An Invitation to Learn: Life and Writing

“Zodak and Nishan care for weak and wounded children.” In the process of brainstorming ideas and plot structure for a novel I want to write, the above quote is one of several notes made during this process. Yet, the more I studied the craft of writing and read about real-life experiences and the need to write and experience in tandem, I slowly began to realize an important truth: I could not write about two characters caring for weak and wounded children without doing the same myself. Such would give my writing no credence and prove me a hypocrite.

About a year and a half after graduating college and working odd jobs to head off payment of my student loan debt, I started substitute teaching in the public schools.  Ironically, I found several students of all grade levels who fit the description of weak and wounded children, particularly students labeled Emotionally Impaired. I worked with these precious children five days a week for seven months. Theirs’ were tales of abuse, drug use, and a great amount of insecurity, leading to exceptionally strange behavior and talk in each child kindergarten through age twelve. One third grade girl called me Mom during my time teaching in her class, most likely because she knew she could trust me. Somewhere during those brutal hard days, I recalled the novel note I had made years earlier. I was caring for weak and wounded children. Now I could write about characters who did the exact same and have experience to draw upon.  Fiction had indeed intertwined with reality!

Come, learn with me about life and writing and their intricate interchange…

 

A Voice for the Voiceless

“Not wrong at all, if it means you become the voice for the voiceless,” was the comment written on my paper graded and returned by my English professor. It was written and wrestled with writing via writing, a sort-of confession in a page-and-a-half. Tension, tiredness, and an all-terrain, busy life, whether working or doing the mundane, had left the feeling writing was marginalized, not important compared to the tyranny of the urgent. I had confessed the topics I wished to write about “weighted heavy on my heart and I believe they need to be told now before time and mankind forget them.” Such had I disclosed, while admitting my attitude of vacillation about the whole affair: were my hard-nosed convictions regarding this art founded in truth or error? Such was the context of the professor’s true and inspiring words given above.

“Not wrong at all, if it means you become a voice for the voiceless,” I had a desire to write in order to be a voice for those who were forced to be silent, whose story was unknown, whose suffering was and is largely overlooked by a busy, chaotic, perhaps intentional or unintentional uncaring world. But then again, the tyranny of the urgent has the potential to enslave everyone, not just me. Years later, rereading comments on this particular work, I am struck and encouraged by another statement written in the professor’s hand: “I like this finale of frustration/honesty/tension—because it shows you’re really doing the thing itself, not just talking about it.” There, in that statement was comfort and consolation—writing and the tension born of it, came via the process of writing and wrestling with the tension born of it. Yet, I still making the discovery of the depth of tension and heartache required to be a voice for the voiceless alongside the mundane of life. Great is the sacrifice. Yet greater still are the rewards!

Please join me as together:

We learn to wrestle writing

We lean into the tension

We grow in the art of study and art

Please join me as together we become a voice for the voiceless.

 

Triple Threat

“Ah, so you are a triple threat!” exclaimed my new friend and the wife of my history professor. I was a year from graduation, carrying a 3.5 GPA and studying abroad in Kosovo, when she discovered my rather ambitious degree – Humanities, majoring in Literature, with minors in both Creative Writing and History. It was true, I was a triple threat and I guess I am still.

The question is what to do with this academic discipline triangle I now hold. Literature and history each forming the base corners of the triangle, fuel writing, which forms the peak. Yet, it is through writing literature and history are engaged and interacted. . .life lessons unearthed, new wisdom found, knowledge known.

Put another way: History is immortalized through literature, literature gives writing wings, writing allows history to awake, becoming more than dates and names.

Yet, individuals more educated than I, have wrestled with the question: how do these creative disciplines influence the practical everyday lives of people? The following are preliminary answers, not original with me, as I am determined to construct the bridge between theory and practicality, thereby making the most of being a triple threat.

Literature invites one to strive to emulate the protagonist and avoid being the antagonist.

History invites one to study and learn the human story, passing it down, so as not to repeat its errors.

Writing invites one to engage the world with new ideas, hopefully leading the reader to both interaction and introspection.

Come alongside and learn as I am, how to become a triple threat!

Return on Investment

“Get your education,” my history professor told the young adults, taking notes on his lecture. “You can expect a return on your investment.” Four years post-graduation, I have definitely gained a return on my investment, although not near as smooth-sailing as I had envisioned, nor in the area of investment I would have originally chosen…but then again, life tends to work opposite of expectations!

You see, for three of four post-graduation years, I’ve worked as a substitute teacher both in public and charter schools, mostly five days a week, trying to teach the children of Grand Rapids both life skills and academics. As classes, I don’t believe they want to hear anything I try to impart; as individual children maybe. I could tell stories of my experiences which would literally curl toes and turn any upright responsible adult red-faced. Yet, equally true, I could give testimony to narratives which would either thrill because of tender beauty or pulverize the heart due to grotesque abhorrence. Then, as always, there are those stories which cause side-aches and tears from laughter. Yes, I’ve definitely experienced a return on my investment!

I’ve always wanted to offer individuals something worthwhile and lasting, not a temporal fix via consumerism in all its varied forms, but emotional connection and understanding. Words and literature have always been a huge part of my life, as has school, so I guess its natural for me to want to write and strive to provide an education to those who truly stand in need of it.

Therefore, I have two chief goals in mind, to write a novel and to teach Advanced Placement® classes to international and home-schooled students, for I have heard there’s a dire need to do the same.  Whether or not these will find fruition, who knows, for life rarely goes as planned.

Yet,

Regardless, I desire to make a lasting difference. . .

To give individuals something of value. . .

To teach and train to think deep. . .

To continue to expect a return on my investment. . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the College Board. Used with permission.

 

 

Take Us There

“Take us there,” my creative writing professor urged me regarding my own writing. This is exactly what excellent writing is supposed to accomplish: placing readers in the story, so the characters’ experience becomes their own. The reader should witness the light in the child’s eyes as he blows out the candles on his birthday cake, presents piled high, the last strains of “Happy Birthday” playing out on friends’ lips. The reader should find themselves sitting beside the mother wailing at the death of her daughter, eyes tear-filled, heart twisted with the knowledge of another’s pain – a life snuffed out before its time.   The reader should be walking on a pleasant spring night, in the park, arm-in-arm with their spouse, sweet whispers floating on the breeze.

Go ahead: learn the art. . .

Go ahead: apply the pen. . .

Go ahead: Engage emotion. . .

Take us there.

Historical Happenings: Fictional Frames

Look at blogs, bookstores shelves, and internet postings its clear most aspiring writers wonder and struggle to generate writing ideas. In my opinion a history textbook is a fine place to start. Love, war, public demonstrations, private conversations. . . Royalty, paupers, underdogs, comfort-seekers, hard-bitten survivors – history has it all.

Character development, plot lines, rich context. . . look at the reality of history; wisely put pen to paper and have the freedom to create stories of good and evil, light and dark, the strong and the weak, mild and passionate, meek and intense. . .

Stories of the imagination are hidden in the pages of history, and it may be possible history is waiting to be made via imaginations’ stories.

Inspire and Preserve

History and literature compliment each other like blue and green or coffee and a cheese Danish.  “How?” one might ask.  There are various ways history can be preserved by literature although to differing degrees: By chance, an individual’s history might be written in a biography, or maybe even a more intimate, up-close memoir, but its books capturing historical events, which serve as the most obvious intertwine of history and literature.

Historical events created literature and literature in part is responsible for the preservation of history. Consider Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s dramatic yet realistic tale of the French Revolution or Erich Maria Remarque’s haunting chronicle, All Quiet on the Western Front, hailing the horror of World War 1.  Both classic works of fiction were inspired by infamous wars each which left their scars upon history, just as the aforementioned wars gave the authors subject matter.

Knowing history enables one to have writing material and historical writing will enable history to live on down through the ages. Handling the first accurately will establish the credibility of the second, ensuring the compliment is complete.

Advanced Placement® Creation – Part 2

I have an unfounded theory: the bigger an organization the more and more bureaucratic it becomes. Whether good or bad, this is the natural way of things; as natural as the second law of thermodynamics.

My first call to the College Board was to inquire the steps needed for certification to teach the said AP® classes online. I was asked what kind of a web presence I had and was informed I needed a website. So I found a way to turn my WordPress blog into a website at no monetary cost. Weeks later, I called again, informed them I had a website and asked afresh what steps needed to be taken to teach AP® online. The gentleman was very cordial asking me such and such information and filling out a form over the phone in order to immediately get the ball rolling.

Within days, I received an email: Composition Craft had been recorded and processed into the College Board’s online database of listed schools, one registered under when seeking to get a syllabus approved. I was directed to call the AP® Educator help line for the purpose of requesting an AP® Course Audit Online Provider Administrator access code so I could be officially recognized as the Administrator of my own online school: Composition Craft.

I called immediately only to be asked to provide my six-digit AI Code, which I did not have and had no idea what it was nor how to obtain. I called to inquire, only to discover Composition Craft had to become accredited, or so I thought. Discouraged, but not dissuaded, I made phone calls, wrote a letter describing exactly what I wanted; the classes I would teach both potentially and for certain. I even had to sign it twice, because I neglected to affix the appropriate title to my name.  I even conducted my own research into becoming accredited, only to be blown away by the complex and arduous process I have not even embarked upon!

Tempted to vacillate, but not ready to admit defeat, my determination didn’t dissolve, but the more I prayed, became diamond-hard. I reasoned if I was meant to do this, this would be done, if not, it wouldn’t; I just had to keep pursuing.

One day in steady but wearying pursuit, as tiring as the intense heat of a sultry summer afternoon, a least-expected miracle occurred: the College Board left a voicemail granting me the Online Provider Code, I had so desperately sought…

 

 

AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the College Board. Used with permission.

Hello World!

Writing for college is like mountain climbing. It’s hard, difficult, constructed one word at a time, just like a hiker puts one foot in front of the other, ignoring the soreness racking every limb, the overwhelming fatigue, a body demanding rest. The student writer must do the same: sit at a blank page and fill it, read and highlight, extracting the main points from the studied text, weaving words to earn the grade, to touch emotion, to make truth known.  Tiredness must be ignored, patience must be embraced, hard work must be accepted as fact.

But when the summit is reached, Hello World! the farthest horizon is seen, landscape takes breath away and every agonized groan, sleepless night and hours of monotony is forgotten, lost in the beauty of the discovery.

But such a view was only possible by hard work, yet it’s the view which made the hard work worth it!

So join me, as together, we learn how to write for college and life. I’ll teach what I know and practice it alongside.

Important Update

Composition Craft now offers certain Advanced Placement® classes online: specifically AP® US  History and AP® English Literature and Composition, both classes written and designed by the instructor according to the Advanced Placement® guidelines established by the College Board.

For more information or to enroll, contact: Laurel Plimpton (616) 745-3495 or laurelplimpton@gmail.com.

Thanks much and I look forward to hearing from you soon!

 

 

 

 

AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the College Board. Used with permission.