EPT
Learning to Write
I've always been decent at writing pursuasive or expository essays. It's not a matter of talent, for I definitely feel I have no particular talent for this style of writing. Rather, it's a matter of practice and upbringing. In the American school system (and I suspect in most school systems), almost all time spent in Language Arts classes is focused on basic literacy. You are taught how to read and write, how to read a novel, how to understand the composition of an essay, and how to write an essay. If you are lucky or talented, and live in a good area, you can take accelerated courses in High School in which you can learn advanced methods of composition and style and read good literature. The vast majority of your time in these classes will be spent writing analytical essays, reading literature, or learning how to do either. Other related classes (such as those in history, philosophy, and the social sciences) are of course focused on analytical writing as well.
As a result, I graduated from high school with an education how to write only in a very narrow, very strict sense of the term. My college years focus on Physics, and any writing courses focus on writing succinct and informative lab reports and academic papers. This means I've learned very few writing styles in an academic setting. Basically, I can argue. It translates well to some things, such as discussing news topics on the internet, or explaining nuances of video game strategy, but it translates very poorly to just about anything else. Everything I've learned about creative writing or expressing my personal feelings in the written form, I had to learn by doing in blogland. I started in middle school with Xanga, a popular blogging tool among youths, and continued on it for some years until a lapse in self-expression that began in High School and continued until I began blogging here on TL. I never kept a journal, and so the internet has been my only diary.
Even as largely self-taught writer of blogs, I still feel somewhat comfortable with the style. What this post is really about, for me, is creative writing. I was never encouraged or even allowed to write creatively for a school assignment. I suspect that a lack of measurable student learning outcomes coupled with a premium on time in English classrooms contributed to this gap in my education. At the time (and now), California was a state that battled with a large ESL student population and a difficult statewide standardized test. Measurable gains in literacy for any school translated to good federal support. If your school happened to have too many immigrants and scored too low on the literacy exams, federal censure was a constantly-looking threat. It's fairly unsurprising, then, that even my somewhat more affluent school was not awash with free time and cash to throw at creative writing in the classroom.
I got some practice for it, though, if only because I was a huge, huge nerd-- and for this I am eternally grateful. I had several great loves in High School, and one of them was Warhammer 40,000, a miniature battles game. Through what I can only sumrise is the smallest of small chances, my friends and I branched from Warhammer 40,000 to a game called Ætherverse. I'm still not entirely clear how we stumbled across that small forum for a game still in Alpha being published by a one-man company, but we did, and we loved it. Ætherverse basically was a miniature battle game, set in a sci-fi/fantasy multiple universes existence. The entire product was an inexpensive rulebook that contained the rules for generating army rulesets that you could use with any miniatures. An arbitrarily large number of possible army rules, units, and characters could be generated to go with your miniatures, and whether you were wizards riding dragons, rifle-toting militiamen, or futuristic space aliens, the rules would let you field your army and play against anyone else. We were the author's Beta testers and his first customers. Not many of his books sold and as we soon moved on to other things, his company went out of business. I can only hope Jason (I forget the entrepreneur's last name) went on to do great things.
Those couple of years we played Ætherverse, though, were special. They were special because Ætherverse not only begs you to write the rules for your own army, but to write the "fluff" and the background story. It was my first attempt at writing histories, dramas, and characters. I'd consumed so many books, but had never tried to create before. The habit came hard, but in time I had developed a story for my army. My army was a mixture of technological mechanized robots and poorly-equipped footsoldiers to accompany it. I wanted to create a feudal society, one with deep rifts. After a time I wrote a society torn between old and new, where the tradition of the Patriarchs was opposed by the youth movement of the Zealots, who read the ancient texts and embraced arcane religions and heresies. Cliched, poorly written, and over-dramatic, my work blended in perfectly with the other fluff stories on the boards. The other authors, some of them my friends, some of them part of the other group that played this game far away, offered me advice and criticism on my backstories. We congratulated each other, readied our armies for battle, and wrote more.
These fluff stories were probably the reason why, in college, I was the only guy in the group who could really DM. We all knew the rules, and we all had ideas for campaigns, encounters, dungeons, and fights, but only I could breathe some life (however feeble) into the ideas. Practice begets more practice, and in time I became not an excellent DM, but a reasonably capable one. I still had trouble gauging party strength and writing interesting dungeons, but the NPCs had stories and motivations and the Jewel of Garius meant something to the players. Even though writing an adventure or a campaign for people to play isn't the same as writing a creative piece, it has similarities. I think that my time both writing my Ætherverse fluff and DMing (which continues today) taught me a bit of creative writing. In the end, though, I'd like to have had some more specific instruction. I feel that there's something wrong with teaching children to read and never to write, and I feel that there's something missing. It's not the fault of the teachers, and it might not even directly be the fault of those who design the curriculum or the standards. Sometimes that's just the way it is.
I love TL Blogs, with its [Girl Blog]s and its whining and its stories of laddering and love and hate, and I love the stories I get to read and get to write. Somehow, I think in the transition from older media like message boards, listservs, and Xanga to newer media like facebook and twitter, we've lost something. The microblog tells us we can't tell a story, that we can only offer peeks into our lives. The tweet is about a dialogue, but a necessarily short and curtailed one. Perhaps I'm wrong, and perhaps Xanga is still alive with young people blogging their hearts out.
Maybe I'm the exception, and most kids kept diaries and wrote great things in them. Maybe Xanga for me was just an outlet for adolescent tears, and maybe Ætherverse was just overblown grandiose writing. Maybe D&D is just me and some other nerds staying in on Friday and rolling dice instead of going out.
Even if all that is true, though, I'd never give up the creative outlets I hugged close to me throughout the years.
