Endearing Advice
Thursday, January 8th, 2009

The best writing advice I was ever given involved a profane analogy that’s stuck with me for more than a decade. What made it so extraordinary is its directness and that it came from an intelligent, well-spoken professor who trusted me enough to speak plainly. He endeared himself and gave away knowledge in a way I could never forget, which is what talented teachers do.

“Writing is like taking a good shit … it all comes out at once.”

Told you.

Those are the immortal words of Park University Professor John Lofflin. While his statement might be offensive and a picture best left unimagined, the sensation he alludes to – with a pen and words used in substitution – is something I strive toward everyday (and something other writing instructors try to say, but not so blatantly).

An instructor clever enough to reveal a trick of the trade with such endearment must reach a student on a much deeper level than what can be accomplished in the lecture environment. At 20 or 21, I walked into Copley Hall on the Park campus in Parkville, Mo., with a distant look and no sense of purpose. I’d attended classes at the University of Kansas for a semester, spent a year-and-a-half in community college, the finally enrolled at Park. On a shelf overlooking the river bluffs, I’d never stepped foot on the college’s campus though it was less than a mile from the house I grew up in if a line could be drawn across the Missouri River.

Copley resembled a hidden cabin that might be found among other limestone-fronted outbuildings or shelters on a public lake. Government regulation caused the entries to be broadened for handicap access, so at the north and the south ends, heavy doors were added along with ramps and railings that resembles a retreat where couples could have an indoor wedding against the backdrop of a stone fireplace and windows that open up to glistening water or dangling tree branches perfect for wedding party photos.

Inside, the building smells faintly of polished wood floors and the moisture that the limestone has held in through the years. The hallways are so narrow that the shoulders have to be turned when another body passes. Those halls, as some old buildings do, includes random steps up and down, windows painted shut that open only when an elbow has nearly been put through the glass, a rotary telephone stacked on old Yellow Pages, and cork boards push-pinned with flyers.

After its original life as a boy’s dorm, the hall was converted to the university’s communications offices and classrooms. Professor Lofflin’s office was on the second floor, across from the newspaper offices – a quaint meeting room with an old, orange-vinyl couch and an assembly room where the staff could “paste up” the newspaper on production days.

I spent the majority of my college experience in these offices in a variety of modes, but ordinarily either participating in deep conversations, writing, or laying out the campus newspaper, The Stylus. Pasting up the newspaper is an old-fashioned process that involves printing each page of the newspaper in three sheets and gluing them to boards – all lines matching – with glue sticks.

For a 12-page publication, the process takes a full day with several people working non-stop. Fits and starts are the norm. The room is congested and then empties out according to class schedule. And it was at a moment when the room was clear when Lofflin walked across the squeaky wood planks and offered his analogy.

I’d already known him to talk my language. He’d grown up in same area I did with the same type of people in the neighborhood. And he’d decided to try to make sense of the world in the same way I was: with written words. We were discussing column writing and some difficulties I had when he offered the “shit” analogy. He brought out a box of old Pitch magazines that carried his photo and by-line beside his opinion column and began talking with great care about his experiences drawing material from the world around him to put that column together monthly. All the while, he was teaching in an uncommon way, but with real care and brilliance. There was no teacher-student veneer or superficiality. I was on board. I learned a lesson of a lifetime.

He imparted on me the need for lifelong learning that I sometimes think about when self-checking books at the library – when I choose to listen to Lennon or write on a Sunday afternoon when the kids are asleep and most guys my age are watching football. Not that I needed it, but I’ve come to find similar advice in other instructors’ books.

Lofflin’s philosophies that writing is a trade that can be learned are reflected by Roy Peter Clark. His theory to keep the pen moving during timed creative writing practices are reminiscent of author and writing instructor Natalie Goldberg’s concepts in books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. In fact, I turn to her work to revisit what it was John was trying to tell us.

Goldberg writes about freeing the mind so the words flow straight from mind to paper with no self-editor kicking in to stop the progress of putting the words down. The concept is to write fast and connect with “wild mind”, flashing on the first thoughts that come to mind before society all the forces we’ve embedded that tell us, “No, you shouldn’t be writing that”, can be ignored and the Creator in you has the voice.

Working on deadline another time when the office had cleared out, Lofflin told me he couldn’t be a great writer because nothing terrible had ever happened to him. He said until it did, his chances at writing something meaningful were sparse. He was kidding, of course, but there is some truth in his statement.

Tags: Writing Instruction