Well, I'd like to test that theory so I'm taking the semester off.
I've been in school since I was five. For the last 5 years or so my education has been fairly focused on reading and analyzing literature. I can deconstruct meaning, find subtext, root out binaries, distinguish between my reading and what is expected from the implied reader. I know when differance isn't just a typo. I'm good at this. I almost always have been.
When I was in the ninth grade I had an English teacher named Mrs. Siggers. I wished now that I tried harder in high school because maybe I would have gotten more out of her class. As it is, I think she was probably the best teacher I've ever had. She sat at her desk on the first day wrapped in an afghan cursing the air conditioning unit that would not creep above 65 degrees. The blanket draped her head so that, when first entering the room, you could only see her nose and the tips of her white bob. The home-spun Fate or a folksy Weird Sister. She was terrifying. And I loved her.
She would pound out iambs on our still soft heads and yell at us for the misplaced semi-colon that marred an otherwise unblemished essay on scientific hubris in Nathanial Hawthorne's short stories (I got a 98% on that essay, she docked me two points for that semi-colon.) She gave me the best compliment my writing has ever received (apart from something Chuck Palaniuk wrote that I will get to soon enough.) She told me I was clever with words. It turned into a epithet that followed me until 12th grade. Mr. Rosinski did not think I was particularly clever. He had no real reason to. I hardly ever made anything in his class that would pass for a concerted effort.
Siggers, along with my high school journalism teacher, Mr. Rens, made me want to be a writer. I used to write to the detriment of my other work. It wasn't always good. Most of the time it wasn't good. But I felt like I had to do it. Unfortunately, my formal education has gotten in the way of writing. And pretty much everything else. I don't enjoy it anymore.
I've come to resent writers I love because of the time I have to devote to them. Whitman wouldn't want me hold up in some library like a latter-day Bartleby when there are trolley cars to ride and rogues to meet. Melville called the sea the only Harvard that would have him. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael refers to the whaling ship as his Yale, his Harvard. Even Emerson knew we could be scholars even when we weren't officially students. One of my favorite lines in Beckett ends with the the phrase "fail better." I'm missing the point of their work. It comes from experience and you don't (always) get that in a book. And you don't get it from only sticking to what you are good at.
I'm good at being an English major. 4 years of undergrad, two semesters of grad school and I have yet to receive a B on anything. I have established my proficiency in the field. But maybe it's time to find out what I'm bad at. Maybe I will never be a published author. But today I printed out everything I've written in the last 5 years. I am going to sit down and find out what needs to be thrown out and what can be salvaged. The fixed bits will be sent out and I will start collecting rejection letters. I also pulled my guitar out of the basement today. My fingers hurt and I can't manage to go through any exercise without mucking it up but I like it. I don't have to think about it.
...
Now about that Chuck Palahniuk thing. When I was a freshman in college, I wrote him and he wrote back and this is what it said at the bottom of his letter:
I cried in my dorm room when I read it (mercifully my roommate had already left for winter break.) It doesn't say I'm a good writer. But it hints that I could be. Incidentally, the "November novel" was part of National Novel Writing Month wherein you try to write a 50,000 word piece in one month in an effort to just get at the thing. I failed. Next time I do it, I'll fail better.
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