I don’t remember them teaching me much about writing in school, that is expressing myself. I remember topic sentences and the talk about punctuation and run-on on sentences and the passive voice vs. the active voice. (They didn’t like the passive, too mousy; better you showed the vigor of the active voice.)

I remember groaning when teachers would announce, “Tomorrow’s assignment, class, is to write 300 words.” Sometimes, they would add that you could you could write whatever you wanted. Ha! I didn’t think it in so many words, but I knew they didn’t mean that; you were to write something with each law of grammar observed, even if it made it less attractive to read . . . topic sentence, dontcha know?

The irony of this is that we were often reading the works of authors who couched their message in symbolism and analogies . . . and we aren’t even getting into guys like Faulkner who told the story from different viewpoints and different times and didn’t even mention it was doing it.

I’d sit there and stare at the study questions asking me to discuss Faulkner’s theme, his symbols and explain what he was really telling people. Do you know what I would think? I’d want to spit out, “Look, it it was so important to get this message out, Bill, why didn’t you just spell it out for us.

Okay, so maybe that wouldn’t make a puzzle of the book, lead the reader to the slow dawning of what was happening. Maybe the dialect of the telling would lose its flavor. Okay, fine, leave it as you wrote it, but include a little nutshell at the back of the book to explain things for those of us who had all your subtle intellectual literary maneuvers go right over our heads.

Decades later, I would share this thought with an editor who majored in literature and she would say that good writers put stuff out there for interpretation. To me, that would imply good writers are the ones who write assembly instructions – you know, the writers for whom English is a second language. In this case, I find the pictures to be a better guide then the words.

Anyway, so I was supposed to decipher what the great minds of literature decided to hint at, but when I wrote myself, I was to make certain I clearly stated what I meant. Bummer.

I leave you with this Winston Churchill quote: ”If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time-a tremendous whack.”