New year, first post
Mrs. Raper's rules of writing
Happy new year, and welcome to Lit Café.
The cover photo is from my family homeplace: my mother’s café curtains at the window over the kitchen table where I used to sit up late at night, after everyone else was in bed and the house was quiet, to write my high school English papers. By and by my father, never a sound sleeper, would come in, open the refrigerator, make himself a snack, stand and the counter and eat it, then go back to bed.
I loved to write long before I knew how. Mrs. Raper, my teacher, encouraged me. What she saw in my work I don’t know. I wanted my language to be beautiful, my meaning dense and inscrutable. I wanted to be thought deep. I did not want to give away how I felt: small, lost. Mrs. Raper no doubt knew that. She knew teenagers.
She gave us rules. There are, she taught, three qualities of good writing:
Clarity. Know what you mean to say and say it clearly. It may take many drafts to figure this out.
Concision. Say only what you need to. Write fire, not smoke.
Eloquence. Say it in a way that lingers in the ear and imagination and heart of your reader.
Break the rules if you must. But have a good reason.
I can't wait to read more from you!
Kim how does one make a ‘post’ here? But aside you can tell me. Longer version of what I might say.
But my mother was an ‘educator’. She taught generations of her students to be ‘critical thinkers’.
God only knows, I suffered through it then, two years in class everyday, and oh she is still beating me into shape seventeen years after she passed into Transition.
I cannot forget the lessons learned, the sound logic, the completely repudiated arguments, any of it.
I got a feeling Kim feels that too. Last I saw Kim was at my mother’s funeral. I was sitting in the Piedmont Funeral Home limo, and she came and gave me a hug through the window.
It had been a long time and I’m sure I did not recognize her.
But I still knew the hug and all I could say, “Oh she is in my head right now…”
Starring into the air at the parking lot at the Methodist Church.
Very thankful for what Kim has done here. My mother is too I am sure.