interesting story but not the right project” for them. I patiently practice till the day agents wise up. Three more books are in progress. There are two blog-stories that I update with a new chapter each week. One of them I love, and one I struggle with. I like blending fantasy and realism and use humor to charm you till the story hooked your heart and wrenches it with every tragic turn. Currently, I’m working on a video game story-script and programming it into a 2D, digital play as an audition in case a game design company grants me an interview.

 

I can tell you how to write a report, memo, resume, cover letter, formal letter, haiku, sonnet, grant proposal, so on and so on. I know the difference between lie/lay, lay/laid, lain/laid, complement/compliment, so on and so on. I read closely and discuss Kurt Vonnegut, Shakespeare, Salinger, Hemingway, Jane Austen, Achebe, Walt Whitman, John Updike, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver. I can name more authors and I’ll forget a few, but let me check my closet full of books and the list will go forth till I’m just name-dropping. I’ve met Naomi Shihab Nye, discussed with her William Stafford. My high school drama teacher wrote Stafford a letter after his play was set to premiere at LA’s most prestigious theater at the time and Stafford wrote him back saying, Sure, of course, I was greatly moved by your play and would be honored to have a poem of his as the preface to my teacher’s play. Not my qualification, a tangent, I know, but it’s still cool.

 

I’m a substitute teacher in my hometown so that I can afford life, but I still manage to write daily. As college bills and rent erode my income to a shell, I’ll be forced to get a move on on my literary magazine project. It’s a big step and I haven’t thought it out enough, but the area needs it and I need the minor amount of cash it’ll provide.

 

You can find me on twitter, facebook, skype, and when another major site pops up, I might be there too. I was on Dailybooth till it shut down, but I’ve migrated to Clicar.us. I’m a nice guy, but a harsh editor. It’s good for you.

Why Nobody Can’t Write Good by A.W. Johns

There are a few basic principles in good writing of any sort, among which are simplicity, economy, color, and freshness. This has been true for centuries, despite changing literary fashions and the idiosyncrasies of individual authors. However, the student often concludes from incompetent teaching that there are no standards of excellence in writing, and that prudence only requires him to humor the conflicting whims of each professor. Or he may become a convert and embrace the cliches invented and made immortal by generations of pedagogues. He has been told that he must “make transitions” between sentences, and the way to do this is to haul a lot of cargo from one sentence into the next, which makes his paragraphs echo like a burial vault. And he must never a sentence with a preposition, nor sully the dignity of prose with contractions. To write with color he should use lots of adjectives and adverbs. And of course there is the constant assumption that big words are more eloquent and impressive than simple ones. For organization he must have an “Introduction, Body, and Conclusion,” which require that he must first “Tell the reader what he’s going to tell him,” and in the “Body” (or Cadaver) he must tell him, and in the “Conclusion” he must “Tell him what he has told him,” and so inflict all of his tediousness on the reader for a third time, like Shakespeare’s Dogberry. Thus the student first Introduces the reader to his cadaver, who has little information to offer, and the Conclusion is that there’s no hope of reviving this corpse.

 

The student who wishes to write well should begin by creating a bonfire of those hoary notions, and others. The most useful book of rhetoric I ever saw was called The Modern Stylists, edited by Donald Hall – a simple anthology of comments on writing by real authors who have demonstrated their ability, and thus their authority to advise, including Hemingway, Orwell, E.B. White, Mencken, Churchill and many others, among whom there was widespread agreement on basic principles. This does not mean “Rules” as inflexible as the laws of physics, for they were not brought down by Moses from the mountain. Even in grammar there are few rules which do not admit exceptions – such as when we write dialect (non-standard forms of English). And even educated people sometimes speak in fragments of sentences – thus when we write dialogue most of us choose to preserve the patterns of real speech.

 

The following specimens of good and bad prose were chosen to illustrate the four principles of economy, simplicity, color, and freshness. These are basic to good writing and speaking on the level of individual setences, though if you wish to write the next great American novel there are many other skills to acquire. I include clarity within the concept of simplicity, but if you feel that it requires separate consideration, I have no objection.

A Preface on Pedagogy by A.W. Johns

I notice too often that I sneer at some of my students’ work, when it’s notably inane or inept. Most of us in the profession do this, I find, probably to remind ourselves how clever we’ve become since we were young and green. Fortunately, few of us indulge such bad manners in the guilty student’s presence, so perhaps this is a harmless species of vanity.

I read all of my students’ papers in private tutorials in my office, once per week, with 20 minutes each for short freshman essays, and 45 minutes to an hour in my fiction writing class. I began doing this 46 years go as a shavetail instructor at a big university, a factory lacking only the smoke, but with plenty of industrial-level noise. I adopted this desperate expedient one day after returning a stack of essays to my students, who glanced at the grades and stuffed the papers in their backpacks. I had spent twenty or thirty minutes reading and annotating each paper, but I saw that my efforts had been wasted. So for the past 46 years I’ve read (aloud) and marked each narrative or essay with the student looking on, making both written and oral comments, and allowing him or her to make explanations or ask questions. I haven’t read their works in advance, but after three or four years of teaching there are few surprises, and the students aren’t doing anything wrong that I haven’t seen a thousand times before. In tutorials, they cannot ignore my analysis of their work, though they may not choose to profit by it – I try to give them their money’s worth, whether they want it or not. These private tutorials take a lot of time, but with the next student at my door I can’t procrastinate between papers, and I’d much rather talk to students than just scribble on their pages. This forces me to use my daylight hours to full advantage between classes, and my evenings are often free. Some students like this personal attention, and others are terrified, especially at first. In another life long ago I taught a basic geology course for six years, as a voluntary overload, and I learned that students could accept criticism of their exams with no great suffering. But a personal essay or story from their own experience was an extension of themselves, and their sensitivity to their faults was much greater. Even their ideas in a critical essay or a research paper become a part of their identity, and to attack these can make them bleed. I’m not a sadist, and I don’t wish to batter or bruise the feelings of any student. With some of my colleagues I’m less considerate, but they’re grown-up folks with Ph.Ds who  consider themselves my equals (at least), so they ought to have verbal weapons equal to my own.

In tutorial, when a student and I sit or stand side by side as I read his words aloud, I usually have to demonstrate how to improve the color or economy of a line by producing an alternative. He can then understand what I want and attempt his own revision, perhaps better than mine. Hundreds of such tutorials every year create a substantial discipline that improves the professor’s own writing. By showing others how to write better, we teach ourselves.

Very occasionally during one of my tutorials, a tender student will shed tears, which always makes me feel bad too. But it’s a waste of time trying to teach writing skills by making cryptic red marks in the margins of a paper – even if they read and ponder those remarks, which is seldom, they often don’t understand and they have no good opportunity to ask questions. Every year I see student essays annotated by other professors, and often I don’t understand the marginal comments, even when they’re legible. So after 46 years I persevere with these tutorials, despite occasional tears. I recall the sweet voice of my dear mother saying (or rather shouting), “The more you cry the less you’ll pee!” as she was whacking me with a stick. I hope that my former students will forgive any pain that I’ve inflicted.

-A.W. Johns

To Write Right

Do you like writing? Do you do it for readers or for self-expression? Do you do it to communicate, entertain, teach, or your own fun? Has anyone told you you’re doing it wrong?

In today’s school systems, they teach you to write “A bold beginning, a mighty middle, and an excellent end.” They teach vocab words that you’ll never use and they make you memorize Latin and Greek roots that might be useful if you’re a linguistics professor. They teach you to preview a text and guess what it’ll say, then you’re allowed to read it and see that you’re not psychic. They tell you to summarize key points and to circle words you don’t know. They load you up with poems and short stories too dry to entertain, too dense to understand. Then they ask you for symbolism when you can’t even describe *what* happened till you’ve read it ten times. They teach you to fill space on a page; they teach you to abuse thesauruses. They teach you to find academic criticism and they teach you the patience to muddle through the big words and poor ideas.

They don’t teach parts of speech (subject vs predicate or adverb vs adjective); they don’t diagram sentences; they don’t teach grammar till your mind is hardwired to say “I seen.”  How are you supposed to know the difference between a good sentence and a bad one? How are you supposed to make a good sentence? They don’t teach you. So the top stories on Fanfiction.net and Wattpad read like plays with dialogue more boring than instant messaging between teenagers. “Hey. What’s up? Nothing much, you? Same. Cool.”  Thousands of pages like that is bad enough but for the top rated, most popular stories to be that offensively bad is proof that no one has taught you the basics of good writing.

I’ll teach you.

This blog will feature lessons on language. I can’t teach you what to write beyond the archetypal plots that are tried and tested and a bit stale, but as Roger Ebert says, “I know, in fact, that what will happen next is completely predictable: They’ll fight, they’ll share experiences, they’ll suffer together, and eventually they’ll fall in love. I know all of these things, and yet I don’t care. I don’t care because love is always a cliché anyway, and the only thing that makes it endlessly fascinating is that the players are always changing.”  There are plots that have never been successfully explored and characters that seem impossible till presented properly. I can’t tell you who or what to write about, but I can show you how sentences are better than others. Through practice and by following this advice, your writing, academic and creative, will improve.

I’ll include example sentences for you to improve upon and then show what I thought would spice it up. I’ll update every week with new lessons, but I’ll also include stories from around the internet that showcase poor writing. I’ll show you my edits and why, and you can compare my version to the original and you’ll see mine has more punch, visual appeal, characterization, and literary value.

These lessons are not my own creations. I was taught by a great crank in a sweater vest, A.W. Johns, and he wrote a book my final year of college. These are lessons from his book, as well as my experience thrown in. His theories aren’t perfect and neither are mine. But they don’t force a style onto you; they give you a foundation for your style to build from.

If you’re not interested in learning, move on. If you want to critique my theories, go ahead. If you want to learn, keep reading. I’ll teach you what I can.