Tom Courage: What I learned about writing
My writing was certainly undistinguished at The Choate School, in Wallingford, Conn., as my teachers’ reports (which I still have) consistently indicate.
Mr. Gutterson revered E.B. White, and expected me to emulate the breezy, sophisticated froth of a New Yorker magazine “Talk of the Town’’ piece. Nothing could have been more ill-suited to my personality, as a foam-at-the-mouth head-first slide into home plate amidst a choking cloud of dirt is probably the best metaphor for my temperament.
In my term reports, Gutterson portrayed me as a student who combined awkward writing and earnestness. I must acknowledge in retrospect that I had achieved admirable fluency in all the cliches. One of my writing efforts is sufficient to illustrate this.
When I was about 13, my Greenwich, Conn., family moved from the Riverside section to Valley Road in the town’s Cos Cob section, on the shore of the Mianus River (above the dam, built by the power company to generate electricity for the New Haven Railroad ). One of the notable characters in our new neighborhood was an eccentric fellow everyone called Captain Horst, who collected stale bread from the bakeries and delivered it to residents up and down the river, to be fed to the swans.
My story was about Captain Horst, and more particularly about his arrest. Apparently he had been keeping goats in his living room, at odds with the strict dictates of the zoning ordinance of the Town of Greenwich.
Taken in the right direction, such a story might have been right up Mr. Gutterson’s alley.
Predictably, I took a different route, more along the “can’t we all be brothers?” pathway. In Mr. Gutterson’s eyes, I had taken a promising shiny nugget and transformed it into a lump of coal. It is easy to visualize Mr. Gutterson slapping his forehead. My report that term mentioned my steadfast (if boring) pursuit of values.
Mr. Lincoln set me on a different path. Precision was his thing. My writing became like a series of algebra equations. My conclusions followed inexorably from the antecedent text, while giving a wide berth to any ground that might have been considered new or interesting. I continued this approach through my college study of philosophy, and it actually worked quite well.
If there has been any improvement since Choate, I think that performing music was probably a factor. Tone and rhythm are essential elements of flowing prose, and music woke me up to that. Getting the right note is only a starting point; getting the tone and articulation just right is what requires the fullest attention. And just as rehearsing music over and over moves one ever closer to something acceptable, writing allows for endless editing, my favorite delay tactic (greatly abetted by the rise of computerized word processing). Nothing I have ever written would survive another reading without yet a further attempt to make it crisper, more incisive, funnier.
If I didn’t subject myself to the discipline of unyielding deadlines, I would have long since suffocated amidst piles of unreleased drafts.
All this assumes that there is something to explain, and I am not so sure about that. All I can really say, for what it is worth, is that what comes out is just the inevitable result of who I am and all that has happened to me along the way.
And the head-first slide remains a part of that.
Tom Courage, of Providence, is a retired lawyer.