Writing can, at times, be an almost mystical experience.
Like other professional feature writers and columnists, I write as a way to review experiences and find out what I think. For me, writing is more or less a process of discovery.
The reader, meanwhile, is my shadow friend whose attention I am trying to keep.
It is true, I also write for money. Samuel Johnson once wrote that only a fool or blockhead writes for reasons other than for money.
I wouldn’t go quite that far.
But when you consider the 18th century author wrote his famed “Rasalas, Prince of Abyssinia” to escape debtors’ prison (specifically to defray the expense of his mother’s funeral and pay some little debts that she had left), maybe he had a point.
My columns, as far as subject matter goes, jump all over the place: from human interest and nostalgia to education and entertainment. I write to explore my ignorance of things and to clarify the meanings I am trying to understand. Essentially, I am asking my audience to help me process information by allowing me to clarify it for them.
Closing in on 50 years of professional journalism experience, I know the value of clarity.
If I walk into a local restaurant and see a customer reading my online column on his cellphone, I watch to see if he finishes it. If he doesn’t finish it, then I must have failed that particular reader, or at least let him down somehow.
One day when I was feeling pretty good about the works I’d just written, my telephone rang.
A little girl named Michelle from Hollywood Elementary explained she had been given a school assignment: to read a feature article in a newspaper or online source and write about it.
“I read a story that you wrote yesterday in LootPress.com” she said. “Can you tell me what it means?”
That burst my balloon. I was at a loss for words.
Then I asked the polite elementary student, “Where do you go to school? How would you like me to come out for a visit?”
“Fine,” she said. She would ask the teacher. Shortly, I received an invitation.
It turns out that here third-grade teacher was a former journalism student of mine when I taught at Woodrow Wilson High School.
I was prepared to relax my sense of aesthetic for such a young audience. I was surprised to find out that the third graders were already writing five-paragraph themes.
“Wow! I thought as I clandestinely slipped my notecards into my jacket pockets and out of sight. “If you’re writing five-paragraph themes this year, what did you do last year,” I asked my young charges.
“We wrote paragraphs,” came their reply.
“And the year before that?”
“We wrote sentences.”
Now, I was the one being taught about writing. I’ll admit that I was impressed, as any veteran secondary English teacher would have been. It was an exciting lesson, to be sure, for an old head like mine. I couldn’t wait to tell my college composition students about the incident.
As I said, the visit turned out to be a wonderful experience. I was on the other side of the interview for a change. I had to defend myself as a writer and show how I did it.
Meanwhile, the youngsters fired a barrage of questions at me that I had never been challenged with before. During the exchange, I was able to impart to them the importance of having a plan before writing, having a main point at the beginning of an essay, and sticking to that main point throughout, putting ideas in an organizational pattern, and offering a summary at the end.
Basically, that’s what writers do every day, and we’re only as good as our last column or feature story.
I like talking to the youngsters about writing. They always seem to enjoy hearing about my failures, how things don’t always turn out as planned. That’s a key issue for young writers, knowing there is no perfect way to write anything. They can identify with that easily.
“It’s not how much time that you spend writing,” I explained in my classes, “but how much time you spend thinking about the essay before you ever begin to write it.”
The young students asked me lots of valuable questions that afternoon—things like “Why do you write?”
The truth is, I really don’t know why I do what I do.
I think it’s because I have always enjoyed reading. I grew up in a culture that spent time reading for entertainment as well as to gain information. Even today, the best way to learn something new is to read about it—in books or in magazines or on the internet.
Reading is a bridge to writing, and writing is a bridge to reading. The two are interconnected. If you can’t read, you can’t write. Reading and writing are the key components of literacy.
Read for meaning, read for knowledge, read for pleasure.
And writing to summarize what you have read is a means to clear thinking.
If there are no books or magazines at home, there is no exposure to good literature.
If we want our children to read, the subject matter must have meaning for them. It must be relevant. If you don’t believe it, just give youngsters something they are interested in—trucks, fashion, sports, science fiction, horror—and see how quickly they devour it.
My idea of spending a leisurely afternoon is sitting in the easy chairs at Barnes & Nobel and sipping a cup of hot mocha while exploring the works of half a dozen authors. The exotic fragrance of books and coffee is how I imagine Heaven must smell like.
Perhaps it would be a good idea if parents took their children to the public library or a bookstore once in a while and allow the young readers to explore the kaleidoscope of literature currently on display.
After all, more books and magazines are being published now than in any other time in history. It’s a terrible shame to think that all of those billions of words, like far-flung stars in the heavens, are indiscernible to young intellectuals and squandered in solitude.
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Top o’ the morning!