Writing, Part 1: How my Teachers Crushed my Creativity

I started writing creatively in elementary school, but rarely finished anything.  I started a story about wild horses that was a few pages long, and I started a novel about "Will the Cat" that lasted a chapter or two before I lost interest. In any event, I didn't mention my extracurricular writing to my teachers. Looking at the scrapbook where my mother collected selected assignments, I can see that some of my school writing efforts received standard praise, but that's not what I remember about my experiences. Mostly I remember the rejections.

My third grade teacher was well known for being strict. She would berate the class daily, waggling her middle finger at us and referring to us as "You little infants!" (she wasn't giving us an obscene gesture--rather, for some reason she used her middle finger as her pointer finger) One day she gave us a writing assignment where we were to write a story about a raindrop named Droplet's adventure falling from a cloud to the earth. I wanted to be creative, so I named my raindrop "Mike" instead. Big mistake. I got marked off for that because I didn't follow directions, and the teacher actually erased the name "Mike" on my paper and wrote in Droplet instead. As a young 8-year-old, I wasn't about to complain, as I probably would have been called a "little infant" and gotten a middle finger in the face.

As an aside, the sole exception to rejection that I do remember is an assignment in 6th grade. Our instructions were minimal: Write a story about Mount Marshmallow. Unlike most creative writing assignments, the minimal instructions provided allowed me to get into it. I drew a map featuring Mount Marshmallow (on an extrasolar planet I named Omega Centauri) and wrote about a mountain climbing expedition to conquer the alien peak. The 2-page assignment ballooned into 6 pages for me, and the teacher was sufficiently impressed that she had me read it to the class.

The map that sparked the story was the key. I had always been fascinated by the maps I found in National Geographic, as well as books such as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Lone Wolf series of adventure gamebooks. I started to draw my own maps, and it was only natural to me to populate them with peoples, cultures, conflicts, and story ideas. I started writing a novel in 7th grade (1987), writing by the seat of my pants and slowly building a story as I went. By my junior year in high school, I had finished a first draft of some 90,000 words, but it was all handwritten in scattered notebooks. So I typed up the novel on my mother's computer, rewriting and revising heavily as my grasp of writing had matured significantly in the four years since I started.

After English class one day, I was discussing my book with a friend, and the teacher overheard the conversation. She was an excellent teacher and I enjoyed her class. I looked to her, and perhaps anticipating what might come next, she shook her head and told me flat out, "Sorry, I don't have time to read it." I never brought it up again.

Late in the year she was temporarily replaced by another teacher. During a writing assignment where we were supposed to describe our bedrooms, I wrote that I had a bookshelf that was so large that it "loomed" over you when you approached it (I was being dramatic). The teacher commented with her official red pen that using the word "loom" in such a fashion was anthropomorphizing an inanimate object, and therefore incorrect. At the time I was intimidated and said nothing. To this day I remain stunned that an English Teacher would say something like that.

So disenchanted with English, in my senior year I declined to take the AP English class despite having the grades for it. What was the point? I took a lower level class instead, which was easy but boring.

I started applying for colleges, and like all students, met with my guidance counselor to discuss my future. He said that I had good grades and was smart, but smart kids were a dime a dozen. I was light on extracurricular activities (I had stayed at home writing and painting miniatures, rather than being active in school sports or band), and therefore there was little to make me stand out from the crowd. The guidance counselor warned that I should not get my hopes up about attending a good school, and apply to several safety schools in case.

"But I've written a book," I replied.

The guidance counselor smirked at me skeptically and said, "You mean, you're writing a book." I inferred from his manner that he thought he was being charitable, and that he really believed I hadn't even gotten that far.

"No, I mean I've written a book.  It's 93,000 words." I took a copy of the printed manuscript out of my backpack and thumped all 300 pages of it onto his desk.

A sickened look came over his face as if he was terrified that I might ask him to read it or worse, get some actual guidance from him. He quickly changed the subject and got me out of his office as fast as he could.

I graduated high school and attended Wheaton College, a small Liberal Arts school in Massachusetts (not to be confused with the Evangelical Christian College in Illinois). As part of the Liberal Arts curriculum, all freshmen were required to take an English class, but students could waive the class if they could provide three writing samples, one being a term paper. Unfortunately despite a lot of digging I could not find any of my old term papers from high school, so I submitted what I did have: two creative writing assignments from high school, and my 93,000 word novel. My waiver was promptly rejected due to the lack of a term paper. I objected that while I didn't submit a term paper, what I did submit should certainly serve as a good measure of my writing ability. I was told that since I didn't prove I could write a term paper, it was just too darn bad. To make up for my clear deficiency in writing term papers, I was assigned to... a journalism course.

At college I asked around about my writing, seeking out advice wherever I could, and was told of a professor in the English department who was a published author, and it was suggested I speak to her. I did, expecting nothing. She didn't disappoint me. When I told her what I had written, she said that she wrote children's books, and therefore couldn't help me. Have a nice day.

By this time I had matured enough that I had long since learned my lesson about writing:  I was on my own. No one had helped, and more than that, no one wanted to. There would be no mentor to swoop down and show me the ropes. If I wanted to learn how to write and publish my work, I would have to do it myself.

The writing part, well, I've found that the best way to learn how to do it was to simply write, write, and write some more. As for the publishing part, in retrospect I think about it as an exercise in dodging bullets... which will be the subject of part 2 of this series.