When Not to Write

When I applied for the Minor in Writing at Michigan, I knew very well that it would be competitive and was half expecting that email politely encouraging me to reapply the following year. I figured if anyone could save me from illiteracy, the creative writing professors at Michigan would be best suited for the challenge. To my delight, my admissions email arrived with a few words on how all of the creative writing professors had met and discussed in length their plan to mold me into a competent, society-ready writer of words and stuff. Thus began a growing egoism that followed acceptance into a cohort of extremely talented writers at a prestigious University.

I was going to learn to write with some of the best in academia, and maybe be as talented as David Foster Wallace one day. Pretty exciting stuff. The class was structured around three experiments of reworking one pre written material of our choice. The learning objectives were to develop rhetorical flexibility and to understand how the rhetorical situation, choice of genre and target audience all work together to create an effective (or less effective) message. These learning outcomes didn’t really matter to me--I imagined myself to be ascending to David Foster Wallace’s level of mastery already based on my presence in the class alone.

I played along, however, and tried several different genres with different audiences and thus entirely different outcomes. The experiments were thought-provoking and worthwhile, but not what I came for. My original topic of interest was my summer experience working for a real estate management company in Des Moines, Iowa. During the first week, I listed all of my observations and thoughts in hope of being able to write about it later on. Sure enough, my second experiment was a three page overture of all that I had experienced, emulating the introduction of DFW’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. It was witty, introspective and insulting, what I believed to be DFW’s style of writing. And not only did I feel more like DFW, I enjoyed bashing the experience and the hypocrisy of the company’s mission. When time came to choose one of the experiments to fully realize as a developed product, my DFW immersive journalism excerpt was my first choice.

Yeah, I’ll have the essay done when we come back from Thanksgiving break I told my professor. Writing the excerpt was fun, therefore writing the entire piece would be an absolute ball. A man of my word, I wrote a full draft that was a little over 25 pages.

Hey Diana (my sister), read this beautiful masterpiece and don’t hold back on the flattery. My sister read the article and didn’t say much, just that I shouldn’t expect to be hired anywhere if I published it. Wonderful. I probably should have taken the hint earlier. Before jumping into the project, I half assed some research on DFW thinking I knew enough about his style of writing to forgo the preparation and jump into my own self exploration. One of the sources was an editorial on how all aspiring writers should familiarize themselves with and appreciate DFW’s work, but should never attempt to emulate it. One will undoubtedly fail if they attempt this.

I looked back on my original research and delved deeper, hoping to break through the problems on my own work by better understanding DFW. If anyone were to reverse engineer DFW’s articles (which are typically no fewer than 50 pages), they would begin to see that he does not merely criticize something for the sake of laughing at it. Nor does he uproot something because he believes he’s inherently better. He is ultimately the butt of his own joke, pointing out that his own presence is at fault in some way. A surface level glance (how I read his articles) would give you the impression that he simply bashes everyone and everything cleverly enough to give him a pass for being insensitive. My first draft was both unclever and rude without meaning. I had failed as predicted, fantastically.

But I rewrote the piece and it got better. Possibly even good enough to begin showing people without them thinking less of me after reading it. I was unrooting one of the biggest flaws in the real estate market. Companies that renovate properties tend to displace low-income households in the process. I was going to give readers an inside view of a company that idealized quality of life, so long as they could afford the rents. Whether the office knew this and didn’t care, or didn’t want to be reminded, I believe the piece would have given people something to think about.

Thus I had a fully realized article that was not only going to cut all ties with the employees I worked with and potentially prevent me from getting future jobs, but also bring bad publicity to a company that didn’t deserve it. My company was not and is not at fault for a system that works against low-income families. But they never did anything to help the situation and only contributed to more displacement.

I was now in a situation that forced me to think critically about what I could possibly achieve if I published the article. I am not David Foster Wallace--my reputation nor current income could support me if future employers decide not to hire the kid that exposed his old company. The potential benefits from publishing the article might have been the small feeling of satisfaction for having written something that looks cool and long, if that. The potential damage included cutting ties with everyone that worked there, harming the company’s reputation and feeling the shame that follows the first two. Who would have guessed that I would be in the do I pull the trigger or not situation in my laissez affaire minor in writing class? Well, the situation forced me to consider rhetorical situation, genre and audience. So, the class worked, I guess.

Not to be dramatic but my finger was literally hovering over the submit button before I decided to scrap the entire article and write the short film screenplay from my third experiment. The change in genre was simple. I could still hold onto the important elements of my article, but transform them into a medium that shows instead of tells, avoiding the controversy brought on by the article. Writing a short film mockumentary allowed me to paint an image that would have been potentially rude to write about. This is what genres affords us as writers. The opportunity to convey the same message in different ways, with potentially more impact through the affordances of that genre.

Upon reflection, I experienced an important learning curve this semester. Rarely do we consider the external factors of genre, audience and situation before speaking or writing. The result is an attempt at communication that falls short or fails to achieve its goals. The intended audience doesn’t feel the impact of the words, or in some cases such as mine, it misses its mark and does more damage than good. Once I began to consider how genre influences the audience, with all other variables remaining constant, I began to question everything. Signs. Tweets. Wedding speeches. They all have rhetorical situations, goals and intended audiences. But does the genre by which they are bounded help them succeed in achieving their rhetorical goals? This is something I cannot unsee or unthink about now, having learning this lesson the hard way. But if writing 25 pages of an article only to never publish it was necessary for this, I guess that’s fine by me.