What Everyone Who is Anyone Says About Writing

Jerome David Salinger
In his seminal novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger writes of a young man whose place in the world is uncertain. Holden Caulfield flunks out of Pencey Prep and spends the rest of the novel wandering New York, being an asshole - rationalizing his behavior as grief for his dead brother, Allie - until he remembers his love for his living sister, Phoebe.

Everyone in my AP English class in high school loved this book, but I only took away one thing from it. At one point Holden goes to Phoebe's school and finds a wall graffitied with the words "fuck you." His reaction to it is something along the lines of "no matter where you go, some asshole has gotten there first and written 'fuck you' on the walls." I read this as, "no matter what you write about, someone else has already written about it." So why write?

Ernest Hemingway/William Forrester
"The first draft of anything is shit." I see your bet, Papa, and raise you the wisdom of a fictional author, William Forrester, who said, "No thinking. That comes later. You write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head."

I miss writing. Since I started teaching in 2008, I have written very little and it disturbs me. I saw Finding Forrester the same year I read Catcher, and I understood that while someone might have written about "it" first, they didn't write it with my heart. Or rewrite it with my head. It's time to get my heart and head back in the game.

Ray Bradbury
I cried last June when Ray Bradbury died. And not just weak, slow-rolling tears. I full-on ugly cried. It was 5 o'clock in the morning before school, and I was reading the Sacramento Bee obituaries, which I usually skip, and there he was. The rocket man, fuse burned out.

I am reading The Martian Chronicles with my junior English class. Yesterday we read "Usher II," a chapter among several about the settlement of Mars. Or, an overt homage to Edgar Allan Poe. Stendahl builds a house on Mars that will enable him to exact retribution against the culture police of Earth. The culture police walk right into their deaths because they burned the stories of Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum, the Cask of Amontillado - without ever reading them. My students rejoiced; they knew some of the source material but wanted to read more. They won't be victims of ignorance.

Bradbury wrote about what someone else had already written about. But it was new, from his heart and an obvious love for Poe. Embrace the fact that someone has already written "fuck you" on the literary wall. Change it, update it, revive it. Again, do it fast. Spare no time for thought: "In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping." The rocket man, fuse eternal.

Me
I use my typewriter or a pen and legal pads when I want to write from my heart. How much good writing is lost because we rely on computers? The cursor blinks, we type a line, the cursor blinks again, reminding us that the text we've just completed is temporary. It can be erased. Should it be erased? I should just erase this and start again. Thinking.

I am starting again, this time from the heart.

Polyphonic Improvisation

Definition: Instruments playing independent parts at the same time.

To make
this decision is to have
a polyphonic improvisation playing in your
head at all times; instruments play their
independent parts - pros and cons -
simultaneously.
The cacophony is resounding.
On your feet
as if to dance
pace and turn and frown and smile
independent parts improvising
involuntarily without rhythm or grace
They are all you and so
Beautiful.

An egg
fertilized, latches to lining
cells form, replicate, divide, and replicate again
a heart beats
ribs, lungs, eyes, skin debut their solos
in time
Polyphonic improvisation of the womb
Half you but still
Beautiful.