Scribe
Scribe
2012
Teach it or Write it
If I wanted to teach writing, back in the day, jumping through the hoops of academia would have been the thing to do. And, if I lucked out and was able, on my own, to grok the necessary relativity of integrating scholastic-conforming but stodgy writing concepts with my natural proclivity of free-form experimentation, I could have become a writer, not just a teacher of writing.
In my case, my life trajectory made it impossible to continue in pedagogic higher education, so I had to rely on writing skills mostly developed in elementary school days, tweaked in high school through composition assignments. By the time I entered college for a short run in seeing life as others compartmentalized it for academicism and career advantage, I was more inclined toward living life and writing about it. I stepped out (as opposed to dropped out) from the walls of conceptualized life to literal life, from "literary fiction" to literal fiction describing literal non-fictional life.
The irony I've learned is a truth that my wife often speaks to: Sometimes, if not mostly, reality must be presented in "fiction" to make it more comestible to our digestion of unvarnished life. It gets the point across, but puts some distance between the spectators and their own personal story. Yet, it gives a personal voice to those whose life it literally depicts, granting them validation, while escape from the self-isolation of preferred privacy.
I didn't know what I was doing, when I wrote my first published book. I simply began it, and it unfolded with elements that later troubled my POD (print on demand) provider. When all was said and down, absolute truth had emerged out of memoir, history, and magic realism (a term I just learned, which I can relate to).
Ultimately, the forces of convention and avant-gardism, struck an accord and managed to live in the same space of written observation and truth-telling.
Carl
Thursday, February 16, 2012