Lesson 3: Maybe DON’T write what you want to read...

I don’t recall writing assignments from my early days in school — it is safe to assume they were a tortuous requirement. By sixth grade, however, I was enjoying writing and illustrating short adventures that riffed off the book descriptions I read in Scholastic Book Club flyers.

Actually, this one I still have a copy of. Somewhere.

The 'rents were cool toward this outfit — likely for the same reason they were cool toward television (worldly influence). Since I rarely set eyes on the advertised product, necessity dictated I conjure up these forbidden adventures on my own. I also did this in the family back yard, physically elaborating plot elements gleaned from the TV guide, energetically spilling rivers of villainous blood that would have made Conan the Barbarian recoil in horror.

Lotsa fun, lotsa fun...

English classes were dubbed “Language Arts” in those days of Trudeau-and-all-his-hippie-cronies-playing-the-pipe. Mr. H__, my grade 7 LA teacher, required a creative one-pager at the end of every month. On Friday he’d take the collection of foolscap pages home, and on Monday he’d read his favourites to the class. To my astonishment my pulpy descriptions of starships eliminating hideous alien threats, or MENSA teens exacting poorly-conceived revenge on their jock tormentors, were frequently read aloud to my less-than-ecstatic classmates.

This is a good time (for me, at least) to tip the hat to Alan Dean Foster — you were my Proust, sir.

By grade 8, coinciding with Joe Clark’s brief tenure as (Conservative) PM, “Language Arts” was bluntly reduced once again to ENGLISH. Mr. L__ — a man of very different temperament to Mr. H__ — announced in September there would be only one “Creative Writing” assignment, due in January. The rest of the year would be devoted to sober discussion of serious texts, and disciplined mastery of spelling and grammar.

Needless to say, Mr. L__ was nowhere near as moved as Mr. H__ might have been, had the latter been given opportunity to read my crackling story of an international team of space agents dispatched to assassinate an evil genius in his orbital station.

The winning story that year was an account of a girl who, against the wishes of her caring but religiously austere parents, gets her long, lustrous hair cut to a more fashionable length, then comes home to face the consequences. As Mr. L__ read it aloud to us, I was surprised to find myself actually quite moved by what I initially thought was a rather pedestrian struggle common to us all, really, in one form or another. I also couldn’t help but notice the author was in possession of a well-brushed, cared-for, and very lengthy mane of hair.

Lessons learned: 1) make it personal; 2) KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.

Next: literary encounters of an unsettling kind.