In the previous post, I wrote about the main cause of my writer’s block, as far as scientific writing was concerned. But that was not the end of it — my parents continued to punish me for writing even as I switched to other topics.
Now, being beaten, locked out of the house, and threatened with disownment would probably have deterred most people from continuing to do the things that provoked those reactions in the first place. But the maltreatment I received at home was more than balanced by the acclaim I received outside. Everyone called me a genius and told me that this or that one of my essays was the most insightful thing they had ever read on whatever subject it was on, that I was the most talented writer they had ever met, that I should be published, and so on. People kept telling me that I should submit my writings to this magazine or that journal, but I couldn’t heed their suggestions. I had conflicting goals: on the one hand, like any author, I wanted to disseminate my writings, but on the other, I had to limit the probability that my parents would chance upon them. And this latter constraint took priority, because being caught would have meant being prevented from writing at all.
While I was punished mostly for writing about science, I also wrote about many other things. Whenever my father caught me writing, he would ask, “Is that for school?” — because by the time I entered high school he had caught on to the fact that most of what I wrote had nothing to do with any homework assignments whatsoever.
I could have just lied to him, but not only would that have been wrong, it would also have been a concession that I wasn’t willing to make. He always dismissed my writings as “nonsense”, “frivolous”, and a “waste of time”; and if I had justified them by lying about them being homework assignments which were required for school, it would have been as if I had conceded that they had no interior purpose for existing. But I felt that they had to be written — the topics were important and someone had to write about them. I was only the messenger, and if I didn’t write the things I wrote, somebody ought to do so anyway.
To deflect my parents’ harassment while I was writing, I founded the school’s literary magazine. Actually, the story of its founding is a little bit more convoluted than that; but that was one of my major motivations for being involved in it. The teachers had in fact been mulling over the idea of starting a literary magazine for the school for some time. The problem was that if the project was too closely associated with the teachers, then submissions would begin to look like schoolwork, and students would not be enthusiastic to make contributions. On the other hand, the material was clearly there. High school kids love to write — at least, that was true in my social circles. My schoolmates would write poems or short stories and pass them around to their friends, and a whole marketplace of exchanged writings existed outside of the essays and articles required for homework. I observed that many of my schoolmates were very creative, and that a lot of them channeled their creative energies into writing. While they would freely share the output of their labours with their close friends, they were somewhat more shy about opening up to a wider audience. I was the same way — except that I wasn’t shy.
I was extraordinarily lucky in that I was perfectly poised to be put in charge of the project. I had just edited the school’s handbook, a thin spiral-bound volume given to students at the beginning of each school year containing vital information about the school and that year’s school calendar. The previous edition was typewritten and photocopied, as were contemporary handbooks at other schools. I was hired to computerise everything: type in all the text, insert some graphics, and lay everything out using desktop publishing software. It paid pretty well for a summer job for a high school student, and the finished product looked very professional.
Nowadays everyone has access to colour laser printers and a dozen tools for electronic publishing, so a well-laid-out handbook physically imprinted onto the bleached remnants of dead trees might not seem so impressive; but at the time I used what was considered cutting-edge technology. In any case, the library staff and teachers with whom I worked were very pleased with the result.
To make a long story short, I became the founder and editor-in-chief of my high school’s literary magazine. I gathered a bunch of friends together to form an editorial committee, and we advertised for submissions in the English classes. After a long and arduous process of voting on the submissions — and we had far more than we could possibly print — and laying everything out nicely, the teachers booked us time at the school’s printing press. The editorial committee took a bus there, and it was exactly as you would imagine a printing press to be: big drums of paper unrolled and whipped through one machine after another, with more ink appearing on the pages with each pass. We got our hands dirty cutting papers with big industrial cutters and binding them together with giant staplers. The result was, I think, the envy of all the other high schools in the area.
The entire time that I was serving as editor-in-chief, I felt free to write whatever I wanted to at home. Whenever my father asked me, “Is that for school?”, I could reply quite honestly that it was “school-related”. Furthermore, if he continued to harass me, I could say, “Take it up with Ms. P—” — the English teacher who supervised the project. That is one of the tricks you eventually learn for coping with authoritarian parents: they will defer to another authority (under the right circumstances). I would have preferred to convince them that my writings were worthwhile based on their merit alone, but I had already discovered that this was impossible.
Most of what I wrote actually did not get published in the magazine. The subjects of many of my essays were simply inappropriate, and there was also the length restriction that we had to impose. Furthermore, I wanted to avoid the appearance of impropriety: since I was the editor-in-chief, people might complain about a conflict of interest if too many of my pieces appeared — even if they had been voted in fairly. I recognised that, even though I had only one vote just like everyone else on the editorial committee, as the editor-in-chief I was disproportionately influential. And finally, we had to submit to the censorship of the teachers, which was a necessity since it was a Catholic school.
Strangely, the censorship actually worked to the magazine’s advantage, even though one might think otherwise. Because the magazine would be read by parents, the teachers could not allow any submissions which dealt with themes deemed too controversial, and especially if they involved religion. Since I worked closely with the teachers, I knew that many of them were actually much more open-minded than most students imagined them to be; in fact, some of them would probably have loved some controversy. But in the end, between the editorial committee members who actually disliked the controversial submissions and those who merely voted them down on the assumption that they would never get pass the teachers anyway, the teachers’ veto turned out to be unnecessary. Of course, I was one of the students who had submitted controversial pieces (in fact, I think I probably submitted the most). Long before there was any actual voting, it had already become quite well-known that some of my own favourite submissions would not make the cut. This actually helped convince a lot of people who were not in my immediate social circles to submit their writings, because they could see that it was a fair process. Even the editor-in-chief couldn’t get his own favourite pieces published! So it wasn’t just some scam by me and my friends to make ourselves famous.
– davinci
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