I just turned twenty-two and I’ve already published a piece in a prominent literary journal. In fact, you’re reading it now. Although my name is Jason L, the counter on my website tells me that 23,832 of you already know me as “ProseMeister.” I’ll explain my webname later. After you finish this piece, you’ll probably want to visit www.prosemeister.com to read the full story of my phenomenal success as a young writer.
What’s my secret? Well, it was all a matter of finding my voice. That, and starting sentences with “well” in order to make that voice more relaxed and folksy. Techniques like this make readers feel comfortable. Of course, a sophisticated reader like you will see right through them, which is why you’re already feeling even more comfortable than an average person would. A reader like you will also understand that this isn’t really my voice. Although I actually did find my voice a while back, I’m not stupid enough to write in it, because there would be “ums” and “you knows” and “likes” all over the place. So I lied about that voice thing: my bad.
The real secret to my success is that when I write, I use anything but my real voice—with the exception, just now, of “my bad,” which is something I might actually say when I’m not writing. I write in a voice that readers want to hear—and I know a hundred sure-fire ways to do it. Sometimes I’ll use a cliché but put a twist at the end of it, so that readers will feel almost as if they wrote the sentence themselves. This is just one example of how, as a writer, I’ve learned to walk a mile in my readers’ heads. See? As soon as you didn’t see “shoes,” like you thought you would, you realized that you were in the presence of genius.
So how did a twenty-two-year-old get so good at reading readers’ minds? If I told you that, I’d be giving away the real secret of my writing success. But I’ve got so much confidence in my talent that I’ll tell you anyway. Besides, it’s important for a successful person to give something back to the community. Sometimes it’s also important to use a cliché straight, so that readers will keep their bearings and not feel stupid. The worst thing a writer can do is to make a reader feel stupid.
The worst thing a student can do is to make a teacher feel stupid. I learned that in college, along with how to make cool transitions by repeating a phrase with a slight variation. It was in college that I learned how to write so well. I am deeply grateful to all of my teachers for this gift, along with the insight that readers will warm to the kind of speaker who remembers to thank his or her teachers.
In college I became a master of prose by taking freshman composition eight times. This bears repeating for emphasis: I took freshman composition eight times. To develop my thesis through restatement and elaboration, this amounts to one composition course each semester—eight courses with eight different English professors.
My high school teachers told me I had talent, and as a would-be writer I was determined to maximize the opportunities that college afforded me. By taking the initiative, I wound up with eight captive readers—highly trained readers, too, with PhDs—precisely when I most needed them, during my formative years as a writer. My professors taught me, among other things, to mix levels of diction creatively to achieve memorable effects. To put this more trenchantly, freshman composition offered a sublime pedagogical opportunity that I sucked dry.
Like most colleges, mine wouldn’t let you retake a course just for fun: in order to repeat a course, you had to fail it. This means, as I’ll explain in an “aside” that you’ve already figured out, thus confirming how insightful you are, that I had to flunk composition seven times. The key thing to understand here is that I flunked it on purpose. Our school allowed grades of A, B, C, and No Credit for composition, so my strategy didn’t hurt my GPA. In fact, with all the extra writing practice, my grades in other courses soared. It is almost impossible to fail an essay exam if you’ve been taught eight times how to write a coherent and well supported essay.
For an aspiring writer, college is a gold mine. I’m still amazed that more creative writers don’t take advantage of it. When I first walked into the Arts and Letters Building, there it was: an entire department filled with English professors, a rich source of writing expertise that was there for the taking. And the taking. And the taking. How could I not help myself to all of it?
What I would do is this. I’d enroll in a course, start writing papers, and show a great deal of “promise.” I’d also tell the prof, with total honesty, that I was an aspiring writer. When you tell that to an English professor, you’ve already taken a big step toward reading minds. Like I said, or as I said if I weren’t going for a conversational tone, knowing what a reader wants is half the skirmish. Whenever a prof asked what sort of writing I wanted to do, I replied that I didn’t know except that I hoped to “express my feelings” and “improve people’s lives.”
Of course, if I ever screwed up and actually passed composition, my ongoing writing instruction would come to an end. That’s where my secret strategy, the kind that readers enjoy being let in on, came into play. During the eighth or ninth week of the semester, after writing several papers and receiving feedback useful to a promising writer, I’d let a few deadlines go by, miss a revision or two, and turn in some intentionally lousy papers. Then I’d make an appointment with my professor, claim to be going through a personal crisis of some sort, and disappear for the rest of the term without turning anything else in.
Believe me, there are lots of ways for a promising writer to flunk composition. The trick is to fail with credibility. This meant that I had to do enough work to extract all the advice from the prof that I could, but not enough work to pass the course. This way, I always made sure that another semester of writing instruction lay before me beautiful and new, as Milton once said, along with a fresh batch of insights gleaned from a whole new teacher. Like/as I said, my usual tactic was to stage a major freakout: “After all the help you’ve given me, I can’t bear to disappoint you.” “I’ve lost all confidence in my voice.” Or “What’s the use of being a writer in this materialistic society of ours?”
Nobody picked up on my scam, and after my third or fourth stab at comp, the English faculty saw me as a special challenge. Who would be the one to get through to me B to help me overcome my “performance anxiety,” as one of my profs called it? With each new teacher, I could see professional pride swelling to the occasion; these people had a lot at stake in my success.
Although I had pretty much found my voice in endless arguments with my unambitious roommate about whether or not Meg White is a good drummer, any reader of this journal will know that I’m talking about my writing voice. All eight of my composition professors took it upon themselves to help me find that voice—or rather, this voice—and every one of them, in one way or another, did me some good.
My first teacher was a middle-aged woman who was a stickler for punctuation and mechanics. She believed that the best way to learn to write was to analyze poems. She usually wore floral print tops, which I’m mentioning because I learned from another teacher that using concrete images is a way of showing rather than telling. For the floral-tops teacher I wrote heartfelt appreciations of several Shelley poems, all claiming that the Romantic lyric had changed my life—and all laced with compound-complex sentences and appropriately placed semicolons. Under her care, comma splices became a thing of the past. I listened; I learned.
When I was getting dangerously close to passing, it was time for action—and on paper number four I pretended to freeze up. My professor got concerned and suggested that I try something completely different: how about analyzing a poem by Wordsworth? (By not giving Shelley’s and Wordsworth’s first names, I am signaling my awareness that you already know them, which is one reason why you’re enjoying this piece. I did the same thing earlier with Milton.)
Given your insight, you’ve probably guessed what came next: a paper that slammed “Tintern Abbey” because it contains no car chases. This paper would have insulted the intelligence of either (I say this to satisfy your hunger for trenchant metaphors and occasional hyperboles) a literate bear or a piece of shale. You decide which, because it’s important to give readers something that one of my other professors called “interpretive freedom.”
Having mastered punctuation and poetry explication, I moved on to another class, this one taught by a bearded poet who opened my eyes to the universal hunger for poignant metaphors and dramatic hyperboles, but mostly to the fact that a good writer must be a good person. To paraphrase the poet Frost, with whom you are no doubt familiar, “good persons make good writers.” I showed exceptional promise as a good person and received many hugs of encouragement.
I enjoyed being a good writer-person. I wrote papers about how I loved trees, and in so doing learned how to give my writing a lush and even tropical sensuality, as if each word were a palmetto leaf playing a verdant role in the garden of my prose, which I tended without pesticides, dark thoughts, or anything else that was not natural or good. Then, around the eighth week of the term, I penned — you’ll note that I wrote “wrote” too recently to repeat it here—a defense of Chicago’s Mayor Daley for kicking the asses of those Vietnam War protestors back in the day. After absorbing my professor’s comment that this was not up to my usual standards, I scribed a lament for the fact that cryogenics came too late to preserve Mussolini. When Professor Poet suggested that I find yet another topic, I argued that the citizens of every Islamic nation should be force-taught Latin in order to make them so pro-Western that they will give us their oil for free.
To recount these topics, repugnant as they are, is to take you into my confidence: my speaker is very vulnerable here. With concern and sadness in his eyes, Professor Poet called me into his office and urged me to have more positive thoughts in the future. There wasn’t enough future left in the term to have enough positive thoughts to pass, so he gave me a gentleman’s C and a final hug.
My next composition professor was a radical feminist in her late thirties whose class Professor Poet recommended because it would help me confront and accept the Other. My new teacher—let’s call her Professor Other—helped me attain the empathy necessary for writing well. I worked up so much empathy for others that in paper after paper I renounced my maleness, professing shame at my collusion-by-gender in the oppression of over half the world’s reader-persons.
A self-hating writer, I learned, will quickly earn his or her reader’s sympathy. Though I feel sick about myself for admitting that, I was starting to gain too much of Professor Other’s sympathy. My final paper, which counted double and consisted of a stirring defense of Eminem, turned the trick. (You are aware, of course, that the phrase “turn the trick” is deliciously ironic in a feminist context.) Mine was not a defense along wimpy lines like freedom of speech or anything like that. I defended Eminem because with all his fame and money, he probably gets laid a lot. By now you know that I didn’t believe this sexist, misogynist, and androcentric thesis for a minute. The fact is, I’d rather read a thesaurus than listen to Eminem.
After Professor Other gave me an NC, I took composition from a teacher who helped me get in touch with my deepest feelings by writing about all the bad things that happened to me as a kid. I’ll call him Professor Sensitive. We kept journals for that class, and I quickly learned that the more lurid the stories I put in my entries, the more he praised my work. This class made me wonder whether my goal of being a writer didn’t stem from the time when I was very, very small and my father dipped my head in tallow, lit it with his Zippo, and used me as a human torch to light his way to a whorehouse in the middle of the night while Mom was giving birth to my little sister Zoë, who has no feet. Writing about this episode, however painful it was to do so, helped heal the wound whose pain you=re feeling right now. As Professor Sensitive taught me, good writers turn bad things into art that heals us. My vague but unshakable belief that I’m going to die young, for example, gives special urgency to my writing: I need to become famous really fast, and only readers like you can make that happen.
With Professor Sensitive, my usual excuses of feeling insecure and depressed didn’t work, because he kept giving me A’s for feeling insecure and depressed. Finally I had to take a gamble and tell him the real truth: that I had made up my childhood traumas just to con a good grade. As I crept out of his office, he called me an insensitive, conniving little bastard. Little did he know that the bastard part was the real con. I am actually a very good person, which is one of the prerequisites for a successful writer.
Because a sophisticated, sexy reader like you will not tolerate being bored, I’m not going to describe every composition professor I had. Sometimes, as my mother used to say when she withheld my and Zoë’s dinner for no reason at all, less is more. So I’ll cut right to the hunt and explain the nickname and website that I mentioned earlier. Trust me: you’re going to savor the ironic closure and/or the O. Henry-like twist that I am about to provide.
But first, a restatement of my theme: during my entire college career I pretended to be in trouble as a writer when I really wasn’t. Then came my last semester before graduation, which meant that I was about to take the one composition class that I had to pass. In this class, ironically enough, I actually did have trouble as a writer. If this weren’t the case, my story would have far less suspense than it does.
My final composition professor provided the crisis for the plot that you’ve gotten deeply invested in during the past twenty minutes or so (more like fifteen, for a fast reader like you). Given the rising trajectory of a well-crafted narrative, how could things have been otherwise? Plus, nothing beats a speaker who is duped by his own duplicity, or “hoist,” as one of our shared and therefore nameless writing heroes once put it, “on his own petard.” Good writers know that ironic self-awareness kicks major butt.
The professor who provided the petard was a late-middle-aged man, bearded and overweight, who ran the class through private tutorials: individual twenty-minute conferences once a week. He was one of those guys who never let you forget their working-class origins. As a literary person, you know the type. Let’s you and I agree to call him Working Class Hero, or Hero for short.
Professor Hero prided himself on having a no-nonsense approach to writing. It was all mind over matter: stiff upper lip, no crying in your beer, whatever. Writing was simply a job of work, and he didn’t care how you did it: just do it. The problem was, he didn’t seem to believe in anything. There was no obvious hook for an aspiring writer to grab onto, no button to push to make him take a special interest in me or my writing. At first I tried not writing anything, as a way of goading him into accepting the pedagogical challenge that I offered. But the second time I arrived at my conference with nothing to show him, he handed me a filled out drop-slip. “Bye,” he said. “Nothing personal.”
“But I’m an aspiring writer. Don’t you care about me?” That, or something very similar to that, was what I said as I stared at the slip.
“Yes, I do. I care about all of my students,” he replied. “Bye.”
One of my other teachers taught me to enliven my writing with snatches of dialogue, and since I stand a reasonable chance of remembering every word of this exchange, why not do it here? Besides, I was really scared, and I want to slow down the pace so that you, too, can be scared. To summarize, and also to prolong the suspense, I needed to pass this course in order to graduate. I promised to manage my time better and never again come empty-handed to a conference and could I please have another chance? While my consciousness streamed out in words very similar to those, my hairline was dripping with sweat, as you can easily visualize because I’m doing more than just telling you about it.
Professor Hero granted me a second chance, provided that I show up the following week with two drafts to make up for lost time. From then on I worked like a demon. Nothing, however, seemed to please him: affirmations of political correctness, tales of abuse, appreciations of sunsets, drunken-party narratives, laments for life’s absurdity. Hero was always maddeningly noncommittal. He would read a draft in silence and then slowly look up. “This paper is OK, and by OK I mean average, around a C. But you won’t get a higher grade than that unless you tell the truth. Good writing always tells the truth.”
After the third paper I demonstrated my sincerity by losing my cool. “Well, what the hell is the truth?” When I asked this, thereby making a literary allusion to Pontius Pilate, Hero replied that I would have to find my own truth, just as he had once found his truth while working nights in a Whirlpool appliance factory. When I protested that I couldn’t afford to get a C in his course because it would look bad in my future career as a writer, he leaned forward and said, “Kid, there’s nothing wrong with being average.” He went on to say that being average was a perfectly honorable thing, like driving a truck, being a plumber, or working nights in a Whirlpool factory.
As near as I could figure, Professor Hero defined a good writer as someone who used to work with his hands and now told the truth. I scrapped my drafts and started over. Determined to gain the working-class insights necessary for truthful writing, I went to the college maintenance department and volunteered to help out for a shift. After spending an entire Saturday cleaning toilets, vacuuming carpets, and hauling trash to dumpsters, I wrote about how the experience had fostered a new appreciation for people less fortunate than I or me, depending on how much formality would be appropriate at this point.
Hero read my paper and said “Nicely done: a good, solid C.” Royally pissed, I rewrote the paper to say how I had actually hated the whole experience: how the Lysol made my eyes burn and how I almost blew chunks while hauling the cafeteria garbage. This time Hero grunted his approval, but said nothing about a grade. In my next paper I described my day picking tomatoes for free at a local produce stand and how my arms itched for a week and how I despised every fucking minute of it, as only a well-placed colloquialism can express.
Once you start telling the truth, it’s hard to stop. Didn’t I confess that I don’t really like Eminem—and didn’t you and I bond over that? In my final paper, I told Professor Hero the biggest truth that I was feeling just then: I railed against Working Class Heroes and the injustice of aspiring writers having to write a certain way just to please their sorry, middle-aged asses. By now I knew that I wouldn’t fail, because every paper had gotten a C. But this was my last push for an A or a B, and I really let Hero have it.
I graduated and everything, but was none too pleased with my C in composition. When I emailed Hero to complain, he replied that he had liked my final paper a lot, but since I had told the truth only because it was what he wanted to hear, I hadn’t really told the truth after all. “If you had told the truth for truthful reasons,” he wrote, “I might have given you an A or a B. Still, a C is a perfectly honorable grade. Sincerely, Professor Hero.”
Telling the truth for truthful reasons was my last and most important lesson as a writer. Despite my disappointment over that C, Professor Hero had given me the best writing advice of all B a fitting capstone to a four-year, eight-faculty writing workshop just for me.
Here’s where that name ProseMeister comes in. After mastering the expectations of seven composition professors, Professor Hero forced me (and here’s more irony for you to savor) to master myself, to embrace myself as my Ultimate Reader and to satisfy that reader by writing his or her own truth. My final lesson in becoming a prose master—doesn’t ProseMeister sound a lot catchier?—was to discover my own truth and to write about it.
So here it is: I am an insanely ambitious young man who sees publication in this literary magazine as the first step in a lifelong career as a best-selling author. This is the sort of truth—and Professor Hero would surely agree—that cannot be faked. Good writing takes risks, a statement that’s as true as a carpenter’s plumbline or a nun’s prayer, whichever works for you. Every word that you’ve been reading attests to my honesty and my open heart, the latter of which is beating like a small bird’s and is therefore poignantly vulnerable to the response of a sensitive, savvy reader like you.
This kind of honesty is very special. It also accounts for why you’re about to finish a piece written by a twenty-two-year-old in a national literary magazine. In order to craft an effective conclusion with an appropriately “rising affect,” as my professors taught me to do, I’m tempted to use emotional language to urge aspiring writers to screw all those damned advanced workshops, writing conferences, and MFA programs. Success, at nominal cost, lies as close to hand as the English department of your local college. Trust me again: you can get all the training you need from freshman composition, so long as you don’t take it just once.
Well, there you have it. To mix dictions creatively, it is key to our common humanity to bull ahead through adversity to the stars, not unlike Dante reaching the Celestial Rose or a really intelligent reader finishing a story in this journal. My eight exposures to freshman composition made me the ProseMeister. I am Jason L only in my private life. The check for this story, for instance, will be made out to “Jason L,” and if you were to invite me to give a reading, which could be anywhere in the country provided that my expenses are paid, I can assure you that the actual Jason L would show up on time and do a really good job.
One should expect nothing less from an aspiring young writer. Now that you’ve finished this piece, check out my site (www.prosemeister.com), which is friendly to both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, has no pop-ups, and contains only one graphic: my graduation picture. I’m confident that for a reader like you, the latest technology is far less important than honest, well-crafted prose that affirms the indomitable human spirit that we all really and truly share.
