'So what?'
Mrs. Zuhl was my English teacher twice. Ninth grade wasn’t a banner year: I did not in those days vibe with Homer, and my grade one term was a C-minus. But by the time I was a junior, I’d begun to suspect writing was where it was at for me, especially since the evidence was in that it wouldn’t be math, history, athletics, chemistry, physics, biology, visual art, or theater. Our curriculum focused on the spring AP exam, and the coin of the realm was the weekly, handwritten, critical essay.
The exercise was neatly prescribed. We were to keep the punctuation simple—no em dashes, semicolons, or other instruments too subtle for teenage hands—and hew to a certain length. Any superfluous conjunctional “that” was ruthlessly condemned. There were more persnickety style demands, now long overwritten in my brain by the persnickety style demands of a series of newsrooms. (Editors love to make hyperspecific rules that contradict, head-on, the hyperspecific rules of other editors.)
We wouldn’t have the opportunity to rewrite or even refine these essays; they were preparation to write on the spot to an unforeseeable prompt. But each word of them must serve a purpose. No filler, no aimless tangents, no wasted strokes. The way you knew you’d fallen short of this standard was when you got the essay back, with as much as a multi-paragraph section circled in red, and Mrs. Zuhl’s axiomatic reprimand: “So what?” That question was incriminating. It suggested a failure beyond the page.
The effect of the class on my writing trajectory was twofold. One, my plastic teenage brain got many hours of practice writing essays that were spontaneous but also topical, substantive, and lean. Two, I mostly scored in the high 90s. I’d found something I liked applying effort to where I had differentiating skill. Out in the multiverse there’s a timeline where I had another teacher that year, and maybe it leads to the same place—but I think not. When you teach—or write—you see that no matter how generally you address your message, for some people it will end up being specific. The people who receive it generally will be shaped generally. The people who receive it specifically might actually become different people.
It took many years after school for my attention to come back to writing in its own right. By then I’d done a greater share of editing—taking the raw words of others and refining them, helping the writer to achieve clarity. Terribly often, this meant finding which words to remove, carving out a quicker path to the idea. When I did sometimes write for public consumption, I could do so only as a process of editing: The whole had to be more or less perfect before I could add to it, even a single sentence. That old AP exercise was about writing well in one direction; I’d become used to writing in two, steps forward mingled with steps back.
I’ve credited the practice known as morning pages with helping me start producing fiction, because like the AP essays they’re handwritten, unidirectional, unedited. To make something on the scale of a novel, I needed to generate, unfettered by revision. But after a few years of self-training and experiment, and now five chapters into my “this is it” manuscript, I find myself working back into earlier, more consolidated modes. Coming up with new ideas, laying out more material, then paring back, that’s fine. It’s OK to work in two directions. But time is in play again. I’m giving myself 2025 to do this or get out. The proctor has called the start of the exam. So now it’s time to merge editor and writer. The question before us is not different from 25 years ago: So what? The goal is to score in the high 90s.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.