When my 4th grade teacher, Miss Robinson came back from her honeymoon, she told the class her name would now be Mrs. Robinson. That didn’t matter much to us until, that is, she wrote the word COINCIDENCE on the chalkboard. We knew what was coming and that time was of the essence. We all took out a single sheet of lined paper and held our pencils at the ready. When the little hand on the clock circled around and clicked audibly on the twelve, Mrs. Robinson said, “Okay. Go.”
I wrote as fast as I could:
In
Coin
And then immediately froze. It was nerves, I guess. Coupled with the fact that I was a terrible, terrible speller.
Den
Nice
No, now I was on a roll.
Need.
Code.
I wanted so badly, just once, just one time, to win.
None.
Nine.
“Pencils down!” Mrs. Robinson said and hands flew up. If you had that word on your list, you crossed it off. Remaining a contender meant you had come up with more than anyone else had.
“Code.”
“Nine.”
“In.”
“Coin.”
I was beginning to lose heart.
“Need.”
“Den.”
“Nice.”
One by one, I drew a sad line through all of my words. But the game went on.
“Dice.”
“Once.”
“Done.”
Until Peter O’Brian was the last man standing.
“Concede,” he announced.
I questioned whether that was even a real word, but apparently it was and Peter was the winner. In the scheme of things it wasn’t a bad defeat. After all there were fourteen other kids in the room who had also lost.
Such is life.
But later that year Mrs. Robinson came up with another educational activity. It would begin innocently enough as an arts-and-crafts project. We were each given a piece of white construction paper with our name spelled out in big bold teacher-handwriting. We were to draw one brown stem, a black circle, and two green leaves.
Basically, a naked flower.
No problem.
Little did I know that the worst was yet to come. Our paper flowers, which collectively made up Our Spelling Garden were to be hung across the top of the chalkboard, which if I didn’t mention before, was in the front of the classroom.
Mrs. Robinson pointed to a mountain of pre-cut petals, all yellow, in a basket on her desk. “For every one-hundred percent you get on your weekly spelling test,” she told us, “I will put one petal on your flower.”
This was Peter’s flower:
Mine remained naked for the rest of the year:
The point? There is none.
E.M. Forster famously explained it this way:
The King died. Then the Queen died. (is story)
The King died. Then the Queen died of grief. (is plot)
The writers at Pixar – and who tells a better story? – describe it a little differently.
It’s not: This happened. Then this happened. Then this happened.
It should be: This happened, therefore this happened, therefore this happened.
In my workshops, when I teach writing, or when I work one-one-one with writers, I call it: The So-What.
But no matter how it’s described it means basically the same thing.
A lot of my early submissions were rejected because they were “anecdotal,” and it took me a long time to figure out what that meant. Eventually I learned that although a story may be interesting, even wildly entertaining, that’s not enough to get it published.
Your writing doesn’t have to speak to some profound meaning about humanity. It doesn’t need to change the world. But it should do something more than amuse your friends at a dinner party or let everyone know you were an anxious kid who couldn’t spell.
I mean, yeah?
So what?