Close Reading Essay

Because if what people mean is place the love of lauguage be taught? Can a grft for storytelling be taught? thenthe enswer is no. Which may be why the wonder is so often bringed in a skeptical leng imFlying that, unlike the dates tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity nett be tansmitted from teacher to student Lnagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for protagonist virh Paradire Lost,orKaka imperishable d1s semirlsl in which his classmates irrforn. him thaq franklp they just dont believe the part active the guywaking up champion morning to find hes a giant bug.VLrat confuses me is non the sensibleness of the question exclusively tJre fact that, when addressed to me, its world leaseed of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty -What historic period. would it think about mq my students, and the hourswete spent in the classroom if I said drat some(prenominal) attempt to teach the writing of fiction is a complete crazy of tim l?I should probably just go ahead and admit that lve been com mi tting criminal fraud. to f-l an creative *iting be taught? t rt r. roo.6l quJtiorr, but no military issue how -/ often Ive been asked it, I never krrow guite what Thats the experience I describe, the answer I give to people who ask about article of faith creative writing A workshop can be usefirl.A good teacher can show you how to edit your work. The right dass can encourage you and form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you. But that dass, as helpful as it was, is not where I learned to write. *itirg ike most-maybe all-vriters, I learned to write by and, by example, from reading books.Instead I answer by recalling my owu most valuable experienee not as a teacher, but as a student in one of the few fietion workshops I train ever taken. This was in the 1970s, during ny apprize c arLr as a graduate student in medieval side of meat literature, when I was allowed the indulgence of taling one ficti on dass. Its generous teacher showed me, ,mong other(a) things, how to line-edit my work For any writer, the abiJity to carriage at a sentetce and see whats superfluous, what cen be altered revised, erpanded and, especially, cut, is bssential.Its satisfring to see that sentence shrinl, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a much polished form clear, e conomical sharp. Meanwhile, my classmates were providing me with my first real audience. In that pre fib to begin with mass photocopying enabled students to unfold manuscripts in advance, Irre read our work aloud. That year I was bg*ning what would be survey my first novel Arld what made an important d. ifference to me was the attention I entangle in the room as the others listened.I was very dncouraged by their eagerness to happen uponto a greater extent 8Long before 6e head of a writers conference was a glimmer in anyones eye writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They analyze meter with Ovid, dappl e consuuction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes tley honed their prose style by enthralling the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson- And who could require asked for better teachexs generous, uncriticel blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessh benignant as only the dead can be?Though writers give leamed from the masters. in a formal.methodical way-Harrv Crews has described aking aparta whole meal flour Greene novel to see how many chapters it contained, how much time it covered how Greene handled pacin& tone, and top ofvieiv-the truth iS that this sort of education more often involves a loving of osmosis. A-fter Ive written an essay in which lve quoted at length from wide writers, so that fve had to copy out long passages of their work, Ive noticed that my get work becomes, however briefly, just a little more fluenl In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and read the authors I most loved.I read for pleasure, firsg but similarly more aualytical ly, conscious of stylef of dicrion, of how sentences were formed and learning was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing stop and dialogue. And asI wrotq I discovered that writing like reading, was through one battle cry at a time, one punctuation stag at a ti-e. It reguired what a friend calls l committing every joint on u-ial for its Lfe, changing an adjective, cutting a say, removing a sqttrlna and putting the comma bandaging in.I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, broody each deceptively minor decision the writer had made. Arrd though I cant recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks? courses of mystical lessons in the term paper on the make-up of blindness il Oedipus Rex and Kinglear. Newere supposed to go through the rwo tragedies and cirde every fictitious character to eyes, light, darkness, and visiort then draw some conclusion on which we would assigneda art of fiction.When I was a high school junio4 -our English teacher base our final essay. The exercise seemed to us dul mechanical. We felt we were way beyond it AII of us knew that blindness played a starring role in both dramas StiL we liked our E. nglish teacher, and we postulateed to please him. And searciing for everyrelevantword turned out to have ari enjoyable seasure-hunt aspect, a Weres Waldo detective thrill. Once we started looking for eyes, we entrap them everywhere, glinting at us, winking from every page.Long before the estimation of a writers conference was a glimmer in anyonds eye, writers leamed by reading their predecessors. Th*y studied meter with OYi plot construction with Homer, -omedy with Aristophanes. Tong before the blinding of Oedipus or Gloucester, the language of mint and its opposite was prepariag us, consciously or uncousciously, for those violent mutilations. It aske d us to consider what it meant to b6 dear-sighted or obtuse, short-sighted or prescieng to heed the signs and wamings, to see or deny what was right in front of ones eyes.Teiresias, Oedipus, goneril, Kent-all of them could be defined by the serious-mindedness or falseness with which they mused or ranted on the subject of literal or metaphorical blindness. tacing those patterns and making those connections was fun. Like cracking a code that the playwright had em. bedded in the text, a riddle that existed just for me to decipher. I felt as if I were engaged in some intimate conversation with dre writer, as if the ghosts of Sophodes and Shakespeare had been waiting patiendy all those centuries for a bookjsh.attention to whatever each word or phrase is tr4nsmitti.Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read which seems only fitting, because that is how the books we are reading were written in the 6rst place. The more we read, the fasterwe can perform that magic trick of seeing how the letter have been combined into words that have meaning. The more we read, the more we comprehen the more likely we are to discover new ways to read, each one tailored to the reason why we are reading a specific book.At 6rsq thethrill of our sustain brand-new expertise is all we ask or expect from Dick and Jane. But soon we begin to ask what else those marks on the page can give us. We begin to want information, entertainmeng invention, take down truth and beauty. We concentrate we skim, we skip words, put down the book and mean solar daydream, start over, and reread. We firrish a book and return to it years later to see what we might have Tissed, or the ways io which time and age have affected our understanding. As a child, I was force to the works of the great escapist chjldrens writers.Especially if I could rerurn to my own bed in time to turn offtle lights,I Iiked trading my famiJiar sixteen-year-old to come along and fiad them. I believed that I was learning to rea d in a whole new way. But this was only pardy uue. Because in fact I was merely relearning to read in an old way that I had leamed but forgotten. e all begin as close readers.Even before we learn to read, the process ofbeing read aloud to, and of listenirig, is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a trme, in which we are payrngworld for the London of the 4 children whose nanny parachuted into their lives on her umbrella and who turned tre mo$t routine shopping uip into a magical outing.I would have gladly followed the white rabbit down into the rabbit hole and had tea with the Mad Hatter. I loved novels in which children stepped through portals-a garden, a wardrobe-into an piece uoiverse. Children love the imagination, with its kaleidoscopic possibilities and its protest against the way that children are always being told exacdy whats true and false, whats real and whats illusion.Perhaps my strain in reading had something to do with the limitations I was discovering, day by day the brick walls of time and space, science and probabfity, to say nothing of whatever messages I was picking. up from the culture. I liked novels with plucky heroines like Pippi Longstocking, the astringent Jane Eyre, and the daughters in circumstantial Wonzw grls whose resourcefulness and intelligence donot automatically exclude them from the pleasures of male attention. Each word of these novels was a yellow brick ia the road to Oz.Some chapters I read and leread so as to repeat the dependable, out-of-body sensation of being someulzere ebe. I read addictively, constantly. On one-family vacation my father pleaded with me to close my book long enough to look at the Grand Canyon. I borrowed stacks of books from the public libraxy novels, biographies, history anything that looked even remotely engaging. Along with pre-adolescence came a more pressing desire for escape. I read more widely, more indiscriminately, and mostly with an interest in how faraway a book could take me from my life and how long it could keep me there.Gone With rlze LVind Pearl Buck. Edna Ferber. fat James Michener best-sellers with a dash of history sprinkled in to cool down the steamy love scenes between the Hawaiian girls and the missionaries, the geishas and the GIs. I also FtcTtoN rssuE 2006 lO THE ATLANTIC MoNTHLY appreciated these books for the often misieading nuggets of information they provided about sex in that innocent era, the 1950s. I turned the pages of these Page-turners as fast as I could.Reading was like eating alone, with that homogeneous element of bingeing. I was fortunate to have good teachers, and friend. s whowere also readers. The books I read bdcame more chal lenging, betterwritten, more substantial. Sieinbe& Camus.Hemingway, Fiugerald, TWain, Salingea Arrne Frank. Litde beatniks, my friends and I were passionate fans of bozo Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. We read . Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and the proto-hip pie classics of Herman Hesse, Carlos Castenada-Mary Poppiru for people who thought theyd outgrown the flying nanny. I-must have been vaguely aware of the power of language, but only dimly, and only as it utilise to whatever effect the book was having on me.