Thomas Allbaugh's Blog

Friends, I’ve had technical difficulties over the last two years with keeping my website functional. Help is on the way. But till then, here is my latest Substack post–fyi. I hope you enjoy it. And subscribe, if you can.

This month, I have been the featured writer for Solum Journal, a Christian journal I have a lot of respect for. You can see the feature at this link: https://lnkd.in/gvQia3Ma. Here, you can hear my reading of my flash fiction piece, and then read the short interview that follows.

In the interview, I try to give perspective for the story and for my thinking about writing about grief.

I hope you will get a chance to look at this.

Thank you for reading.

Recently, the new Speaker of the House of Representatives said that if anyone wanted to know where he stood on anything, all they needed to do was read the Bible, and that would show them his worldview.

I wish that I could do that–point to a book and say, “Here it is, my whole way of seeing the world captured right here.” But I can’t do that. Every book I have read and loved is a partial, fragmented representation. 

I assume, of course, that the Speaker is talking about his view on various culture war issues, for example, that he’s against abortion, against LGBTQ+ rights, against saying “Seasons greetings,” and in favor of capitalism. And he is asserting that the Bible supports each of these views. 

John Steinbeck, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, these writers I read as a 20 year old caused me to see life in a certain way and look forward. I read them not as scripture, but as authoritative somehow about what life felt like. Today, they don’t so much. There are things that they simply don’t speak to about life right now. There are similar issues for me when I turn to my reading of the Bible. I would like to say that it represents my absolute blueprint for everything I face. But after my son’s suicide six years ago, I discovered that the Bible, quite simply, did not say anything about it in direct terms, starting with guidance about whether or not suicide is a sin. 

Most advocates of Reader Response theories of literature will be unanimous in their view that the text, any text anywhere, has gaps. In these gaps, the reader will fill in their own understanding, and this is why we get so many interpretations of stories that are equally compelling. They are also why we generally prefer the book to the movie, where even the best director’s gap fillers don’t measure up to our own.

This is not to fault the new Speaker for his statement mentioned above, but I must confess that my understanding of what I read in the Bible is often complicated by my reading of other books and authors–even C.S. Lewis can make things complicated for my view that I am only a biblical Christian. The minute I am reading other books, hearing from other pastors, I am beginning to fill in the gaps that scripture leaves. And many the gaps there are.

If we accept that the scriptures were written by many authors over a long period of time, we might accept that the Author behind them, the Creator, was a Creator of few words. 66 books. There seemed to be great concern over preparing certain foods, and no interest in explaining where Seth’s wife might have come from. Different authors, it seems, were influenced not only by God but also by the immediate culture around them. 

But also, consider this–the brevity of the whole enterprise. A few thousand pages represent the holy text, and that is all, with a great deal of attention to certain ideas. I can’t imagine one of our politicians living so long and being so eloquent and restrained. But that is what we have, a nonpolitician explaining things.

I still don’t understand why we automatically associate the reading of the Bible with conservative political views. The Bible does not support, or even know about, capitalism. Or socialism, for that matter. Both -isms are recent constructions of an enlightened, industrialized world. The Bible was long finished thousands of years before Karl Marx or John Stuart Mill, two writers who probably had more than a passing familiarity with the Bible. By the time we get, say, 300 years out, we have St. Augustine trying to show that allegorical readings of the Old Testament are justified, especially with texts that are very hard to understand. 

If we are honest, the gaps are there–and that doesn’t have to undermine anyone’s faith. We fill the gaps in with our experiences. Mention a boat and I’m likely to supply the sails. Mention baking bread, and it will take some effort to get past a loaf of garlic bread.

The same was true with slavery. The Bible was used rather thoroughly to support the debased institution of slavery in the old American South. It was used less successfully for abolition. 

The Bible has very little to say about suicide. There are only a few instances of it. King Saul tries to take his own life before he is captured by his enemies. Judas is supposed to have done it. And the one jailer in the Book of Acts has his hand stayed by Paul, who reassures him that all prisoners are still accounted for, and he won’t be held responsible. 

In each case, there is no commentary, no theological perspective attached. When I was a child, our priest assured us that Judas had sinned horribly by taking his own life. Suicide, he said, was forbidden. 

But again, this is a cultural response to a gap. Either the gap was left there because the author and scribes assumed that there was no question. Or they didn’t see any issue with the gap. 

When we read back to those pages, we see the need to fill gaps. I fill them with what better writers have called a law of love. 

With suicide, we have been encouraged by so many people who do not take the traditional view of filling in the gap. They understand the brokenness that our son was facing. 

I believe that they have followed a law of love, at least in this case. 

Revision is such a dirty word.

Especially when it is required as part of an assignment. Believe me, I do understand. I sympathize with students forced into this predicament, even though I assign it like every other teacher of writing does. I assign revision dates for workshops as though revision is good for you. Like vegetables.

A little closer to home, of course, and to offer evidence that I take my own medicine, I’m just getting started, as the summer begins, on another revision of a memoir I began writing five years ago, after my son took his life.

This revision, what I’m doing now, is very different from an assignment, from writing imposed on me from the outside. This memoir is strongly the writing that I first had to do, then wanted to do. Over the last five years, I’ve revised the work several times, and each time it’s deepened and changed, even as the nature of my grief has changed. This summer, I feel in a position to finish it. That is, I hope to finish the final draft, not the process of my grief. I assume that will continue.

Revision is hard to do

I began this process of new revisions just yesterday, the first day of my summer with no meetings scheduled. I could work through the day. And, to be honest, getting started wasn’t easy. It’s always like this; beginning the process of revision can be the hardest part of all. Once it’s going, it expands on itself, multiplies, becomes very rewarding as I discover ever newer ideas and idea development. In fact, this is why I have argued that revision is perhaps best named re-writing, because revision often amounts to a lot of new writing.

But I admit that the start can be painful.

I take advice of Walter Mosby, the Los Angeles writer. Rereading your text can count as revision work.

Especially since I hadn’t been able to look at the last draft of my work since last November, six months ago, I started with Mosby’s suggestion, with reading. I read the opening material. And then the benefit of not looking at material for a while kicked in. Enough time had elapsed so that I could see strong and weak aspects to the earlier draft. I began to really slim down the first chapter, but also add new verbs and details.

This led to similar changes in the second chapter. The revision is leading me to shrink the draft. It was a longer draft than I wanted, at 216 pages. I hope to get rid of perhaps another 80 pages. I think that a book about grief should be shorter and perhaps written more in fragments, should resemble poetry.

That is my first writing goal for the summer. I hope to finish by this summer.

Revising. Re-seeing. Re-writing.

Of course, I won’t be finished with the grief. That will continue to change. Perhaps it will lead to new books and new revisions.

Psychologistsworking with trauma patients have found value in the trauma narrative. Generatedin a variety of ways, through conversations and through drawing and music, traumanarratives allow patients to construct meaningful accounts of their experiencesin the presence of a therapist or in a setting where the response issympathetic. The benefits can be powerful.  

One areaof narrative non-fiction that would seem to have its roots in trauma narrative,at least as an initial motivation for writing, is the grief memoir. Shared andfeatured in grief groups, and even used to discuss what might be called “norms”for suffering, these narratives, written anywhere from one to 20 years after aloss, are shaped for audiences, circulated, shared, and discussed in griefgroups in ways that I would like to suggest may help to shape the groups to serveas discourse communities.

Insuggesting that these groups are discourse communities, I want to side-step theold, vexed discussions about how much a reader’s community determines meaning.Instead, I want to suggest that grief support groups provide a meaningfulcontext for the discussion of trauma that is absent in the larger culture andchurch. This support need not be determining, but it does serve as individuals arebrought together meaningfully by their experiences, as they share languagechoices and ways of talking about their experiences that are meaningful withinthe group and not recognized outside of it.

Thetwo works I wish to discuss here are both written by parents who lost children;both parents are published authors, and both chronicle inconsolable months ofdeep, unrelenting shock. The first, by Ann Hood and disarmingly titled Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, is agrief memoir that follows a sharp edge of trauma over a span of four years. Theother, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Christian philosopher, is titled Lament for a Son and takes the generalform of a lament as it follows a year of grief. Both works raise questions: Whathope is there? What redemption can possibly await the parent who has lost achild? What is left to the parent who must face experiences that challenge mostprofessional psychologists and theologians? Both narratives move throughtrauma, and the second work, as a the Lament, partially addresses God, and raisesquestions about suffering and faith.  

Theprologue to Ann Hood’s memoir is titled “Comfort” and shows the author’s slightof hand as she details the words of “comfort” given to her over the firstmonths of her loss, which are no comfort at all but instead the platitudes ofthose who have not suffered: “Time heals. Your daughter’s in a better place.She is with you…There is a heaven and you will see her again” (9). These are givenby friends and followed by words of advice: “You should walk everyday…go tochurch…therapy…the cemetery…Are you writing down how you feel?” (9, 11). These suggestionsare followed by her detailing how her loss has paralyzed her to the point whereshe, a professional writer, cannot write. This prologue, it is revealed severalchapters later, Hood wrote a year into her grief in response to a prompt shereceived from Tin House. Theprologue, it should be clear, offers no comfort, only the clear message that asa grieving parent, she has been cut off from the society of people she used toenjoy. This narrative thus begins with details familiar to most people whosuffer loss—being confronted by an uncomprehending community untouched by loss.

Thefirst chapter details the day that her daughter Grace died—the ballet classwhere she broke her arm and then became feverish, running a temperature of 105and having a seizure. There are before/after snapshots of how the family livedbefore that day, including Grace’s comments on things and her preferences andher life. Hood recounts being with her daughter in the pediatrics ICU andwatching her condition go from unknown to a reaction to a viral form of strepthat enters the blood stream and attacks the organs, and she is told that herdaughter will not survive. She captures this hallucinatory moment of denial inreaction to that news, and then the sudden change in her daughter’s conditionas the fever abates and she regains consciousness and they have a briefconversation and Hood falls asleep next to her, only to be awakened to Gracebeing intubated and herself being forced out of the room as the medical staff tryto save her.

Indetailing her first year of grief, Hood notes that it is not linear. She writesof being fine for a day or even a week before a smell or a song will triggerher grief, and then it is as though no time has passed for her since the loss. Hoodmimics this sense of time as she moves between memory and trauma, overwhelmedby the sense that there is no comfort for her. Her daughter is gone, and shecannot write.

Duringher second year, she is told that she should do something with her hands, andshe gives the account of how she takes up knitting and it becomes a meditative,present-centering practice for her. It is something new, and she is forced toget lessons over half an hour away from her home. This becomes a new focus forher, and it is perhaps the main impetus behind her ability to write the Tin House piece that eventually isreprinted as the prologue of this narrative. Yet she remains a broken personover the next two years of avoiding people who knew her daughter and the churchthey occasionally but stop attending after the musical director leads the choirin “Amazing Grace” when she has finally returned to church.

Threeyears after her loss, Hood’s family decides to adopt a Korean child. At thispoint, her son Sam is 11 years old, and the family has many things around themas shrines to her daughter who, she writes, is never coming back. The idea ofadoption starts slowly and goes through a few complications before it happens.But the point is very clear in the narrative that the new member of theirfamily, who has a wonderful laugh and makes it very clear that she is happy tobe with them, is not a replacement for Grace. While being engaged with her newdaughter and even finding purpose, Hood continues to grieve. The telos, or the end point of this is,however, that while she continues to mourn the loss of her daughter, and herlife is not one full of new comfort, she is living with grief. The maincomforts of this narrative, the author’s knitting and her new daughter, allowher to continue to live and grieve, but she does not achieve a distant shore ofnew happiness and deepened understanding. The point here seems to be that thereis no such place to be reached. Rather, it has to do with learning to live inthis place where the loss of a daughter is not out of the realm of possibility.It won’t happen to most other people, but it is what she must endure. “I amhere today, four years, one month and one day since Grace died,” she writes onthe last page. Since I’ve seen her. Since I’ve held her. Since I’ve heard herfunny, throaty voice. I have a broken heart. I am writing a book. I am drinkingmy coffee. It is raining outside. The grass is very green. A cardinal fliesaway. I think of my daughter…I say: ‘Grace, here I am.’…And I hope, I pray,that somehow she hears” (186).

InLament for a Son, a similar space iscleared out for a father’s grief, but there is one added element. The loss tothe family and the emotional trauma that must be faced is accompanied byquestions about suffering and continued faith. Furthermore, the form of lamentthat the author has chosen seems to put a boundary on the time frame, limitingthe focus to a year after the son’s burial. Nicholas Wolterstorff does not atthis time simply stop grieving. Instead, he follows the form he has chosen andmakes a conscious effort in lament to submit to God all of his concerns, eventhough he finds God more mysterious that he did before his loss.

Lamentproceeds not in chapters but in fragments, some a paragraph, some a page or twoin length, With the call that his son has died mountain climbing in Germany,Wolterstorff narrates going to identify his son’s body and returning it to theStates. In seeing the badly broken and bruised body, he also comes upon hisson’s climbing boots, which remained unscarred in the fall, and he grimlyimagines telling the makers of them, “Know that if you bump and scrape to yourdeath on a mountain, these shoes will come through unscathed, ready to be wornagain by family and friends” (18). He also notes where his son was living, whathe was doing, what he was planning, including work on his masters thesis. Thesefragments take on weight and figure in a loss that the author cannot contain.“Eric was bursting with futurity,” he writes, “with plans and resolutions.Humanity in full flower. Now…All the rich future that he held—gone in thosetumbling seconds. His death is things to do not done—never to be done” (30). 

WhereAnn Hood’s memoir begins with her responses to the inconsistent words ofconsolation and advice she was given during the first year of her loss,Wolterstorff’s begins with an invitation to others joining him on what he callsthe “mourning bench.” But Wolterstorff does acknowledge his trouble with theway that friends and acquaintances speak to his loss, and it leads to aparticular line of reflection. About one-third of the way through, he writes,“What do you say to someone who is suffering?” He offers several alternativesand then suggests “But please: Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is.Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me thatreally, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in mygrief but place yourself off in the distance away from me” (34). This line ofthought is developed further when he a friend offers him a small book writtenby a father whose son also had been mountain climbing, and the author notesthat “God had shaken the mountain. God had decided that it was time for him tocome home” (66). Wolterstorff finds this “pious attitude deaf” to the messageof the gospel. He finds it untenable to see death as a “normal instrument ofGod’s dealing with us.” He writes that “Paul calls (death) the last great enemyto be overcome. God is appalled by death. My pain over my son’s death is sharedby his pain over my son’s death” (66). He objects to this idea of God with thefollowing:

Seeing God as the agent of death is one way of fitting together into a rational pattern God, ourselves and death. There are other ways…I cannot fit it all together by saying ‘He did it,’ but neither can I do so by saying, ‘There was nothing he could do about it.’ I cannot fit it together at all. I can only, with Job, endure. I do not know why God did not prevent Eric’s death. To live with out the answer is precarious. It’s hard to keep one’s footing…The writer of Job refuses to say that God views the lives and deaths of children as cats-o-nint-tails with which to lacerate parents...I have no explanation. I can do nothing else than endure in the face of this deepest, most painful of mysteries…I do not know why God would watch him fall. I do not know why God would watch me wounded. I cannot even guess. (67, 68)

Wolterstorffwrites that his faith “endures,” but his approach to God is altered. It is thissense of living in pain and mystery where he begins to dwell. The lament allowshis questioning and his expression of pain. He writes that “Elements of thegospel which I had always thought would console did not. They did somethingelse, something important, but not that. It did not console me to be remindedof the hope of resurrection…I did not grieve as one who has no hope,” hewrites, but he acknowledges the problem of living without his son, who is nothere now to talk with (31).

In her grief memoir, Ann Hood finally, after a year, submits to mental health advice and takes up knitting. For Wolterstorff, following the form of lament allows him finds a space to give voice to the growing contradictions he faces in his loss. The form allows him to detail the many ways he is grieving the loss of Eric. It also allows him to think about his loss in some distinctly Judeo-Christian terms not typical of the grief memoir. The reflection on death as the last enemy, rather than on death as a friend to be at peace with, is clarifying and allows him to mourn completely that his son is dead and never to be seen again. He renders his loss in physical terms rather than in the terms of a platonic dream. But he also leaves the lament after a year with a hope in a coming resurrection, and this is not something he would have considered a year earlier.

Inneither case, with Ann Hood, or with Wolterstorff, is there a return to a past normal.Job is given new wealth and family but no answers as to why he has suffered. Heis given a new family and farm, but we are not told that he is also given akind of heavenly amnesia so that he has no memory of his former suffering andloss. In these works, Comfort and Lament for a Son, a new normal meansthat grieving parents move into an undesired country. In the telling of theirstories possibility, more than hope, must eventually emerge in the wake of deepchanges. It is this sense of possibility that comes from affirming that, yes,this is how this loss has felt, and this is what it leads to. This is found ina community they would at first prefer not to join.

WorksCited

Hood, Ann. Comfort: A Journey Through Grief. NewYork: Norton, 2008.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

*This is the text of a presentation I gave at the Western Regional CCL on March 17, 2023.

A few days after my son took his life in October, 2017, I wrote the following post on Facebook: “To those working on a time machine, I’m ready to go back about six days.”

The post got many likes and hearts, and it received many comments. I think everyone could identify with wanting to go back in time to “fix” or change something that has happened to them. Certainly, this is what much of the early period of grief was for me, in addition to the trauma.

And in those first days of our loss, there was much outpouring of care and concern for us, though within a few months, that had mostly receded. After the memorial service, most people we knew tip-toed around us, not wanting to remind us of what we were always already thinking about. I think that there’s an unconscious tension that most of us feel toward grief and the grieving: We are aware that it takes a long time, and five complicated stages, to get through our grief, and at the same time, we don’t know what to say when we meet with grieving people. We want to help but also sense our own inability to help. We are not experts. We think, well, I’ll just step quietly through this and get out of the room without really hurting anyone.

The stages of grief, outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As we began really grieving for our son, I couldn’t have told you exactly what I was going through in terms of this five stage model. In those first months or our loss, I could say that I didn’t go into the stages neatly. I was certainly in denial when scheming to find a time machine. And I certainly remained in a state of trauma for quite a while.

Even five years later, I haven’t ever really felt any anger toward my son. I have felt anger toward his therapist. But not him.

I do think that many would acknowledge today that these five stages do not represent a neat, linear model. We do not pass neatly from one stage to the next after X number of days. I think that even Kubler-Ross acknowledged that it is possible to experience different stages again and even again at different times.

That said, I have wondered what it must look and feel like to get through to the place of acceptance. How long does it take?

Today, five years later, I could say that I have learned to live with a certain amount of resignation. I am resigned to my loss. But is that the same state as acceptance?

This is the problem I see with acceptance–why I hesitate to accept acceptance. It seems to mean having to acknowledge that what happened to my son is a part of reality now, but it also sometimes feels like it includes a second, more difficult admission: That I have come to also be at peace, to sort of get along with the fact that he’s not here now. Certainly, I know that we can’t have our son back, even for an hour, but I can still think that losing him was a horrible event in our lives. I’m not sure that this is really acceptance, or that I want this kind of acceptance.

We, my family and I, have lived for five years without the presence of our son. We have gone on to other things and other relationships. We are not the people we were five years ago when he was just starting his senior year of high school. His friends are not there either. We recently went to a restaurant that he and his friends had for a hangout after school. None of them were there. They are all moving from their early to their mid-twenties. 

I do enjoy things about my life now. There are times that I don’t think about him. Part of this has come about because I’ve been writing about him and plan to finish a memoir about him. I don’t want to forget. 

But recently, at a Survivors of Suicide meeting, I did say something that has struck me as, if not acceptance, then at least moving toward some version of it. I’m not sure, and it still seems, well, sad. I said this:

“If I had the time machine now to go back five and a half years to see him again, I would tell Michael that I love him. I would tell him how much I’m going to miss him. But I would leave it at that. I wouldn’t seek out extra-human abilities to save him.” 

A couple of other people present that evening told me that this sounded like a major move forward. 

I’m trying to decide what it really means to accept this loss. I’m still thinking in terms of time machines. And that’s quite clearly on the side of extra-human things. And I still feel sadness. If coming to a place of acceptance means still being sad about my loss, it may be that this is the start of things. 

But as I think I’ve already said, these stages we pass through are not neat and orderly. But then, I’ve gotten used to that idea. 

A few days after my son took his life in October, 2017, I wrote the following post on Facebook: “To those working on a time machine, I’m ready to go back about six days.”

The post got many likes and hearts, and it received many comments. I think everyone could identify with wanting to go back in time to “fix” or change something that has happened to them. Certainly, this is what much of the early period of grief was for me, in addition to the trauma.

And in those first days of our loss, there was much outpouring of care and concern for us, though within a few months, that had mostly receded. After the memorial service, most people we knew tip-toed around us, not wanting to remind us of what we were always already thinking about. I think that there’s an unconscious tension that most of us feel toward grief and the grieving: We are aware that it takes a long time, and five complicated stages, to get through our grief, and at the same time, we don’t know what to say when we meet with grieving people. We want to help but also sense our own inability to help. We are not experts. We think, well, I’ll just step quietly through this and get out of the room without really hurting anyone.

The stages of grief, outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. As we began really grieving for our son, I couldn’t have told you exactly what I was going through in terms of this five stage model. In those first months or our loss, I could say that I didn’t go into the stages neatly. I was certainly in denial when scheming to find a time machine. And I certainly remained in a state of trauma for quite a while.

Even five years later, I haven’t ever really felt any anger toward my son. I have felt anger toward his therapist. But not him.

I do think that many would acknowledge today that these five stages do not represent a neat, linear model. We do not pass neatly from one stage to the next after X number of days. I think that even Kubler-Ross acknowledged that it is possible to experience different stages again and even again at different times.

That said, I have wondered what it must look and feel like to get through to the place of acceptance. How long does it take?

Today, five years later, I could say that I have learned to live with a certain amount of resignation. I am resigned to my loss. But is that the same state as acceptance?

This is the problem I see with acceptance–why I hesitate to accept acceptance. It seems to mean having to acknowledge that what happened to my son is a part of reality now, but it also sometimes feels like it includes a second, more difficult admission: That I have come to also be at peace, to sort of get along with the fact that he’s not here now. Certainly, I know that we can’t have our son back, even for an hour, but I can still think that losing him was a horrible event in our lives. I’m not sure that this is really acceptance, or that I want this kind of acceptance.

We, my family and I, have lived for five years without the presence of our son. We have gone on to other things and other relationships. We are not the people we were five years ago when he was just starting his senior year of high school. His friends are not there either. We recently went to a restaurant that he and his friends had for a hangout after school. None of them were there. They are all moving from their early to their mid-twenties. 

I do enjoy things about my life now. There are times that I don’t think about him. Part of this has come about because I’ve been writing about him and plan to finish a memoir about him. I don’t want to forget. 

But recently, at a Survivors of Suicide meeting, I did say something that has struck me as, if not acceptance, then at least moving toward some version of it. I’m not sure, and it still seems, well, sad. I said this.

“If I had the time machine now to go back five and a half years to see him again, I would tell Michael that I love him. I would tell him how much I’m going to miss him. But I would leave it at that. I wouldn’t seek out extra-human abilities to save him.” 

A couple of other people present that evening told me that this sounded like a major move forward. 

I’m trying to decide what it really means to accept this loss. I’m still thinking in terms of time machines. And that’s quite clearly on the side of extra-human things. And I still feel sadness. If coming to a place of acceptance means still being sad about my loss, it may be that this is the start of things. 

But as I think I’ve already said, these stages we pass through are not neat and orderly. But then, I’ve gotten used to that idea. 

On Sunday, I was on a panel of writers who discussed the ways that revision can lead to a bestseller.

Going in, I was not sure that I could speak with authority on how to write a bestseller. After all, I haven’t written one. I have mostly labored in writing contemporary, literary fiction. 

To write a hot bestseller, my main advice would be to switch to a genre like romance or mystery, one that will provide lots of committed readers. Yet I could and can always speak to the virtues of revising ones thoughts and words. Only good usually comes from it.

To begin, one could observe one obvious point. Consider: What exactly do bestsellers, of all genres, have in common? My answer would be that they tell a good story about characters who really matter to readers. That’s the mix–character and story. Perhaps a good story background–place–also matters, if it allows readers to enter a complete secondary world where things happen that we dream about.

These are big concerns. At some writers conferences, speakers will get into debates about what matters more, story or character, but I think that this is setting up a false dichotomy. Both matter. In fact, story, character, and world-building cut across genres, from romance and mystery to crime and fantasy and sci fi. We have to care about the hobbits, or the woman in the car, or the youth baseball team. And something should be happening to them that we have fears or concerns about. Both matter. 

I have been on GLAWS panels before (Greater Los Angeles Writers Society), and I enjoy the way that they are facilitated. For Sunday, I planned to be ready to speak of several tricks I’ve practiced: changing the point of view character from one draft to the next, especially in a close third person narration; cutting the opening pages of a draft, the part where introductions and descriptions are gone into, and getting to the scene where the action really starts; then, rethinking the main character’s reactions to things that happen, and rethinking my own reactions about what happens, so that something truly surprising results, surprising to the characters involved, surprising to the author, and then, probably, surprising to the readers. 

I have an entire chapter in my writing textbook, Pretexts for Writing, given to steps to revision. It is a most practical chapter, and it begins with the often missed truth that we don’t like to go back and look at our rough drafts. We don’t like to read what we have written. We prefer to bask in the fact that we have finished a draft. And we want to imagine our draft of our story as a completed intention, not something that will benefit from more work. 

The first step, then, is to reread a first draft, from start to finish. From there, I like to ask, could another character be the one seeing and telling the story? Does the story begin at the beginning, or does it begin, as Aristotle once intoned, en media res, that is, in the middle, at the start of the conflict? Are more possibilities implicit in that rough draft that I could explore, open up? 

Revision, then, becomes more than having my eyes rubbed in my mistakes. It becomes an adventure, a way of seeing the possibilities. It helps to know that there are steps we can take to revisit our writing in new and productive ways. 

I was at an open mic night a few years ago, just before the pandemic put a stop to such social events for a while. After I had read my three poems–all free verse–the next poet got up and announced that he was reading poems that had rhyme. He said that he favored that practice.

I understand this desire. I suspect that some people only think of real poetry as that which has rhyme schemes and strict rhythms. As one customer said in a Barnes & Noble where I was looking over the poetry section, “You can’t tell the good from the bad poetry. There are no standards.” Perhaps he was thinking that free verse has made things too easy. There is this idea that free verse feels like writing that is of small value.

Yet I don’t think this is true. Writing free verse can be a wonderful way into writing poetry. It can lead to rambling, certainly, even wordiness. It can seem easy as we simply write whatever is on our minds. But this can also lead to greater conciseness. It can even lead to experiments with meter and rhyme.

Back in college, my poetry teacher talked about how his poems would start small, amounting to a few stanzas, and then, as he revised them, they would expand. They would open out into all sorts of new suggestions for him to consider. Eventually, he would edit these drafts back down, often ending up with poems that were as short or even shorter than the first draft was.

Once he really engaged the process, allowing himself to really try to see all that he was writing about in a poem, he could then get at the phrases that made the most concise meaning.

From my poetry teacher, I got the distinct impression that a rough draft usually only contains a hint of the writer’s sense of what she has to say. Writing further drafts can lead to a fuller exploration of what was only the start of an idea.

Writing the Bad Poem

Recently, I’ve had similar experiences with several poems I wrote that started out in my daily routine as rough drafts, which I tend to call bad poems. These poems I gathered in my notebooks, and at some point later, I would look at them again and begin to rework them, often doing what my poetry teacher suggested, adding to the poem, making it longer.

With a few of these poems, I found much internal rhyme and images taking shape that I’d not guessed at before, even as the poems ran over in length to cover the better part of two pages, single-spaced.

This was when I began to really see the potential of the original short poem. I could sense how the images, words, and ideas were connected in my experience.

I don’t know that I could tell that customer in the bookstore who complained that modern poetry has no standards that my poems were of high quality. But they are not just random free writing, with no planning or structure. In fact, they are complicated and move to emotional places. In one, for example, I’ve made the connection to my son’s former past time of hanging out in Good Will stores with his friends before he took his life. In a later verse, I return to the Good Will images as I think about the random possessions we still have from him and how the context changes as the years pass.

It was in expanding the poem that I discovered this connection, and I think it works. I may eventually edit the poem down to a single page or a few stanzas, with that idea implicit in it. But I needed to write long and free to find it.

This is one reason I write in free verse. And I think that in the multi-verse, there is room for more of it, as well as poems that rhyme.

I usually hear the claim on a news show when the pundit or journalist takes the mic out onto the street to talk to the proverbial “people on the street.” I don’t know why pundits do this. I don’t know who they are expecting to cross paths with. If they really wanted to get informed ideas, they would try to find groups committed to discussing the issues they care about. That way, instead of showing how stupid and uninformed the average Joe is, we could actually listen in on what people who know something are actually saying. These people, who know what they are talking about and how to talk with others, could then not only inform us, but also become good role models for us of how to talk in public. 

Instead, as always happens on these shows, at least one of the people given the mic will claim to have done his/her/their own research. When pressed, they usually won’t explain what their research looked like. If they begin to describe it at all, they will usually mention a few websites they’ve visited–websites I always suspect someone else led them to look at. 

“I’ve done my own research.”

Not that having someone else lead you to a source is bad. That is also part of doing research. It’s just not the end of it.

In graduate school, I did my own research. I had to map out for my committee what my research plan was going to look like. I had to include a substantial bibliography, much of which I’d already read and summarized. I might privately have started with what I believed was a settled conviction, but by the time I’d gotten to this, the proposal stage, I was also bothered by a question, or questions, that I hoped my research project could at least address. I might have had certain feelings or leanings on my project, but I admitted to this so that my own opinion wouldn’t get in the way of a better one as I dug into every possible opinion and study from every possible angle on the topic. 

The people on the shows today usually don’t mean this. Usually, clothed in a red, white, and blue t-shirt that sometimes has the American flag and a picture of Donald Trump, their favorite politician, on it, they will look surprised to learn that DJT began his life as president by paying off a 25 million dollar fraud settlement to students of his defunct Trump University. I note this not because I have Trump-Derangement Syndrome but because it makes their claim to have done their own research, given the statement on their t-shirts, deeply ironic: It suggests that they haven’t done any oppositional research. If they had, they’d know that Trump is a bum out to make money, and not someone who will save them from the Deep State or the Federal Government, or whatever it is they are against.

This really is the only question to ask those who have “done their own research”: Did they at least do what I require my first-year writing students to do? Did they at least do some oppositional reading? Did they read anything that might be credible from a point of view they might disagree with?

And yes, people who disagree with us can and do have credibility, and if the solitary researchers don’t see this, then they haven’t yet started their own research. 

Oppositional Reading looks something like this, but it isn’t sacreligious.

Say I want to write an opinion on abortion. And I’m pro-life (which I basically am. I also care about the life of the woman, and I don’t think that raped ten year olds should be required by the state to carry their pregnancy to full term). That means that as I compose my argument, part of my research for that will include reading the fairest representations of as many opposition views as possible. It will mean reading entire essays of opposing views with an openness to learn something and not simply to cherry pick wording or sentences that reinforce my own prejudices about the position I’m reading. It will mean being able to fairly summarize an opposing argument, including in my summary ideas that might make them look reasonable and even persuasive. I should also be looking at the evidence they have used. This will finally lead me to questioning the evidence that I have relied on for my position on the argument, because I know that others will do the same with my argument.  

This is most difficult–for everyone. No one I know likes to read opinions that run counter to theirs. We resist them. Even as we read, we are squirming with facts to marshal against the opponent, ready to reduce them to the shmucks they really are.

In fact, I generally like to carry on as though there are no reasonable objections to my views because I am simply right.

I don’t care who is doing oppositional reading. It is difficult for lawyers, journalists, politicians, the Pope, feminists, Democrats, Republicans. It’s just not in our nature to fully attend to someone who has an argument counter to our own position. It’s not. It is something we have to become trained to do. 

What Most People Today Seem To Do

In fact, this is so difficult to do that most people stop short of the task. Instead, they will do one of three things:

1) attack the messenger (“Oh, that’s just CNN, and they are fake news,” or “Oh, that’s just Breitbart, cheerleaders for The Donald”);

2) claim that the message has been altered (“I don’t believe that William Barr really said that about the election”);

3) reduce the opposition view to look unreasonable (“All Democrats favor all abortions, even after the child is born.” Yes, a congressional leader recently at least seemed to imply this of all Democrats); 

4) use devil terms to dismiss the opposition (We saw this during the McCarthy era during the search for “un-American activities.” Today, of course, in the thinking of some members of Congress, to be “un-American” is to not be white, or to be a Non-Christian). 

In the current political climate, we hear these, or similar, attacks on occasion. It’s not every day, but it does represent the thinking of a vocal minority. But to think this way is not argument in any classical or modern sense. It is not done so that we learn something. It is done agonistically. That is, it is  done to win and not to lose. Most of the time, people will draw on these bastardized versions of opposition, all of which are logical fallacies (1 is an ad hominem attack–attacking the character of the opponent, 3 is a version of the either/or dilemma, and 4 is what Richard Weaver would call a devil-term). And the intention is to win some social debate or culture war. 

Why Do We Argue? 

We have to ask this, because it simply sounds like much of our current public discourse is tending downward into what looks like actual, not symbolic violence. Our culture wars are moving, as some congressional leaders have recently suggested, toward civil war. 

This is disturbing and suggests that we are beyond arguing. It appears that we no longer know how to argue and not fight. 

So here is what we need to know. Argument, in the classical sense, was done not only to win something. It was also done to make a case for the best possible, most likely opinion. It was engaged in so that the debaters could match one opinion with another in order to find which of them was more aligned with real possibilities. 

People argued, in the classical sense, in order to learn something. And when they did, they were willing to change their opinions to the better one. This also suggests that they were open to change, to new ideas. 

People don’t argue like that anymore. They claim that they have already done their research, and now they want to win something. 

But before we run for the guns, what is most needed today, for our nation, for our politics, for our future, is for everyone to study argument and what it means to argue. And we need to learn what it really means to do our own research. I am not mounting an elitist argument here. I don’t mean that everyone needs to attend graduate school. But everyone should, and can, read. 

For our civic responsibility, collectively, it is time for us to require that all high school students study this lost art we used to call rhetoric, the art of defending the public good, the art of arguing in public about what matters most to us. 

The alternatives don’t look good. And I’m not trying to assert an either/or dilemma here. Surely there are still alternatives between civically arguing our positions and going to war. But before we reach that point, I have this vision that occasionally diverts me, and I hope it will divert our fellow citizens: It is the sight of the men or women on the street shown in a kind of intellectual humility as they weigh whether they have actually marshalled enough evidence as the microphone is placed before them.