This Writing

I'm coming down with something, and it's supremely irritating. Somehow, I always find myself working myself into a position where I cannot afford the time to be sick, and thus have to soldier through whatever comes my way. But then again, who plans to be sick? Who plans their days to leave the leeway to encounter an unexpected malady? I guess rationally there is good reason to give yourself room to maneouvre, room for error, as it were. So that when things go wrong you can adapt and compensate, and the smallest error will not also be a catastrophic error. But I can't do that. I find that if I do that, I'd be tempted to take advantage of that leeway. I find that I only plan plans that I fully intend to execute. And insofar as the malady isn't fatal or incapacitating, then it is tolerable.

But it is irritating, trying to mark with one hand holding a piece of tissue to my nose, and having to stop every two or three scripts for a breather. There's only so much that tissue paper, peppermint tea and copious coatings of Vaseline at night can do, but there is still work to do. That's why health is important; because healthy or not, I have things to do, and I would rather be doing them in health than under the stress of sickness.

Anyway, been marking the essays that have been coming in this week. Generally, the kids have poor grammar; the standard of their grasp of the technicalities of the language is generally low, and I've been having to correct tenses, phrasing and even punctuation. Do you know, incidentally, the difference between a comma, a semi-colon and a full stop? I trust that we all have, by now, an intuitive grasp of how to use them, but when you're trying to explain to someone who is experimenting with punctuation, you need to know the technical reasons behind it.

That being said, though, the kids generally have good ideas on what to write. I've got science fiction compositions from my iSpark classes, and the ProEd boys are giving me descriptive pieces. Their plots are mostly sound; and, in fact, the ProEd plots are generally more sound than the iSpark ones. I think this is because iSpark kids tend to be more self-indulgent, and, faced with an interesting topic like science fiction, they tend to lose themselves in the writing, forgetting that what's fun for them to write may not be fun for other people to read. The ProEd people are not so daring with their plots, though there really are quite a few gems; and since their plots are simpler and not so convoluted, their standard of grammar is more appropriate and up to the task of their expression, which makes the ProEd scripts linguistically and technically better than the iSpark scripts.

The process of writing a story, after all, finds its orbit between the reader and the writer. Like I said to them on my first day, Language is Communication. When one writes, one must have something to say, and one chooses how to say it by considering what words, techniques and devices would best convey one's idea to the reader. Poor writers write for themselves, and thus feel little compulsion to write an entertaining plot, or even to keep to grammatical and technical conventions, or even to write at all, since communicating with yourself is no challenge (our internal debates and second-guessings notwithstanding). Better writers write for an audience, but perhaps cater to their readership too much, thereby compromising their core message and their style by appealing to the lowest common denominator of their chosen constituency. Political speeches fall into this category.

The best writers, I think, have found the sweet spot: the place from which they can be sincere with the readers without being untruthful to themselves. These are the true artists, that can turn any message into something that impacts the reader; they tend to seek to provoke, rather than to please, and their writing demonstrates an innate logic that advances inexorably in the reader's mind like a tsunami. When you read a work in this category, revelation dawns upon you like the warm glow of a fire kindled from damp wood; it takes effort on the reader's part to decode the message, and the message proves that the effort was well worth it. The paragon of the writing process, then, is to achieve this point of communication, to write something that is not just words, that forms a conduit of thoughts between the reader and writer, that engages both in a conversation that defies the need for a common time and space.

All this, though, I have come to realise through the classes I have been giving. Being on the other side of the teacher's table has been a sort of catalyst for me in this way, codifying and clarifying concepts that I have had a feeling for, deepening the appreciation and understanding of the process to a point where it can be communicated and evaluated. These realisations, emerging out of years of spontaneous experimentation and rumination, could not have arisen without the audience and the sounding board of my kids. As such, I have found myself growing, surprisingly, fed by the viewpoints and the dynamism of my classrooms.

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And today, I've indulged myself in a spot of science fiction as well, doing an assignment that I set for my kids. It has been so long since I've written pure fiction - stuff that's not based on my past experience. And as an exercise in description, in exploring the limits of imagination and expression, without the fetters of having to keep my prose realistic, it has been a welcome reprisal of the old techniques and pleasures.