Last month, I was invited to speak at the summer writing camp at Hopkinton’s Harold Martin School. The invitation was an honor, and my visit was a delight. I have written about writing in the Monitor before, but I came up with some new material for the campers, so away we go.
It is conventional to the point of cliche to imagine the writer as a tortured soul, alone in a garret room, struggling to fill an empty sheet of paper. That image invites us to see writing as a project with two main elements, the writer and the piece of paper. But that image leaves out something important, the element without which writing has no point. That element is the reader.
The reader is obvious when you think about a letter or a textbook, but even a diary entry or a grocery list has an intended reader: the writer’s future self. There is always a reader. Moreover, the purpose of all writing is to get the reader to do something, to think something or to feel something.
As for the persuasive aspect of something like a letter or an essay, I have often found that less is more. Rather than bludgeoning the reader with a conclusion, I like to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, unembellished facts arranged in a way that encourages the reader to draw my conclusion for themselves, as if it is their own. A lesson learned that way is often more persuasive than one handed down from on high.
While it is important for a writer to remember their readers, it is also important to remember that long before there were writers and readers, there were speakers and listeners. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were passed along orally for centuries before they were ever written down.
The roots of writing in speaking remind us of the importance of the sounds of the words we use when we write. Using the sounds of words thoughtfully can help make writing memorable. I am certain that the sounds of the words in the Odyssey made it easier for ancient storytellers to remember that epic poem. So I told my campers to try something I often do, which is to read a sentence out loud after I write it.
Many different aspects of sound can make writing memorable. These include rhyme, alliteration, and meter (or rhythm). My own name is memorable because it features all three. Subtracting each element, one at a time, makes my memorable name increasingly mundane. Parker Potter (rhyme, alliteration, and meter). Parker Payton (no rhyme, just alliteration and meter). Parker Nichols (no rhyme or alliteration, just meter). Parker Bartholomew (no rhyme, alliteration, or meter).
With my campers, I had fun doing the same deconstruction with “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” transforming it step by step, to “Peter Posey picked a peck of pickled peppers,” then to “Peter Morris grabbed a bunch of roasted carrots,” and, finally, to “Peter Morrison harvested one hundred and seventeen marinated string beans.” While I am certain that most of my campers will be able to recite the original line until they are old and gray, you could knock me over with a feather if any of them remembered the final transformation after they got home from camp.
Finally, returning to the writer and the piece of paper they work so hard to fill, I challenged my campers by suggesting that putting words on paper is only a small part of writing. I do much of my own writing in my head, when I am out for my morning walk. I told my campers that because I broke a finger about a month before my visit to camp, I had written my talk for them the same way. I even wrote a limerick for my lesson on rhyme when I was out waking, and rhyme is the reason why I remembered it. (You should have seen the looks on the teachers’ faces when I began with the line “There once was a girl from Nantucket” …)
As an example of the relative unimportance of putting words on paper, I told my campers how great if felt, when I was in graduate school, to throw away 90 pages of a 120-page draft of my master’s thesis so I could clear the deck and write a better one. Just because words make it onto paper doesn’t mean that they are the right words.
I concluded with two pieces of conflicting advice. Don’t be afraid to revise, revise, revise and don’t be afraid to say “enough is enough.” As a parting shot to my campers, and to you, dear readers, I offered a bit of advice on editing from fashion designer Coco Chanel: on your way out the door, look in the mirror and take off one thing.
Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.