How to Be an Author: THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL EXPERIENCE

When I was growing up I didn’t know any authors. My parents vocations–my father was a firefighter and my mother sold Avon and Tupperware or worked at a number of federal government jobs depending upon the year–didn’t provide a lot of opportunity for rubbing elbows with those scratching out a living by writing. To make matters worse, my elementary school didn’t even have a library. We did have a bookmobile that came around a couple of times a month. To check out a book and discover a new author I’d climb up a couple of steps into what looked like a converted Greyhound Bus and walk down a narrow aisle with fiction on one side and non-fiction on the other. The driver/librarian always wore a friendly smile and helped me figure out what to read next.

Another thing my elementary school had was after school “social center.” These programs allowed students to choose activities to expand their horizons. There were games like box hockey, where a player attempted to hit a soft puck through the opponent’s goal. Team sports like dodge ball, and musical programs with recorders and percussion instruments like maracas and castanets, were in different wings of the school basement. And then there was arts & crafts, where participants created art by drawing or painting and crafts by stringing beads or pasting popsicle sticks together. Leading many of us to believe artists wore smocks and painted at easels, while craftsmen wore tool belts and drilled and sawed stuff. Nobody I knew back then thought of an author as an artist or a craftsman, let alone a craftswoman.

Now, I am not saying my elementary school experience was anything less than the solid foundation on which I built a wonderful middle class life, but a few misconceptions may have developed as the result of unwitting omission or limitations of twentieth century terminology (e.g. when I completed elementary school the word gay only meant happy and joyful). Last week at the monthly meeting of the Southern California Writers Association, Raymond Obstfeld, who teaches the Orange Coast College course on writing that the five other members of my critique group have all taken and who facilitates the Writers Retreat in the desert that I’ve attended two of the past three summers, presented the six basic themes of all fiction.

My guess is he presented nothing I hadn’t heard somewhere in my past education. I was an English major in college before switching to elementary education. Hearing him break the six themes into two basic categories, orthodox and naturalism sounded familiar. The three themes of orthodoxy, tragedy, orthodox drama and romantic comedy are divisions I have used to describe other authors’ work. Even the tragic comedy, naturalistic drama and satire in naturalism were classifications I knew. But seeing them laid out on a whiteboard and related to books and movies everyone in the room knew was delightful.

Two questions arose that made the genius of his teaching come alive for me. The first was how does this help the writer? Raymond acknowledged his belief that the more the writer knows about her craft the greater the opportunity to structure a story that engages the reader. The second question, which I believes dovetails with the first, was how does a writer avoid making the story feel like a bunch of pieces hammered together? That, according to Raymond, is where the artistry takes place.

No musician wants to be known as a technician, anymore than a painter wants his work to look like paint by numbers. There is not a separation of arts and crafts, it’s artsncrafts.

Now it’s your turn. Leave me a comment about your elementary school experience or about arts and crafts, or writing, or whatever. Don’t worry about leaving your name and email. That’s just Blue Host protecting the integrity of this website. They don’t publish the email address and you can use a pseudonym if you like. Hope to hear from you!