December 2018 Newsletter

Stories Through The Ages

Our contests Generations Plus 2019 and Baby Boomers Plus 2019 are both open for submissions.

Generations Plus is for any adult born 1965 or later. The deadline for submissions for the 2019 edition is April 15, 2019. 

Baby Boomers Plus is open to anyone who was born 1964 or earlier. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2019.

Coming Soon:

A first novel by R.T. Kilgore, Volume one of The Historical Chronicles of Elinor Sturgeon and the Last Human Colony

Earth is long gone, seventy-two humans have
been saved from dying on a lifeless planet by
the Par, and now they are expected to fight in
an intergalactic war. Does Elinor fight for the
Par, the creatures that enslaved her, or does
she let the humans die along with everyone
else?  

The History of Learning to Write by Henry E. Peavler

I love writing and always have. From my first encounter with a yellow number 2 pencil and a Big Chief Tablet. The lines were so wide that even I had no trouble keeping inside. Do they still make Big Chief Tablets? Do kids even learn how to write anymore? I’m not sure, I guess I need to ask one of the grandkids. I hope they do because it was a grand experience, realizing that those squiggly lines meant something to people who could read. We practiced for hours, each letter, both capital and lower case.

I hated Mary Jean Larson because she was a teacher’s pet always getting each letter the same all the way across the page. Each T the same height, one as indistinguishable from the next. My letters never looked the same. The capital T’s began to take on the shape of a cross and droop like flowers wilting in the sun and my a’s looked more like o’s as I grew angrier with each praise of Mary Jean’s perfect letters and the look of disdain that Mrs. Roper bestowed on me, no longer taking the time to correct, realizing the hopelessness of the task.

There was nothing creative about the exercise. But somehow, I remember it in vivid detail, even going to the pencil sharpener, which I doubt exists in a classroom anymore. Then, in high school, we had a business class, which was actually a typewriting class. I loved it. The teacher was a man, a fairly young man, as I think back, probably just out of college. His name is lost to the vagaries of memory, and I doubt it is of importance, but he had a tremendous influence on my growth as a writer–the creative part. We were freshman and he told us we didn’t know a ‘Goddamned’ thing about life. Unheard of for a teacher to use a curse word in the classroom. He belabored the point, obviously, in retrospect, because of some cosmic realization in his own life.

We were shocked, first because he used that word, but most importantly because we thought we did know everything about life. He was a young philosopher and he lectured us about keeping an open mind and forgetting what we are told and questioning everyone and everything including our parents. I think he only lasted a year at that school.

About typing, he was a reluctant genius. I felt that he was just bidding time but somehow he conveyed the idea that being able to type would open up a brave new world for us; that technology was the wave of the future and we needed to ride that wave or get left behind. He was right about the technology but wrong about the instrument. The typewriter has gone the way of my Blockbuster Video stock.

At about the same time, I was discovering the world of books. I don’t have a specific recollection of who introduced the idea that reading was associated with writing but it happened somehow. The rules of writing would be necessary to creating something that someone might read. This was especially poignant when I won the Voice of Democracy writing contest my Junior year and received profuse praise from Mrs. Roper, either forgiving or forgetting my earlier failure in Capital T’s and small a’s.

I read widely, believing that books would ‘learn’ me a style that I could adapt to my own musings, but I quickly came to realize that just isn’t true. Each good book has its own distinctive voice, each author his own divergent style. Hemingway, in his understated declarative sentences was completely different than William Faulkner who was cerebral and wrote long sentences which were paragraphs in themselves. Yet I enjoyed both authors.

Writing defines a whole spectrum of occupations from creative writing to writing instruction manuals and ‘how to’ books to writing code for software. They all use their own special language and require specific skills. But to write creatively takes a different mindset and requires an entirely different kind of skills—of imagination, of observation and even invention—but most of all it takes practice. Someone who seems to write with ease has practiced for hours, alone, because writing is a private occupation.

Faulkner said, “Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.”

So I leave you, readers who want to be writers, with these words of wisdom. Go ye, my children and write. You don’t know a Goddamned thing about life, I don’t care how old you are. Get out from behind that TV. Go find a typewriter and write something.