My best advice for writers: "Let 'er rip"

Learn the mechanics later

Last week I taught the final class in a writing course for lifelong learners. My students, all of them older than I am, listened attentively each week, which was remarkable given that each class was 90 minutes long.

Holding the class in the morning might have helped. I worried when courses were scheduled that an early afternoon class might have involved lots of yawns and maybe a few naps. Our 9:30 start time seemed just right for a bunch of people over 70.

In the first class I acknowledged, somewhat apologetically, that I am not a professor of English and that my graduate studies were in something other than writing. (All of them knew that I had been a Presbyterian pastor and signed up for the course anyway.) On the other hand, I said, I am a practitioner, someone who has published a few books over the years and who enjoys talking about the craft of writing.

To be self-deprecating, I told my students that my college roommate, who received a Ph.D. in American literature from Boston College and then taught writing until he died a few years ago, would have been appalled if he knew that I was teaching writing in a college setting. (I had hoped that at least some proximity to an actual teacher of writing would give me credibility.) No one laughed or even smiled at this, but then their facial expressions were mostly obscured by masks, which everyone was required to wear for public-health reasons.

The class everyone had signed up for was “writing a memoir or personal essay.” The course description promised instruction on the basics of memoir writing, plus a careful look at some of the best contemporary memoirs. I started by telling my students that, as older adults, they undoubtedly had many stories to tell and that I hoped they would be inspired to write those stories. I had expected that they would nod in agreement at this but, somewhat disconcertingly, they continued to stare back at me.

The woman who served as the class coordinator and handled the microphone during class discussions was very encouraging and assured me later that I had the students “in the palm” of my hand, making the gesture with her hand for emphasis.

Even so, I moved quickly into my outline which began with authoritative-sounding definitions for memoir, autobiography, roman á clef, and related literary genres. On PowerPoint slides, crowded with way too much text, I offered both definitions and examples. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, I said, is a roman á clef, though I had not known this until I put together my class notes. When I first read the book several years ago, I thought it was an interesting novel about young adults who were bored and drank too much. My students seemed impressed that I knew something about Hemingway, though maybe I was simply imagining this, again because of the face masks.

The Old Testament Book of Nehemiah, I mentioned in that first class, is one of the earliest-known examples of memoir—a political memoir, I said, and “as utterly self-serving as you would expect.” I smiled as I said this, trying to sound ironic, but once again my students simply looked back at me. “Well, at least they’re not looking at their phones,” I thought, which is what I imagine happens in classes with young adults whose minds wander.

After I was finished with the first class, however, I found myself plagued by self-doubt, which I couldn’t shake, in spite of all the assurances from the class coordinator. It occurred to me that night, as I was lying awake thinking about the course, that I was doing it wrong. People didn’t sign up to hear me go on about character development and narrative arc; they were there to hear someone say, “You can do this.”

When I wrote my first-ever personal essay, my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. DeJong, told me that what I had written was good and that I should enter it in the school’s annual “prose and poetry” contest. As I recall, she never said a word about how to write a gripping resolution to a story or anything at all about story mechanics. She simply gave the class a prompt—“your most embarrassing moment” —and then told us to write. Which I did, a story I have never forgotten.

All the mechanics I needed to know, I learned later.

I remember the first time I went golfing. The other members of the foursome knew that I was golfing for the first time, with a set of clubs I inherited from my father-in-law, so they were all too happy to give me advice about how to grip the club, how to stand over the ball, and how to take my swing. By the time I stood at the tee for the first time, my head was swimming with excellent advice, and I was very nearly paralyzed. My golfing career was mostly downhill from there.

I wonder what kind of golfer I would have become if someone had said, “Just put the ball on the tee, Doug, and let ‘er rip.”

I remember my first course on preaching for pretty much the same reason. After weeks of lectures about grip, stance, and swing, my first sermon in front of a class full of seminary classmates was, well, not so good. I cringe thinking about it.

I wonder what would have happened in that course if, on the very first day, the preaching professor had said, “Let’s see what you’ve got, Doug. Tell us the good news.” All the mechanics I needed to know about beginning, middle, and end could have been taught later.

Some subjects, I realize, can’t be taught this way. We don’t hand car keys to a 16-year-old and say, “Put your foot on the gas pedal, and let’s see how fast you can go.” In the same way, I’m glad that surgeons, dentists, airline pilots, and auto mechanics are expected to learn a few things before they start.

But writing? Looking back, maybe the best advice I could have given to my students that first day was, “Let ‘er rip.”

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Some of my PowerPoint slides were really good. Here are a few favorites:

“That you had parents and a childhood does not qualify you to write a memoir.”

Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, January 28, 2011

“When you start, you’re pounding on a corpse’s chest & it may take a while to sit up.”

Mary Karr, The Art of the Memoir

“The arc from utter abjection to improbable redemption, at once deeply personal and appealingly universal, is one that writers have returned to—and readers have been insatiable for—ever since.

David Mendelsohn, The New Yorker, January 17, 2010

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans ... are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.”

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

One memorable Amazon review, or why you should write for the thrill of writing, not the thrill of being published: “I bought your book at a garage sale, and I want my quarter back.”

A couple of my all-time favorite memoir titles:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers

I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow … ‘Cause I Get Better-Looking Everyday

Joe Namath (and Dick Schaap)