NOTE: Just a bit of writing for a BYU-Idaho class I'm teaching.
All my life, I have wanted to write books.
That desire started in the third grade, when I sat in the
back of Mrs. Barrett’s class, right next to the bookshelf. So I read a lot.
Hundreds of books. Thousands of books.
But never sat down to write one.
Oh, I started many. I still have some of those beginnings.
But during all that time I spent reading about Ribsy and Ramona and Mrs. Frisby
and Melba the Brain and Jack McGurk and Aslan and Bilbo and Frodo, I never did
what I said I wanted to do: I never wrote a book.
Books are easy to read. But to write them, deceptively
difficult. Until I realized that to write a book, you have to become educated.
And by that, I don’t mean learning grammar and punctuation – although that
helps.
Wilson Rawls, who wrote “Where the Red Fern Grows,” was so
embarrassed by his poor spelling and grammar that he burned his manuscript,
along with everything else he’d ever written, a week before he married his wife
Sophie rather than show it to her, because he knew in his heart she’d laugh at
his errors.
But Rawls was an educated person. And to me, educated people
do things. They think things out. They analyze their mistakes and the mistakes
of others. They do this so they can do better the second time. And the third
time. And the fourth time. And they never give up.
He told his wife Sophie the story of Billy Coleman and the
two dogs he loved. She told him to write the story down. He did so in six
weeks, then handed the manuscript to his wife, a stenographer schooled in
proper grammar and punctuation, and left the house. “I stayed in town all day,”
he said “I knew she had time to read it. I called her on the phone. I just knew
she was going to laugh at that writing. But when I called on the phone, she
said ‘You get back out here to the house. I want to talk to you. This is the
most wonderful dog and boy story I’ve ever heard in my life.’”
Rawls worked on the story, with Sophie at his side, helping
him with the spelling and grammar. They sold the story to The Saturday Evening
Post. And then to the publisher Doubleday. And the book is still in print
today.
Rawls demonstrated his education by what he did, and by not
giving up. As Eliot A. Butler says in his essay “We’re All Ignorant, Just on
Different Subjects”: “A common fault made in discussing education is to
describe it as a posture or stance, when in fact it is a continuing process.
The vigor and effectiveness of one’s mental activity and learning today tell
much more concerning whether that person is educated than does the record of
matters learned last year.”
Certainly writing a book is a vigorous demonstration of
one’s mental activity and, more importantly, one that happens now, rather than in the past or at some
future date. Educated people do things because they have a burning desire in
them to perform. So, to further my education in the direction I want to go, I
have to write a book. And that’s going to take work. I need more inspiration.
There is a spiritual impetus for doing things, most certainly
doing good things. The Book of Mormon prophet Lehi writes that mankind, in
accepting the challenge of mortality and accepting the sacrifice of Jesus
Christ, knows “good from evil” and has the ability to “act for themselves and
not be acted upon.”
James E. Faust, a former member of the Council of the Twelve
Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, helps us to
clarify what it means to act, rather than being acted upon. He writes in a 1995
General Conference address titled “Acting for Ourselves and Not Being Acted
Upon,” that “Being acted upon means somebody else is pulling the strings.”
An educated person does things. He or she pulls his own strings. Butler
echoes this when he writes that an educated person learns as the result of
“self-discipline and not the result of demands and pressures from others.”
Thomas G. Plummer agrees. In his essay “Diagnosing and Treating
the Ophelia Syndrome,” he tells a tale from the life of violinist Itzhak
Perlman. Perelman was sent to the Julliard School of Music as a young man to
study the violin. When asked what he thought of his teacher Dorothy Delay, he
said this:
“I hated her,” he replied.
Ms. Delay, a gentle woman with an air
of complete calm, smiled into the camera. “I hated her,” he repeated.
“Why?” the interviewer asked.
“She would never tell me what to do,”
said Perlman. “She would stop me in the middle of a scale and say, ‘Now Itzhak,
what is your concept of a C-sharp?’ It made me furious. She refused to tell me
what to do. “But,” he went on, “I began to think as I played. My playing became
an engaging intellectual exercise in which I understood every note and why I
played it the way I did, because I had thought about it myself.”
Dorothy Delay could easily have pulled Perlman’s strings. But she
knew better. She knew Perlman would be a better thinking-man’s violinist if he
found the strings to pull himself, even if answering his teacher’s questions
exasperated him. Plummer adds: “You truly are the only one who knows what you
think and feel, and you, consequently, are the only one who knows what feelings
and ideas you must follow through on.”
So let’s recap:
Wilson Rawls tells me to forge ahead with my writing, no matter
what my lack of skill may present. The act of writing – doing it now, rather
than wishing it were done – is the start. And since educated people do things,
doing something I know I want to do is a big step in that education process.
Eliot Butler and the prophet Lehi tell me that as I read and as I
write, I shouldn’t block myself off from learning. I should explore and find my
own strings to pull, rather than letting others pull them. I used to read a
book and think, wow, that was great – but I can never read it again because it
was so well-written it’ll discourage me from writing on my own. To apply what
Butler and Lehi say an educated person should do, I should read those books
again, and find personal strings to pull while I do so.
Then there’s Thomas Plummer. He tells me as I read and as I write,
I should figure out how I write, after I’ve read others and figure out what I
like about their stuff. I don’t want to parrot what others do, I want to find
my own writer’s voice. As I find my voice – through the act of writing, the act
of doing, the act of acting rather than waiting to be acted upon, I’ll become
more educated. Whew.
References
Book of Mormon, The; 2 Nephi 2:25-27. Salt Lake City,
Utah: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Butler, E. (1977, January 1). Everbody is Ignorant, Only on
Different Subjects. BYU Studies Quarterly. Retrieved April 25, 2014,
from https://byustudies.byu.edu/showtitle.aspx?title=5289
Faust, J. (1995, April 1). To Act or Be Acted Upon. The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Retrieved April 25, 2014, from
https://www.lds.org/media-library/video/2012-08-1330-to-act-or-be-acted-upon?lang=eng
Plummer, T. (1991, January 1). Diagnosing and Treating the
Ophelia Syndrome. BYU Magazine. Retrieved April 25, 2014, from
http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=2537
Trelease, J. (1997, January 1). Wilson Rawls Author Profile.
Wilson Rawls Author Profile. Retrieved April 25, 2014, from http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/rawls.html
No comments:
Post a Comment