A Writing Teacher Writes

At the end of a summer day in 1982, I threw away all drafts of a play that had turned out to be just Major Barbara in modern dress. Then I produced my one complete piece of creative self-expression for many years:

This frustrated writer of dramas
Has sulked all day long in pajamas.
It isn't that he is
Not full of ideas;
It's just that they all are his mama's.

Nearly twenty years later, I submit a portfolio of creative writing, all of it produced in the last sixteen months. Yet I'm still teaching middle school, and that still preoccupies me. My life experiences have included some travel, some relationships, a part-time job in a restaurant, and more books. Nothing there accounts for the sudden burst of writing.

But in those intervening years, I've been re-educated. I took some years off from even daydreaming about fiction to learn musical composition. I applied what I learned directly to writing scores for six musical theatre pieces, and applied musical principles indirectly to my eventual fiction writing as well. Then, graduate courses gave me deadlines to put writing ahead of grading quizzes some weekends and, by encouraging me to utilize techniques I found in others' writing, eased my self-consciousness about the intertextuality of my work.

My re-education has implications for how I teach, so I have included in this portfolio writings that I produced to reflect — and reflect upon — some pedagogical applications of what I've learned. (link)

 A Suite of Stories

My musical composition teacher, Dr. James Sclater, freed me right away from a misconception. Composition was not about fulfilling grand harmonic designs, though music theory class and program notes at the symphony might give that impression, just as English literature classes can give us the impression that Shakespeare one day thought, "How can I explore the theme of death? I know! Hamlet!" Instead, musical composition is about playing with sounds the way children might invent a game with some found object. "Find something that sounds good and develop it," Dr. Sclater said. But he cautioned, "You need rules, even if you have to make up your own."

For example of both principles, Dr. Sclater showed me a stripped-down notation of Brahms's Second Symphony, final movement. He pointed to the start, a flourish of just twenty notes. For the remainder of the movement, Brahms tosses around the first four pitches; repeats, transposes, segments, elongates, shortens, and reverses them. Each new use leads to another musical episode, until he moves on to do the same with another distinctive passage from that opening flourish. Dr. Sclater's punch line was that the opening theme itself grew from the bass part in the first measure of the symphony! But one idea's leading to another helter-skelter doesn't satisfy an audience's need to feel a piece's movement towards a goal, just as a game without rules is only chaos. For this example, Brahms followed models that limited his options of key, length, tempo, and final chord.

Dr. Sclater gave me another useful piece of advice, another way to use material economically. "Never think of just one song," he told me. "Make it a suite."

My suite of stories about the fictional Crossroads Café grew in the playful manner of a musical composition. My first "notes" came from material chosen for me at random by creative writing instructor Dr. Robert Hill: I had to select the most interesting sentence from the first page of Ann Beattie's story "Learning to Fall." I chose "There's plenty of time." He gave us half an hour to begin a story from our selection. I thought of setting a story in a restaurant, simply because I'd recently worked in one, and I enjoyed eating out. In that half hour, I sketched a story, literally sketching the face of the owner. I gave him relaxed and pudgy features unlike the one I'd known, who had looked intense and edgy. Then I drew the expediter, the person in a restaurant most concerned with plenitude of time. I didn't want to get hung up on themes from my own life, so I made this expediter as unlike me as I could: female, of blocky build, taciturn, anti-authority. I made her half my age and a college dropout. I would put her in a situation when her leadership is being tested, when time has run out, and I wrote in a word balloon by her cartoon portrait, "Just don't let me cry!" She would be working with a pizza man, so I first drew the one I had known, an angular Hispanic man, but then re- made him to contrast more with the mannish expediter: ponytail, soft face, lean build, flamboyant personality. In my notes, there's an arrow drawn from his face to her word balloon with these words circled: He cries, she comforts him. Setting up that climactic moment led to the story "Mutiny on the Hot Line."

That page of notes was for me like Brahms's first flourish, my resource for material. I added another page of notes that week, and all six stories build on these bits from those two pages: "belligerent customers, round one, round two, like a boxing match" . . . "cigarettes in back, row houses near by, train?" . . . "[the restaurant is a] theatre" . . . "international guest, Russian" . . . "big tip and questions of who deserves it" . . . "challenge of coming up with a different creation for each table" . . . "Sacrament? Preacher in argument with chocolatier" . . . "personal chef" . . . "Disturbance in the bar, lack of civility" . . . "Waitresses dueling, the one who's HM (Her Majesty, High Maintenance) and the one who's harried" . . . "Chef at Waffle Hut."

I played by certain rules. Instructors imposed requirements of length; one story had to pay homage to one from a certain anthology; one had to exemplify the "modular" style of narration, while another had to be "linear" in style. I developed some rules of my own. No two stories would have the same protagonist; all the stories would be told as if they had happened in the last week or two; the storyteller would use present tense to describe the ongoing routine of the restaurant, and he would not himself be the focus of any of the stories; each title would suggest a melodramatic action (mutiny, human sacrifice, showdown) ironically out of proportion to small-scale restaurant crises (smashed plate, botched dessert, manager's losing face). I broke every one of my own rules except the first, but they still helped to shape the stories even as I skirted the boundaries... .

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