Black Gate

What a book to assign to high school students! The plot plods, the characters wallow, the ending claims to be happy but is, in most readers’ experience, a huge downer. The book manifests many forms of excellence, too, but it’s simply the wrong book for high school, and it’s part of a canon of eat-your-brussels-sprouts literature that notoriously turns boys off from reading in general.

Fortunately, I have discovered a secret reading protocol that takes some of the sting out of Hawthorne.

American teenagers will probably be stuck with The Scarlet Letter for many generations to come, for several reasons. One good reason: It offers insights into both the Puritan world of its characters and the mid-nineteenth-century world of its author–it’s a sort of curricular three-for-one bargain. Another good reason: Nathaniel Hawthorne was an immensely important author, with an influence that galvanized both contemporaries like Poe and Melville and generations of authors since. (It bears noting that a small minority of readers actually like The Scarlet Letter. Maybe some of them will come visit our comment thread and offer other perspectives. That would be cool.) However, not all the biggest reasons are so, well, reasonable.

Crappy Reason 1: Everybody who trains for certification to teach high school English is required to write lesson plans for The Scarlet Letter, so they’ll have a unit to run with, no matter where in the country they get a job. This means when you study The Scarlet Letter, even if your teacher is a veteran by then, you may be  getting a unit s/he wrote as a college sophomore. The chicken-and-egg flipside of this phenomenon is that, because almost any certified English teacher has already been required to prepare a lesson plan for The Scarlet Letter, school districts regard it as safer to put on required reading lists than other classics that would require more fresh preparation on the part of their already overworked faculty.

Crappy Reason 2: If your poor English teacher had to suffer through The Scarlet Letter when s/he was in high school, and then again in college literature classes, and then a third time in education classes, that book may come to seem as inevitable as death and taxes. Cognitive dissonance may set in, too: I was made to suffer my way through preparing to teach this book, therefore the book must be appropriate and worthwhile to teach.

But you came here for my secret reading protocol, my survival plan, so let’s get on with that.

Read The Scarlet Letter as a failed fantasy novel.

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Last week I got so carried away with my enthusiasm for my favorite SF/F anthology to use with students, I had to break the post into two parts. You can find Part I over here.

When last we saw our intrepid writing teacher, she was doing a story-by-story breakdown of how she uses The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens, Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s brilliant but insufficiently lucrative 2005 attempt to launch a new Year’s Best annual series.

Then, in a stunning cliffhanger, a pack of Red Martians from the troublesome vassal city of Zodonga attempted to kidnap her and carry her back to Barsoom.

She tricked them into arguing about the necessity of the serial comma, and while they resolved the question by means of roaring bloodshed, she fled to the nearest cafe to gather her thoughts about teaching the following short stories:

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Oaths, vows, geasa, bindings–you love reading about that kind of thing, or you wouldn’t be here at Black Gate. A vow is powerful magic. A vow written or witnessed is more powerful still.

You would think, then, that the New Year’s resolutions that saturate our culture this time of year would work better than they do. There’s lots of help out there for people who make resolutions about physical fitness, but not so much for people who make resolutions about their writing. How do you come up with a writing resolution that you’ll be glad to fulfill, not just when it’s all over, but while you’re actually doing the work? If you’ve already made a resolution, how do you follow through on it? Maybe last year you tried the crazy ordeal that is Nanowrimo, and you’re looking for a way to tap into its productivity that is actually sustainable. Maybe Nanowrimo’s cheery cultishness turned you off, and you’re sure there must be another way.

There’s an abundance of other ways, thank goodness. Although I have fond memories of frenzied November write-ins, and my novella that’s slated to appear in a forthcoming issue of Black Gate got its start as the first chapter of a Nanowrimo project, my Nanowrimo survival skills are some of the least sustainable writing behaviors in my repertoire. I have some very different ones that have helped me stay in the game for years and finish some long, daunting projects. I want to tell you about some books on process that have been of enduring use to me in broadening that repertoire.

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