Purpose and Process in Exemplary Teen Writings

Data Selection

From 1985 to 2001, Merlyn’s Pen magazine published the very best writing produced by American teenagers from Grades 6 to 12. In 2003, the New Library of Young Adult Writing (http://www.merlynspen.org/read/library.php) was created as the repository of more than 1,000 published Merlyn’s Pen works. This online library is organized alphabetically by topic from “Abuse” to “Youth and Age.” What makes these works unique is not just that the poems were published and distributed to a national audience, but rather that competition for publication was such that only the top 1% of submissions was published. Founder Jim Stahl trained associate editors to calibrate their rankings according to samples of excellent writing, to expect to be entertained or enlightened by a submission, and to reject everything that did not do one or the other (J. Stahl, personal communication, April 19, 2011).

We chose creative works from three categories of the Merlyn’s Pen library. The first category was “wordplay.” We chose this category because wordplay connects directly with both creativity and the technical mastery of language. Thus, we believed the category wordplay would give insights into how students write. We chose the category “literary figures” because we believed this category gives insight into students’ reading habits and how reading informs writing. Finally, we chose the category “writer’s issues” because this category deals directly with writers’ feelings about the writing process.

Analytical Framework

Hermeneutic inquiry, our chosen theoretical framework for analyzing students’ creative writing, is especially appropriate for this study because it is derived from literary analysis. Philosopher Hans Georg-Gadamer applied the central principle of interpretation to how humans make meaning of their lives (Kerdeman, 1998). Gadamer wrote,

[Hermeneutics’] truth, namely is that of translation. It is higher because it allows the foreign to become one’s own, not by destroying it critically or reproducing it uncritically but by explicating it with one’s own horizons with one’s own concepts and thus giving it new validity. (Gadamer & Linge, 2008, p. 94)

In this statement, Gadamer described three important characteristics of hermeneutic philosophy and inquiry. First, hermeneutics is creative. From his study of semantics, Gadamer believed that thoughts always change in translation from speaker to listener; this is because language is highly individualized and contextualized (Gadamer & Linge, 2008). Thus, readers are always reinterpreting the new in light of their own experience. The creative nature of hermeneutics is connected to its second characteristic, that of subjectivity. Unlike phenomenological philosophers, Gadamer did not believe that researchers could “bracket” their subjectivity to get a better understanding of their participants’ experiences. Rather, Gadamer believed that “It is imagination that is the decisive function of the scholar” (Gadamer & Linge, 2008, p. 12). Third, in pointing to translation as the central metaphor for his philosophical position, Gadamer focused on the importance of language in understanding existential questions (Smith, 1991). Therefore, hermeneutic researchers explore the meanings in the words, expressions, and metaphors that writers choose (Lemke, 2010; Wiklund, Lindholm, & Lindström, 2002). In the reading of text, the hermeneutic paradigm requires that the parts cannot be interpreted without an understanding of the whole, and the whole cannot be grasped without an understanding of the parts (Laverty, 2003). This principle is known as the hermeneutic circle and frames the recursive process of analysis. Hermeneutic inquiry, like many forms of qualitative inquiry, honors the role of the scholar as the most important instrument in the design and implementation of the research. Thus, not all hermeneutic scholars share the same step-by-step research methodologies (Dowling, 2004). In determining how we would design and implement our study, we had to draw from our understanding of hermeneutic theory and our readings of others’ works.

Writing as Remembrance

A photograph can preserve a visual memory. A poem can go further, preserving an integrated experience; a moment’s visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli combined with the thoughts and emotions connected to the sensory input. Life is filled with moments that are turning points because they bring revelation, or moments that deserve to be savored because we awake from the doldrums of daily habit and feel intensely alive. In these moments, it may seem that even the most basic sensations, such as color, heat, or cold, are affected by the weight of the experience. Philosophers have long conjectured about the existence of qualia, or these sensory inputs that we share in common yet that people may experience differently (Shoemaker, 1990). Philosophers ask, is my experience of “red” or my experience of “cold” the same as yours? If they are not the same, how can we communicate these basic sensations? These young poets explore how even sensory input is entwined with context, emotion, and language. Nine creative works, all of them poems, exemplified this theme.

The first poem came from the category “literary figures” because it was patterned after Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s famous poem “Romance Sonambulo” (“The Ballad of the Sleepwalker”). In the original poem, Lorca repeats the color green in images of nature, a weathered house, and a young woman’s corpse, expressing both joy and melancholy. Teen writer D’Ambrosio, in contrast, focuses mainly on familiar images that carry an invigorating and warm tone.

Red, how I love you red!

Red sun, red flowers.

The jet in the sky.

And the bike in the garage.

Red autumn leaves on the ground

Danced upon by red shoes with

Red laces, worn by red feet leading to

Red faces.

I, too, want to dance,

Dance to the sounds of the red guitar. (Phillip D’Ambrosio, eighth grade)

D’Ambrosio chooses words that convey motion (the bike, the trail of a jet, red shoes dancing) and youth (red bike, red shoes with red laces). Although D’Ambrosio does not show the same nuance or historical awareness as Lorca, D’Ambrosio shows that he understands how a focus on a single color can unite varied remembrances and how he can relate his personal experience to Lorca’s poem.

Dana Lunsford’s “Apple Ears” was chosen from the category “word play”; specifically, she hyphenates word pairs to create new associations. Her poem captures the memory of an ice skating routine.

Red-Apple ears from Cold-Feel

Colored-Grape outfit covers my skin

I drift on my tight-fitting Off-White Cloudy.

colored skates.

I catch a Rink-Feel with a mixture of Music-Breeze

that gently pushes me

to flow with the ice.

I Good-Heart Fall Loop-De-Loop yet Warm-Fall

I Cold-Wiggle Slither toward a Bullet-Shooting.

Troubling-Turn.

Up-Up-Up look at the sight—It’s a Jump-Sprite.

My Heart-Goal pumping.

I smell Rhythm-Ice.

I hear the Joy-Fans, yet open my Ink-Blue eyes and

no one in sight.

Just me, my Off-White skates, Water and Ice

I have Self-Completed. (Dana Lunsford, seventh grade)

Lunsford’s word linking technique gives the poem a playful and youthful tone and serves to link emotions and physical sensations. The poem begins with simple linking of sensory inputs: ears that are colored “red-apple” from the “cold-feel” of the ice rink. Yet, the associations become more complex in the sixth and seventh lines. The Fall could be interpreted as a mistake or failure, yet the fall is “warm” and “good-heart” and thus presented positively. After falling, the skater approaches a particularly fast and tricky “Bullet-Shooting Troubling-Turn.” Finally, “My Heart-Goal pumping” evokes sounds of a quick heartbeat, the feeling of rapid heartbeats against one’s chest, and the emotion that with each heartbeat, the speaker is becoming stronger, closer to her dream.

Writing as remembrance serves as a driving force behind many poems. The purpose of the poem is also linked to a specific technical skill: the ability to connect qualia with emotion. A writing lesson based on these exemplar poems would include (a) choosing a significant memory, (b) brainstorming sensory words connected with the memory (e.g., cold, red, hard), (c) using a word web, link specific objects or events connected to the qualia (cold toes, red sun, hard sidewalk), (d) using a word web, brainstorm emotions associated with each qualia, and (e) writing a poem that shows how similar qualia can evoke different complex emotions. Most writers in this category wrote about personal experiences. For extra challenge, have more advanced students interview each other and try to capture each other’s memories. This allows students to develop the additional skill of perspective.

Nine texts from the data set represented the purpose of writing as remembrance:

Writing as Reinvention

The theme reinvention begins with an understanding that language has a history and a personality. Across the years, the connotations of words change, as do the structures of sentences and genres. The “creativity” in creative writing comes in when authors show that they understand canonical forms, yet at the same time push these forms forward to address new themes.

One simple form of reinvention is mimicking an author’s form but changing the theme. Swiney does this with her poem, “Miss Dickinson, You and I Would Not Have Been Chums,” which begins by addressing Emily Dickinson directly using her style.

You’re nobody? How very sad—

to live a life so flat

That you must scurry from the world

Like a mouse before a cat.

Swiney interprets Dickinson’s work to have a timidity that contrasts with her own desire to experience life boldly and broadly. Thus, in using Dickinson’s tight forms, she shows how Dickinson’s tight style reveals a confined life, and her nature imagery evokes a comfort with an ordinary, shy life.

When I emerge from my cocoon,

I’ll be a butterfly.

With freedom to sip from every flower.

That blooms under Creation’s sky.

But you emerged a small plain moth

To waste your precious days

In flitting from your own race,

From its fire’s intense gaze. (Elizabeth Swiney, ninth grade)

Swiney’s reinvention consists of contradicting a canonical work while co-opting its style.

Reinvention can also occur when a young writer embraces a canonical theme and adapts it to a modern setting. For example, in “Fitting In” (after “The Man With the Blue Guitar” by Wallace Stevens) the speaker narrates the night of a teen party:

Applause

This was a Party.

Seeing, they did not see.

So the 17-year-old rock stars jangled their guitars

Slightly out of time while their friends admired

The way art could be sautéed in Sentimentality,

the Past

To drip so comfortably with so little required!

The host’s ego absorbed the praise, then to share the spotlight . . .

“Open mike!” and a foolhardy soul.

Dared move fingers and notes in such a way

That the song seemed at the edge of control.

Fifty-eight eyes saw only a show-off, turned away . . .

You don’t play things the way they are,

Have been, should be!

Alone, for Life’s glory

Stood the Man With the Blue Guitar. (Stephen D’Evelyn, 12th grade)

Reinvention begins with an understanding of traditional forms. In this case, the poet identified with the theme of Stevens’s original work. Stevens’s “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” itself inspired by a Picasso painting, is a lengthy poem that deals with the role of the artist in society. One of its stanzas reads,

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are.

Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.”

Unlike Swiney, D’Evelyn does not copy the author’s style. He writes in free verse rather than in unrhymed couplets. He makes the image of the blue guitar much more concrete by putting it in a specific context and describing the guitarist as a 17-year-old. However, in this excerpt from Stevens’s poem, as in D’Evelyn’s reinterpretation, the nonconformist artist is not appreciated by the audience, who want to hear a song that is expected. D’Evelyn paraphrases Stevens’s message and applies it to his own life, which is another form of reinvention.

Reinvention was also represented in works that did not reference specific authors or texts. In the poem “Imagine That Rice,” Chu plays with repetitions of the words rice and dream to evoke the connection to his Asian heritage, the influence of American culture, and his dream of becoming a musician.

Rice,

Rice,

Rice,

Sticky rice,

Steamed rice.

Fine, fresh, fat rice,

Darn delicious

Dien shin rice.

Fried rice,

Fermented rice.

Opaque, oval, oblong rice,

Warm, wet, wild rice,

Shih fan, too.

Soaked rice,

Sizzled rice.

Still remember, rolled rice

Cools your mouth,

Saves your mouth

From hot, spicy beef.

Dream,

Dream,

Dream,

Day dream,

Rice dream.

Rock ‘n’ roll rice dream,

Small, skinny saxophonists,

Have you seen Elvis Ricely?

Night dream,

Rice dream.

Weird, wild, wailing rice,

Gooey, garish, guitar rice,

Grains play nicely.

My dream,

Rice dream. (Keith Chu, sixth grade)

Chu’s images morph from rice dishes to rice musicians. We imagine that he is tracing his parents’ dream, perhaps of raising and feeding a family, or of selling or serving rice, and how this dream nourishes his own dream of becoming a musician. He evokes images both from Asian and American cultures. He shows how a simple word, rice, can evoke many connotations and transform from an object into an idea. This shows an understanding of how history influences language and identity.

A simple writing exercise involving reinvention would begin by taking a word and branching off associations from it. Writers could organize these associations into which associations are more traditional and which are novel. They could then write a poem as Chu does that changes from the traditional connotations to the novel.

Further writing exercises on the theme of reinvention could be used to assess students’ reading comprehension for canonical texts. For example, a writer could do as Swiney did and mimic a traditional genre or form while changing the theme. Or, a writer could adapt a theme to a new format as D’Evelyn did. Such exercises can be done, not only with poetry, but with traditional genre structures such as Shakespearean tragedies or Stephen King’s horror stories. Ten texts represented the theme of writing as reinvention:

Writing Is Communion

D’Evelyn’s poem, “Fitting In” is, in one sense, about not fitting in, as the speaker is not acknowledged by his teen peers. Yet at the same time, the speaker is “fitting in” with the experience of other artists such as those portrayed by Picasso and Stevens. This is why D’Evelyn’s poem not only represents reinvention, but also the third theme writing is communion. Creative writers celebrate the personal and the idiosyncratic with the affirmation that everyone is an outlier in some way. Writers connect with other writers through truth telling and emotional expression. Communion in this sense is informal, holistic, and contrasts with other approaches to reading and writing that are standardized or evaluative. This theme is reflected in Matthew Cheney’s “Poem for an English Teacher Who Wields a Scalpel”:

Please, Professor, don’t dissect this poem

Its beauty does not lie deep inside,

hidden as a pearl.

Its heart is not some secret thing

to be studied by your omniscient lens.

Its blood flows through vessels,

and if you puncture the heart, the blood will not flow. (Matthew Cheney, 10th grade)

Cheney’s message is that not everything needs to be dissected to be understood or appreciated. He advocates for appreciating the whole, because taking it apart does not make it more beautiful or more understood, but destroys that which makes it beautiful. In doing so, Cheney takes not an academic perspective on creative works but a humanistic or relational one. He describes the affection he feels for the work itself. The work is alive. If a poem has a voice and carries a history, why not also carry a physical body?

Similarly, in “Blue” by Tina Gross, the author personifies the word blue, and gives it a personality through its many connotations.

I would have said saffron or cochineal—

or puke green, but blue?

Shall we gush about

skies and clouds and

oceans and pretty eyes—

again?

I remember them from somewhere

I wish I knew who blue is;

and if he or she is sick

of being fluffed and doctored.

If you are blue,

poor soul,

I apologize (Tina Gross, 10th grade)

In addition to personifying the word blue, Gross playfully addresses different connotations of the word blue within the poem. For example, “feeling blue” can refer to sickness, and the poet uses the word sick in reference to blue. The poet also refers to blue as a “poor soul,” and the word soul associates with “blues” as a type of music. Gross shows us that words are complex and that they have personalities much like people.

In personifying words and poems, Cheney and Gross show how young writers can identify with ideas and texts as kindred. They feel a connection with authors they have not met and works that they call friends. Marisa Pavlik describes this sense of communion and comfort in her essay “Bookstores”:

Ever since then, I have been a creature of bookstores. I can spend hours in bookstores. I open those glass doors, smell the familiar scent of newly printed books, and feel a camaraderie with all the others in the store. There’s a route that I take, visiting all my current favorite authors in the hope that they’ve written a new book. Then I look at all the authors I used to love. It’s like seeing old friends.

Young writers who feel at home with words, texts, and canonical authors and artists may, in contrast, feel out of place among other teens. This is a theme in “Fitting In” and in the short story “The Misunderstood Adolescent Writer.” The title character “could not control the number of pimples on his face, but he could control fully the fates of his characters, who no doubt wished their creator had chosen less morbid destinies for them.” The writer humorously portrays a teen writer who

had read concerning successful authors that despondency added to “the creative process,” and he certainly did not want to interfere with the creative process. In fact, he was so enamored of the idea that poverty and sadness inspire writing (he relied on Poe for his proof) that he felt he had to tone down the happiness that was in his life by thinking of all those who were happier than he.

This young author is a little offbeat because he focuses on the darker aspects of life. Yet, he feels a camaraderie with Poe and other authors who are a bit odd. Outcasts think differently than the norm.

Outcasts socialize with each other through writing. In conventional socializing, students celebrate their common interests and bend to a social norm, but in writing, those with odd, imperfect, or creative outlooks are celebrated. It is differences, not similarities, that bond to common experiences, and deep thinking rather than surface-level thoughts that count. Thus, outcasts can be stars because they bring new perspectives on common experiences.

“S Cape,” a poem written from the perspective of a speaker who may be an outcast, conveys the idea that words formed incorrectly and incompletely can actually express a truer sentiment than confident clichés.

The people that some attitudes have

Really me off sometimes I wish I were in a big

Warmgreen feeled

Just the sky and the earth and the rest of my life is gone

The dark all lit up

(lightsomuchlight)

In the big pavementcities

(lightsomuchlight)

When the sun is the only light we need. (Kathryn Duhamel, 10th grade)

The communion young writers express is both communion with and through writing. Through writing, they bind students of disparate experiences but who feel keenly and think deeply. With writing, students have affection for the connotations and histories of words, so much that the words seem alive.

Exercises that build on communion as a purpose for writing could include writing a dialogue between themselves and a noted author or historical figure. In addition, students could use contemporary forms of communion, such as texting and social networking, and incorporate them into a story or essay about an outsider.

The following seven works represented the theme of communion with and through language:

Writing as a Fickle Process

Although the first three themes dealt with the meaning and motive of writing, some writers addressed the process of writing as well. These works portrayed young writers in bursts of inspiration, stressed by looming deadlines, battling writer’s block, and pouring a stream of consciousness on the page. Such experiences were described with emotional and hyperbolic overtones, becoming narratives in themselves. In fact, in one story, “Dream Within a Dream,” the speaker’s search for an idea for a contemporary hero myth becomes the myth itself as she frees her Muse from a personification of writer’s block:

Suddenly I gave forth a cry of joy. “The archetypal descent into darkness!” I exclaimed. “I am a hero! I have been on a quest for the Perfect Idea. I shall write about myself! A hero writing about a hero writing about a hero . . .” And my head spun giddily with delight.

At my words, Writer’s Block trembled and his laughter rose to a shriek of indistinct maledictions. His cloak flapped wildly about him as if in some great wind, and he vanished, leaving in his place a cloud of acrid dark smoke. The bonds of my Muse dissolved as if by magic. “You have saved me!” spake she. “You spoke the truth! You are a noble hero.” Whereupon she guided me, and words flew to my pen with an ease I had never felt before. What exhilaration, what joy I felt during that brief quarter of an hour! When I laid down my pen, my soul rejoiced.

In this story, inspiration appears in one dramatic burst, heralded by the presence of the Muse.

In the poem “Second Grade Assignment,” inspiration is also personified and dramatized. The speaker recalls being asked to write freely in second grade.

Instantly

my hand, seized

by the Muse [dark

braids, swinging past my eyes],

spiraled sparkling phrases

across page after page:

How the ripped sky feels

torn by clouds;

the smell of honeysuckle

smudged into wet ground;

my leprechaun—

all these found a home

in my enlivened notebook. (Ellen Wernecke, ninth grade)

When the Muse visits this second-grade student, the students’ notebook becomes “enlivened.” There is life in the student’s writing. There is a sense of movement mirrored in the poem’s structure as well; complex syntax mimics the pleasurable overflow of ideas tumbling one after another.

When inspiration visits, students are elated. Likewise, when inspiration will not come, writers are stuck in the doldrums. They comment on their restless thoughts with a tone of impatience and frustration through a stream of consciousness text that wanders. In “A Writer’s View,” the speaker begins,

I’m sitting here in class, bored, trying to think of something to write about. I like fantasy, but I have little talent for writing it. A fly just landed on my desk. That’s strange, it’s getting larger! It’s as big as the desk now! It’s coming to get me! Aghhh . . . Oh, scratch that.

The piece continues as the author’s thoughts flit restlessly and he moves from seat to seat, physically restless searching for an idea that does not come. Similarly, “A Story” simply relates the speaker’s telephone call with a friend over the frustration of thinking of a story.

Although writing a story about writing a story is not the most original idea, an important message is that the writers in these stories keep writing, despite their frustrations. They show that one can write even when frustrated or uninspired. Conversely, one can be inspired and not write. There is a frustrating gap between inspiration and production.

Students portray the idea of “living as an artist or writer,” living with passion, thoughtfulness, and observation, yet not being able to transfer this artist’s temperament into a well-received body of work.

In “Rummy Writer,” the poet explores whether a life lived contemplatively can qualify someone as a writer.

“Are you gin or are you rummy?”

He used to ask me, green eyes flashing curiously

I would always respond the same:

“What’s the difference?”

Sometimes I did remember, but would ask anyway

And he would explain yet again:

“A rummy writer is someone who writes everything down—

Ideas, thoughts, maybe only a word.

They are the lucky ones.”

I would stop and think at this time,

Trying to appear literary, even intellectual.

And I would always ask what gin was

And he would always tell me, almost wistfully:

“A gin writer doesn’t write stuff down.

He keeps it in his head until it’s just right.

He’s always revising it, and he never finishes it.

So he never gets it written down.”

And then he would ask me if I was gin or rummy.

And I would answer with a question,

“Which are you?”

He always replied, “gin”

In a tone of voice saying that he wanted to be Rummy. (Anne Thalheimer, 10th grade)

This poem is paradoxical, because although the speaker empathizes with the elder in the poem, the speaker also recognizes the elder’s regret. This poem touches on the theme that writing is much, if not all, about the way one experiences the world, always observing, always processing the sensations and ideas around us.

The contrast between inspiration and production is personified in two conflicting characters in the short story “The Sandwich.” One is a famous writer who hates everything he produces. Another is a cellist who loves her work but receives no acclaim:

Their lives raise an interesting question. Was Milan, the artist who saw no merit in his own work, yet received gobs of positive critical acclaim, more of an artist than Frances, who received no positive attention yet who thought of herself as the best cellist ever to exist?

In addition to showing that inspiration and production are not the same, this story introduces the idea of imperfection in art and in life. There is no perfect story, the flaws in writing, as in characters, make them more human. Art is mysterious and paradoxical in this way:

The author, Milan, loves the cellist, but yet he beats her: He saw the beatings as part of the four-dimensional object that was his life. He saw them as flaws in a piece of cast jewelry. Without those flaws, however, the piece of jewelry would not be as beautiful as it was. Likewise, she is imperfect because she endures them.

In sum, writing as fickle highlights the following ideas: (a) Adolescent writers are bound by constraints such as topic, length, and deadline just as other writers may be. These constraints heighten the emotions surrounding the writing process. (b) Adolescents believe that there is such a thing as waiting for an idea or searching for an idea, and that despite effort, the idea might not come. (c) Small things such as the struggles of writing, or the random thoughts that pass through a student’s mind when engaged in writing, are found to be topics in stream of consciousness pieces. (d) Adolescents highlight the qualities of a writerly or artistic lifestyle; being observant, living impassioned, which may not translate to writing success.

Thus, the writing process is fickle because it changes quickly from monotony to exaltation. The writing process is fickle because inspiration can be disconnected from production. This theme leads to class discussion questions for young writers. Is it more important to live a writerly life or achieve success? What is the value, if any, of uninspired or bad writing? What strategies can you use when inspiration will not come?

Eleven pieces addressed the topic writing as fickle: