Several years ago, I happened to walk into a room where the TV was playing and I heard Andy Rooney say something like this: “Writing is pretty special work — or I like to think it is anyway. The trouble with writing is you’re always working. I hate myself for it, but I’ll be at a party and I’ll hear someone express an interesting idea and I’ll think to myself ‘Gee I could use that.’”
So, of course, I wrote down what Rooney said.
And then a few minutes later, I heard Andy say, “You have to have an ego if you’re a writer, too; it’s egotistical to think that anyone else cares what you think and put down on paper. I have an ego, but it’s under control. I usually know when what I write isn’t any good. I try to avoid that, but I’m not always successful.”
So, of course I wrote that down, too, thinking someday it might become a column.
I have no idea what the context of Rooney’s lines was that night because I didn’t see the beginning of his five-minute talk. Perhaps he was talking about the broad subject of work. I don’t know. But the ideas expressed in those couple of lines struck me head-on. It was almost as if I’d uttered them myself. As a matter of fact, I have said almost the same things several times in print. I have friends who chide me whenever they say something: “Now, I don’t want to see that in your column!”
I’m in the habit of carrying a notebook almost everywhere I go, and I frequently write down ideas from what others say. (I’m not sure I’ll remember them otherwise.) And so in a sense I’m always writing, too.
And I’ve often thought how egotistical it is for me to think that someone (anyone) would be interested in what I put down on paper. And like Andy Rooney, I have a pretty sure sense of whether the stuff I’ve written is any good. Boy, that’s really egotistical, isn’t it?
I have a friend who frequently used an expression that I have often stolen. In evaluating a student’s performance, he’d sometimes say, “He has delusions of adequacy.” I often think about that whenever I write something. I puzzle over whether what I’ve composed is “adequate”; I’d always like it to be more than adequate, of course, but sometimes I’m forced to accept that that’s all it is — adequate.
When I was teaching and had to evaluate my students’ writing, it was always a challenge for me. It was one of the hardest parts of my job because it’s such a subjective exercise. It frequently happened that the papers I liked best were not necessarily the “best” papers in terms of their structure, usage and grammar. But perhaps the student had a clever or unusual viewpoint or a refreshingly different approach. And yet I was supposed to grade the stuff my students turned in. After all, that’s what teachers do, isn’t it? That put me in the position of perhaps bruising a delicate ego by placing some artificial standards on their creativity.
I usually solved that problem by allowing a “rewrite,” giving the kids some positive strokes for the stuff I liked best about the paper and suggesting some ways to make it more acceptable according to the standards of “standard formal English.” That was delicate stuff.
Now, when I write this column, I often do several rewrites before I submit it. And then I’m putting you in the role of judge. You get to decide whether it’s good or not based on your particular tastes.
But remember, my ego is showing. Please don’t bruise it!
