Writing the Range

In a fit of boredom, as we flipped through the cable channels looking for something new and/or interesting, we stumbled across the Hallmark Channel. Hey, Hallmark – how bad could one of their movies be? – and wound up watching “The Trail to Hope Rose”. The premise interested us for about twenty minutes, and then we realized that although whatever book it might have been based upon may have been a very good read, the movie was a bit of a painful watch. We stuck it out, just to see if any of our predictions made in that first fifteen minutes came true. (They did – all but the kindly old ranch-owner who befriended the hero being killed by the villainous mine-owner. He didn’t… but he was deceased by the end of the final reel.) It was just a generic western: generic location, generic baddies, card-board cut-out characters and a box-car load of generic 19th century props from some vast Hollywood movie warehouse of props and costumes used for every western movie since Stagecoach, hauled out of storage and dusted off, yet again.

It wasn’t a bad movie, just a profoundly mediocre one. Careless gaffes abounded, from the heroine’s loose and flowing hair, her costumes with zippers down the back and labels in the neckline, and the presence of barbed wire in 1850, when it wouldn’t be available in the Western US for another twenty-five years, neat stacks of canned goods (?), some jarringly 20th century turns of phrase… and where the heck in the West in 1850 was there a hard-rock mine and a cattle ranch in close proximity? Not to mention a mine-owner oppressing his workers in the best Gilded Age fashion by charging them for lodgings, fire wood and groceries, as if he had been taking lessons from the owners of Appalachian coal mines. It was as if there was no other place of work within hundreds and hundreds of miles – again, I wondered just where the hell this story was set. It passed muster with some viewers as a perfectly good western, but to me, none of it rang true. Whoever produced it just pulled random details out of their hat – presumably a ten-gallon one – and flung them up there. Hey, 19th century, American West; it’s all good and all pretty much the same, right?

Me, I’ve been getting increasingly picky. Generic, once-upon-a-time in the west doesn’t satisfy me any more, not since I began writing about the frontier myself. It seems to me that to write something true, something authentic about the western experience – you have to do what the creators of “The Trail to Hope Rose” didn’t bother to do; and that was to be specific about time and place. The trans-Mississippi West changed drastically over the sixty or seventy years, from the time that Americans began settling in various small outposts, or traveling across it in large numbers. And the West was not some generic all-purpose little place, where cattle ranches could be found next to gold mines, next to an Army fort, next to a vista of red sandstone, with a Mexican cantina just around the corner. No, there were very specific and distinct places, as different as they could be and still be on the same continent. 1880’s Tombstone is as different from Gold Rush era Sacramento, which is different again from Abilene in the cattle-boom years, nothing like Salt Lake City when the Mormons first settled there… and which is different again from Laura Ingalls’ Wilder’s small-town De Smet… or any other place that I could name, between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi-Missouri. Having writers and movie-makers blend them all together into one big muddy mid-19th century blur does no one any favors as far as telling new stories.

Being specific as to time and place opens up all kinds of possible stories and details. Such specificity has the virtue of being authentic or at least plausible and sometimes are even cracking good stories because of their very unlikelihood. For example, Oscar Wilde did a lecture tour of western towns. If I remember correctly, the topic of his lecture was something to do with aesthetics and interior decoration, and he performed wearing the full black-velvet knickerbockers suit with white lace collars. He was a wild success in such wild and roaring places as Leadville, Colorado, possibly because he could drink any of his audience under the table. Anyway, my point is, once you have a time and a place, then you can deal with all the local characters and the visitors who came to that town at that time, have a better handle on the technology in play at the time. Was the town on the railway, who were the people running the respectable businesses – and the unrespectable ones? Who were the local characters, the bad hats and the good guys, the eccentrics and the freaks? What was the local industry, and for how long – and if not long, what replaced it and under what circumstances? What did the scenery out-side town look like? Even such details as what were the main buildings in town made of and what did they look like, over the years can be telling. Where did the locals get their food from? Their mail? Who did the laundry – even! What kind of story can a writer make of a progression from canvas tents over wooden frames, from log huts and sod huts, to fine frame buildings filled with furniture and fittings brought at great expense from the east. I had all those questions while watching this movie – and I’ll probably have pretty much the same, if I ever watch another one like it. It would have been so much a better movie if someone had given a bit more thought and taken a little more care.

Above all, if a writer can be specific with those underpinnings, of time and place and keep the story congruent within that framework – than it seems to me that you can tell any sort of story, and likely a much more interesting and entertaining one. As near as I can judge from some of the western discussion groups and blogs, like this one, writers are moving in that direction. Eventually movie producers may move in that direction as well – supposedly “Deadwood” makes long strides in re-visualizing a more specific west.

But they will absolutely, positively have to get rid of those costumes for women with the very visible zippers down the back.

Standardized Writing

Lately, when I ask my fifth grade students to get out their materials for writing class, I hear terrible sounds. Groaning. Sighing. Slumping. (And if you don’t think slumping has a noise, then you haven’t been in a fifth grade classroom.)

It didn’t use to be that way. My students used to enjoy writing. Fifth grade is a fantastic grade to explore creative and stimulating writing projects. In the past, my students have written clever mysteries, ghoulish ghost stories, and fantasies modeled after their favorite novels. They have written fictional letters to relatives, pretending to be survivors of the Johnstown Flood in 1889. They have written journal entries in which they imagined themselves aboard ship with Columbus or Magellan. And they have written magazine articles in which their future selves were proclaimed Person of the Year for Time Magazine.

But that was before No Child Left Behind. That was in the heyday of imaginative cross-curricular projects, when a teacher could allow students to follow their interests and choose their own topics in an atmosphere of collaboration. That was before states enacted standardized testing models and determined exactly what students should be taught to write. After all, in this great nation, we wouldn’t want some students to learn one thing while others were learning something completely different.

On our state test, students are required to produce writing samples in two out of three eligible genres: a personal narrative, an expository essay, and a persuasive essay. This year, my school decided to combat mediocre writing scores with intensive instruction in these three types of composition. We began the year with six weeks of instruction on writing personal narratives. That was followed by six weeks of instruction on expository essays. The next six weeks? Persuasive essays, of course. What else could we do? This is what our state government says the students should be learning, and our school’s funding partly depends on good scores.
It doesn’t sound that bad, until you find yourself going into the third or fourth week of writing nothing but expository essays: Write an essay about your favorite season. Write an essay about your favorite sport. Write an essay about your favorite essay topic. Along about the fifth week of this—as I listened to the groans, the sighs, and the slumps—I realized I was killing any love of writing my students might have had. And there were seven or eight weeks of test preparation yet to go.

Since the standardized tests of NCLB have become the sole and unassailable assessment of all instruction in the nation, teachers have begun to lose their perspective. I admit it; we’ve gone a little crazy. I now hear colleagues talking about something called “the five paragraph story.” That’s right. Take your basic five paragraph essay, make a few adjustments, and train your students to write a story that fits right into this structure.
Paragraph one introduces the setting and the characters. The second paragraph reveals the problem. The third paragraph discusses various attempts to solve the problem, which is resolved in the fourth paragraph. The fifth paragraph sums everything up, possibly with a nice moral. Ready to teach voice and style? Just get the students to make one personal comment somewhere in the story, and add two similes and a metaphor. Ta-da! The standardized story. The Stepford Student story.

What about those fifth grade gems of the past with titles like The Beautiful Unicorn? The Alien Invasion? The Day I Woke Up and Switched Places With My Dog? I don’t know when I will get to read stories like those again.
I miss them.

And I wonder—who will be the writers of tomorrow after we have standardized the fledgling authors of today?

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