Week Five: becoming a more critical reader
Please welcome back guest editor Deb Williams who tweets as @mannahattamamma and blogs at MannaHatta Mamma. If you have any questions or need any clarification on today’s topic, please feel free to begin a discussion in comments.
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So what?
While I was getting my PhD, I taught composition to first-year college students, including a unit on “the personal essay.” Students wrote about all types of adolescent existential malaise: sex, death, anorexia, divorce, bleak music. Their emotions were pure but their prose? Dreadful. I felt like a brute grading their essays; the low grades seemed to say “sorry, kid, your grandmother had a C- death.”
In those early teaching days, I hadn’t yet found my question, the question with which I now approach all writing situations, whether my own or my students’. It’s a question that sometimes sounds rude because it cuts through straight to the bone: “so what?”
Searching for their stories’ “so what” jostles people into reconsidering their prose. I know we all want to believe that our painful experiences/cute toddlers/fights with spouses will speak for themselves, will resonate with our readers.
But guess what? They don’t.
All our stories need shaping, honing, pruning. They need, in short, a “so what.”
Finding the “so what” can be a brutal process because it involves carving away the excess baggage; it means cutting away the pretty image, the graceful sentence, the interesting side-note.
When you find that “so what” moment, though, when suddenly all the pieces fall into place and you find your real subject…that’s the moment, as a writer, when it all feels worthwhile.
Our readers might not be asking themselves “so what” as they read our posts, but the absence of a clear “so what” will bore them right off the page. Without that “so what,” our readers don’t feel a compelling reason to keep reading. The pleasure of a clear “so what” takes many forms: the “so what” of Twilight is not the same “so what” as Wolf Hall; the “so what” of a post about an autistic child learning to write his name is not the same “so what” as a story about the time your kid pooped in the bathtub. It’s the question I should have asked those long-ago students: yes, your grandmother died and you were sad, but so what?
When the submissions to the yeah write grid start to all run together as one humongous blog post, the entries successfully answering their “so what” will be the ones to stand out.
Voting is still open!
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It was fate that you wrote about this. Last week, I trashed 3 blog posts that I didn’t really have time to write in the first place because I got to the end and said exactly “so what?” The trouble I tend to have is that when something happens that I want to write about, it often takes me a few weeks after the event to fully process it and find the “so what?” I don’t always have the perspective I need in order to convey what it is about the event that made me want to write about it in the first place.
Excellent. I will definitely be pointing my students this way.
A very simple idea that is very powerful for would-be-writers to hear. It makes me think back on past posts, and will certainly be at the forefront of my mind in the next thing I write. I may need reminders again after that so always feel free to direct me back 🙂
I really like this post. Sometimes, as a reader, I find myself wanting to skip other people’s posts because I start reading and I find myself saying “so what” or even “I think I’ve read this before.” I’m pretty sure that other people have come to my blog and said the same thing to themselves about my stuff, too.
I have a worry that I start to sound like everyone else or I become a “one-trick pony” and this will be helpful for me to remember this. I need to write this on a Post-It with black Sharpie and stick it some place where I can see it all the time.
This clicked with me!
I’ve never thought of it being put that way and I appreciate you for finding a way to really get this point across.
Awesome.
Bring on next week!! Haha.
I will be directing folks to this post often. It’s a concise overview of the entire series, really. Wonderful.