The beauty and power of words Part 3: Writing is its own language or “How I learned to write using the radical technique of being punched in the back of the head by my English Teacher in an attempt to punch literature into me.”
Depending on who you compare me to I’d have to confess that I don’t have the greatest vocabulary. I usually follow that up with, “Many say the same of John Steinbeck”. I’m not comparing myself to Steinbeck. I’m pointing out that you don’t need fancy words to write great works of literature. Although my Grandma did once say my work reminded her of Steinbeck and I actually think that should be on the blurb of any work I get published.
My vocabulary is not awful, but it would be a lot better if I’d had a better grounding in English language from a young age. I only realised how bad my knowledge of my native language was, and still is, when I was helping some friends to improve their English. I was far from qualified to be teaching English, my only credentials being that I speak English. It became clear from the questions that my friends were asking me that their secondary schools had given them an understanding of grammar and syntax and the rules of their own language that I could not match. All they needed to do was to start talking about conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions and definite articles and I knew that my schooling had failed me. I’d heard of those things. I knew they existed but I was not at all versed in them. How could I remember and know the meaning of a lovely word like onomatopoeia, which I first heard when I was ten years old, and yet fail to give a good definition of any of the building blocks of my own language?
I’m not going to pretend I was ever a good student at any time during my secondary schooling. I only took to education at the age of nineteen, when I realised that I could study what I wanted and not just what my school allowed me to. Yes, before that I was what they called a disruptive kid. But as much as I was not a good student, my teachers and my options at school were not great either. When it came to work placements and I said that I wanted to work for the local paper, I was told that my English wasn’t strong enough. It would be some fifteen years later that I’d be helping those friends to learn English that I would think that those teachers were right but also that I was not alone in my failings. At the time I was helping friends with their English I had gained a degree in Writing and Publishing. How could I get to that stage of education and feel that my grasp of my own language was being tested and strained by people who I worked with in the hotel trade? I don’t mean to belittle the profession but it’s important for me to highlight that these people just wanted to learn how to converse with English speakers. They did not have any aspirations to be a writer like I did.
When it came time for that school work placement I didn’t find my way to the local paper. I was given a two week’s stint at the local library. This might seem like a case of, “You like books? Go stack em!” Hey ho, as Tolstoy said, “manual labour is good for the soul”. Wow. Saying that out loud I wish I knew all about Tolstoy when I was at school. I’m imagining a scene of a teenage me leaving the careers counsellor’s office saying that and the counsellor calling me back saying, “Hang on, you know about Tolstoy? Came back here. Maybe we can help you.” I partly feel that one of the main reasons I didn’t get a chance to work at the local paper was because I was a disruptive student. Even so, I was mostly a kid who liked to talk a lot and get laughs, not an arsonist who was going to burn down the local paper.
One of the stories that often comes up when I talk about my schooling is the one about getting punched in the back of the head by teachers on two different occasions. Remarkably, when telling this, people often tend to ask me which subjects the teachers taught. Of course I remember that it was a Geography Teacher and an English Lit teacher. Someone, aware of my education in Creative Writing and Literature recently commented, “I think your English teacher was trying to punch literature into you and it worked.”
I’d yawned in class whilst the teacher was reading Shakespeare to us. He took offence at my yawn and pointed to the door and said, “Get out.” As any teenager would, I stroppily got up and on my way to the door mumbled, “It’s probably more interesting out there in the corridor.” This utterly outraged the man. In adult life I love Shakespeare. I spend hundreds of pounds each year going to see Shakespeare at the Globe or in the West End or the Royal Shakespeare Company. I love Shakespeare on film. Manga comic book Shakespeare is great. But even I have never considered punching a teenager in the back of the head for saying that Shakespeare was boring. But there we were in the corridor putting our fists up ready to fight. That escalated quick. One minute I was tired and yawning, and it was a genuine yawn, the next I’m being clattered by a grown man. If I could go back in time and tell that grown man one thing, other than saying, “Dude, you’re a grown man starting a fight with a child!” it would be that you shouldn’t read Shakespeare and you definitely shouldn’t get your class to butcher it with their reading of it. We’re kids studying literature. We’re not actors. It would be a better idea to sign me up for acting classes, talk about how the lines are delivered, talk to us about whether that pause between the words “signifying” and “nothing” in the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech from MacBeth is really important like many critics argue it is. You got lucky Mr K and your radical theory of “punching literature into me” worked.
What was not instilled in me or forcefully punched into the back of my head was the foundation of good English language. Yet here I am writing a word after a word after a word and knowing I can write. I sometimes try to convince myself that maybe my degree and my Masters isn’t enough proof of my ability or that when I was given a place on my PhD it was to fill a quota or they wanted my money but not because they liked my research. Maybe anything published was done so by accident. Failing all that I can say I’m a writer and I see the two things, being a writer and being great with the English language as not essentially forever linked to one another. The question for teenage me wanting to have a work placement on the local paper should not have been, “How good are your English Language grades?” but more to the point should have been, “How good are you at writing and telling stories?”
I am in no way saying don’t bother with English Language at school. I’m saying do bother with it. I’d love to have had that head start and feel like more of a natural with language and linguistics. I recently met a linguistics student who said she’d rather read a dictionary than a novel. For a moment I envied her for that. I envied it even though I know that however good she might be with language and linguistics it does not mean that she will be a natural writer and a storyteller. Her descriptions regarding which vacuum cleaner to buy could be spectacular though.
Narrative is its own language with different dialects. Which is why you often find stories that sound best suited for a novel but don’t work as film or theatre. On the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas DVD commentary Hunter S Thompson was asked if he had thought about writing the screenplay for the film. He replied no, explaining that he is not a screenwriter. He did not say, “I wasn’t asked because my grasp of story telling wasn’t good enough.” He knew which type of storyteller he was and let others write the screenplay.
The one thing that does exist through most great narrative is the beauty and power of words. Creating the way that something sounds, when you read it out loud or read it in your head, or hear it on screen or stage, is the one skill that I never remember being taught in all of my education. No one seems to have grasped it and I’ve never heard anyone say it, at least no academic that I remember, but the secret to writing, good writing, is to think in writing. It’s not clinical like a dissection of nouns, pronouns or definitive articles. It’s got little to do with knowingly conjugating any verbs. It’s not that the content of what you are writing about is so engaging. In literary parlances, there will always be content and form and there will always be debate about the relationship between the two. There’s always someone just around the corner about to say, “Oh, he’s all style and no content.” In non-bookish type speak, as readers we often ask what a book is about, but as writers we are concerned with how we convey what we’re trying to tell the reader about. Where we might be going wrong as writers, is in believing that content is king. But what’s the point of content if no one remembers it? That’s why content needs to be memorable. That’s why JFK giving a report about what’s so great about going to the moon is not going to be shown again and again as an inspiration to us all, but his speech at Rice University lives on. I can’t help but feel that we’re flying in the face of an attitude that says, “Why bother to make something sound nice at all?”