Details, Details, Details

NOTE: Another bit of babbling from the English 101 class I'm teaching. I put it here because the reminders I'm giving my students are good reminders for myself as well.

As we read in Mark Bennion’s “Thinking about the Self,” “[R]eaders want to be transported out of their mundane world and into another place, into a space that differs markedly from the trivialities of their daily existence; people want to envision the Alaskan wilderness or downtown Chicago. They don’t want to guess about the location of people or objects. Carol Burke and Molly Best Tinsley encourage us to reclaim the senses, ‘Writers have to fight against the tendency of the senses to take the familiar world for granted, and teach them instead to be unnatural, to risk indulging an obsessive appetite for all the world’s details.’”

As writers, we need to develop that obsessive appetite for all the world’s details. I include myself in this, because as I read my own “This I Believe” statement, I realized that while I had opened the door to my third-grade mind, caught up in the stories I was reading, I didn’t really invite you in. And I’m still not certain I’ve done that, given the re-write I’m going to show you. But I think it’s better.

Here’s the original paragraph I’m toying with:

As I wondered at a new world alongside Jon O’Connor, as I tagged along in the background as Henry Huggins romped with Ribsy, as I sat beside Mrs. Frisby in the rats’ library, rapt at the story of the rats of NIMH, I decided I wanted to be a writer. 

Okay. So I’ve given you a list of books, and a scratch on the surface of why I liked them then (and still like them now, frankly). But I didn’t do enough. So I tried again:

I wondered at a new world alongside Jon O’Connor after he fell through that forgotten door from his planet into the wilds of the Carolinas, befriended by the Bean family, hunted by the greedy Gilby Pitts. I tagged along in the background as Henry Huggins romped with Ribsy, that ragged, sharp-eyebrowed dog beneath the bold serif font declaring his name on the cover of the book. I sat beside Mrs. Frisby in the rats’ library, rapt at the story of the how the rats of NIMH gained their intelligence and how they hoped to use it to stop stealing from man, and later soared with her on the back of Jeremy the crow in the film inspired by the book.

I read these books, and many others. I decided I wanted to be a writer. 

I hope, by offering the expanded details, I’m offering a more vivid peek into that childhood brain, and what’s motivating me now to get back to that writing career I wanted to start back then.

Now, go back to your own essays. Get to the details. I’ll post, privately, in the gradebook, some specific suggestions.

And, in general, here are a few other things I’ve noticed:

1. Keep your punctuation inside your quotation marks. I know there’s a movement out there to get away from this “correction.” I’m not a part of that movement.
2. Repeat for effect, not for the sake of repetition.
3. Read your essays aloud. I’ve found a few that have some pretty funky sentence construction – and that’s okay, this is a rough draft. But read what you write aloud before you call it done – you’re going to have to for the podcast due Saturday anyway.
4. If you want to use a word, know how to spell it. Don’t rely on phonetics. Find a dictionary. If you can’t find the word in the dictionary because you can’t spell it, find someone else to help you find the correct word.
5. Watch out for synonyms. They’re doesn’t mean the same thing as their. Died doesn’t mean the same thing as dyed.
6. You don’t have to tell me, in your essay, that this is how you feel or this is how or what you think. It’s your essay. It’s obvious these are your feelings and your thoughts.