Chapter 120: Celebrating Young-Writer-itis

Writers of a certain age (read: old) will from time to time look back at their work from long ago. The experience can feel like recalling the bad choices of youth, such as an ill-considered tattoo or a foolish romance.

The early writing seems so overdone, overwrought, overwritten – hallmarks of a writer trying too hard to say “notice me.”

I have been there; I have done that. And like a parent quick with advice to a teenager about to do something unwise, I tend to be hasty in stopping my students from writing as I did when I was their age. You’re good, I tell them. You don’t need to be showy. 

My students suffer, as I had, from what I call “young-writer-itis,” a condition manifested in such symptoms as an abundance of metaphors, purple prose, and a tendency to imitate the style of one writer before abandoning that one for another. 

I had tried to write like the great columnist Jimmy Breslin, before I tried to write like the Irish novelist J.P. Donleavy who himself tried to emulate the stream of consciousness of James Joyce. 

The opening of Joan Didion’s “Dreamers of the Golden Dream” was a degree of difficulty beyond me. Back then it seemed everyone tried to write like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe: the showier the better. Lots of profanity. Lots of exclamation marks goddamit….!!!!!!!!!!

No one seemed all that confident writing like themselves.

For years I have worked to curb my students’ excesses – forcing them to write without using any commas (much easier to get results than telling them to use short, declarative sentences) or to harness their prose by keeping the focus narrow. 

I am good at this. But lately I’ve been wondering whether I’ve been perhaps too good. 

There are so many difficult things about being a young writer and high on the list is a desire to – how to put it? – please the grownups. The grownups are editors, teachers, and publishers. The grownups want writing that feels…grown up. And so the inclination is to give them what you think they want. This makes sense from a commercial/career advancement point of view. But I wonder whether it comes at a cost – the price that comes from avoiding mistakes that will displease the grownups: the lost creative spark.

My wife has been advising the editors at her college paper for years and is struck, time and again, by how eager they are to replicate the “real world” in their work. She suggests that they have plenty of time for the real world but only four years as undergrads to try whatever they like.

Similarly, my students want my colleagues and me to make their writing better. But, bless their hearts, I cannot count how many times I’ve heard one of them say something along the lines of “I came here to have my writing torn apart.”

Uh, no you didn’t. You came here to get better. Unless you’re a masochist you don’t want your writing torn apart, leaving you and what remains of your self esteem in shreds. 

Much as I want to be supportive and kind – better results, I believe, always come through encouragement – in the end I am, for all intents and purposes, saying with every cut and reordering, “this kinda sucks.” At least I suspect that is how they hear it. I am, after all, the resident grown up.

So now I am asking myself: what is the harm in excess? What is the cost of messy, overwrought, sometimes convoluted prose? Should I be giving my students more running room to fall on their faces, to write in prose so purple it looks like the remnants of pressed grapes?

In short, are there benefits to giving them leave to commit acts of young-writer-itis?

I have come to believe there are. Allowing young writers freedom to feel unfettered, to write as they want to write without fear of “getting it wrong,” or failing to please me, the grownup, unleashes things, like their potential. It allows them to see themselves for who they are, or perhaps wish to be. 

They have, for the most part, spent the previous sixteen years of school trying to figure out what will please the teacher. And because the teacher may a) not necessarily be a writer and b) grades on a curve, she or he may well end up comparing student writing both to the prose of the great authors they’re studying as well as to the writing of classmates. 

But what if young writers were put in a position where they felt their writing didn’t count – meaning didn’t count in how they were seen or evaluated? 

What might they try? What might they do? What might they see in themselves?

So this fall I am going to try an experiment: I am going to call the first assignment: Spaghetti at the Wall. Meaning, I want to see what happens when my students have the chance to write however they like, knowing full well they will likely make a mess.

I will not edit these pieces.

Rather, I will ask them to take a week and then look at their stories again and, with the distance of time, critique them. What worked? What didn’t? What would they change? What would they keep? What in their unencumbered writing pleased them? What made them wince? 

I will insist they offer both criticism and praise; they cannot say it was all great or awful. Parts may have been, but not all.

I recognize that this may sound as if I am unleashing the furies. And perhaps I am. But I have come to believe that absent at least one moment of young-writer-itis, a young writer risks carrying into her or his future a regret that they never quite got the chance to take a big, messy swing and miss.

They have plenty of time, after all, to look back and, with the rueful smile that comes with age, ask themselves, what was I thinking…?

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.