Bad Kids in the News

Bad kids get all the attention.

When I was a teenager, I used to cringe at the evening news. Undoubtedly, there would be some report about a kid who snuck a knife into school or who beat up a cop or made an ass of himself drinking in public or, in one terrible example, a kid who killed a classmate.

Sadly, not much has changed.

I’ve spent two weeks trying to get press attention for my little writers, to no avail. I tried last summer, too. I have a room full of teenagers who, of their own accord, have decided to spend their hard-earned breaks dong something really cool, really positive, and really unusual. Call me crazy, but I think its newsworthy.

Unfortunately, the media doesn’t think it’s such a big deal. Why should we waste our time lavishing praise on kids who go above and beyond their summer reading lists to create their own novels when there are perfectly good stories of young people running amok?

I’ll tell you exactly why: fear sells.

America could be a place where the most industrious among us are showered with attention. Instead, it’s easier to scare the crap out of people in order to convince them to watch your tv show, buy your product, or like you. In fact, this blog will get more hits because of the negative title than it would have if I’d named it, “Why America Should Care About High-Achievers.”

And I don’t say this half-cocked from some anecdotal place of naivety. In a former life, I was a news producer at WKRN News 2 in Nashville. I spent my working hours reading the AP wire, listening to the police scanner, and deciding which news was worthy enough for broadcast. Every day, I overlooked interesting, motivational, and truly amazing stories in favor of one-alarm fires that were easily contained, nearly harmful assaults, and other non-news. I’m lucky to live in a relatively safe city, but safety doesn’t make for thrilling promotional bumps.

Based on the following promos, which newscast would you be more inclined to watch: “A man is rushed to the emergency room after a neighbor’s dog escapes, tonight at 10,” or, “Forty teenagers aren’t just reading books this summer, they’re writing them!”

You may be thinking, “Oh, man, I wonder if they’ll show pictures of a dog attack?” or you’re wondering if the escaped dog is a poodle or a Pitt-bull. Or if the two events – the emergency room visit and the missing mutt – are even related.

Or, if you’re like me, you may think, “who cares about someone’s minor injury? If it was major, they would have said “Dog kills local man, tonight after our latest irrelevant reality show.”

Tell me about these kids who live right here in my town and who are doing something to change the world. Give me something I can aspire to myself, teach me how to be a better version of myself, and give me a reason to keep on improving.

And don’t tell me inspiration doesn’t sell. Don’t we watch American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and Project Runway in record numbers?

If one of my students leapt out of her seat right now and threatened to stab me with her mechanical pencil, that would make the news for sure. Maybe the solution is staring me in the face. Perhaps I should unleash my students’ brilliantly creative minds on the problem and see what they propose!

And we wonder why kids feel ignored. At some point, our culture has to agree that there are better ways to get attention than being drunk and from New Jersey, or being rich, married, and staying home in Atlanta. We need to stop paying lip-service to education, and start paying attention to kids who are actually using their brains to some productive end.

Are You a Novelist?

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten – happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”
Brenda Ueland

Every morning when I wake up, I lie in bed reading my email on my iPhone.  It’s a gentle way for me to take stock of what’s on my schedule, put out any immediate fires, and get a chuckle from the silly things my friends and students send to me in the middle of the night. 

This morning, I woke up to a really uncomfortable email.  A parent of an ANI alumna asked to be removed from my mailing list and told me that she wouldn’t be recommending the program because she didn’t think that everyone who puts a volume of words on a page should be called a novelist. 

My heart wrenched and my stomach twisted into a knot. 

I was offended, hurt, angry: a festering boil of emotion.  Immediately, I thought of all the painting classes, piano lessons, baseball leagues, swimming lessons, dance classes, and any number of enrichment activities that kids participate in.  Do we not call our little painters artists?  Our little sluggers baseball players?  Our little dancers ballerinas?  My students didn’t write 50,000 word grocery lists, they wrote stories with beginnings, middles and ends.  They wrote novels and so deserve the title novelist.  They’re not professionals, sure, but who cares?  And does that really matter?

And then I started thinking of all the novelists whose books weren’t published before they died.  Was John Kennedy Toole not a novelist?  What about Steig Larssen?  Anne Frank?  Just schmucks with pens, I guess, because they were just writing a volume of words. And on that note, I suppose Emily Dickenson wasn’t a poet, either.  I had to take a deep breath and walk away from the computer so I wouldn’t reply in true hot-tempered, redheaded fashion.

ANI is not only my business, it’s my passion.  And I believe so whole-heartedly in what I’m doing – in what my students are doing – that I’ve bet my life on it.  I quit my job, invested my savings, and I devote more time than I probably should teaching kids the value of the written word.  Of THEIR written words.

Throughout my journey as an educator, I’ve come up against many people who think my ideas and practices are too hard on kids.  I ask too much, I expect too much, I prod too much.  I’m a too-much person.  And I don’t disagree with them.  But my kids, they rise to the occasion.  And even the parents of students who don’t finish their novels tell me their kids’ confidence with words is better, their grades improve, and they stress less about assignments.

But what most of my detractors don’t realize about what I do in the classroom is how I support my students outside the classroom.  I make myself 100% available to them all day, every day.  Even when I was teaching composition to college freshmen and juniors, I gave out my personal phone number and email address.  These days, I respond to 3:00am text messages from overwhelmed kids, plot and plan their novels with them, I give them challenges, pep-talks, moral support, high-fives, stern looks, and hugs every single day.  I love them like I love my own children, and I make myself just as available to them after the program ends as I did during their time with me in the classroom.  I even listen to them when they need a safe place to talk about a divorce or a death or a difficult decision.  How many teachers can say that?

I think the personal attention I pay each student is why my feelings were so hurt by this parent’s email today.  In fact, this particular student was someone for whom I went above and beyond my usual role of muse-mentor-coach-friend-teacher-guide-confessor.  I just can’t imagine not wanting to celebrate the achievements of young writers, especially a young writer who happens to be your child. 

When I was in the sixth grade, I went to an awards ceremony for a program called Writers’ Showcase.  It was a personal project of a wealthy Nashvillian who created a writing competition open to all Nashville students and awarded cash prizes for the best examples of writing in many categories and age levels.  I participated every year, and worked at winning like I now work at making a living.

This particular year, an author handed out the awards.  He asked us all to stand and repeat together, “I am a writer.”  He called us peers.  He said our words were now published in the little Writers’ Showcase anthology and that we had been paid for our work.  We were professional writers, and we should be proud of ourselves.  I cried. My mom cried.  It changed my life.

From that experience, and others like it, I developed my curriculum.  I spent years teaching college students, I spent summers teaching reading and writing development to preschoolers, grade-school students, and adults.  I honed my people skills, earned advanced degrees in creative writing and kept current on educational best practices. 

What I found in the process was astounding.

Each year in my classroom, students’ test scores went up, but their ability to express themselves in writing deteriorated.  Their confidence with the written word was damaged because their exposure to writing was limited to short projects that got shorter and fewer each year.  The last year I taught, one of my best writers told me he’d never written anything longer than 1,000 words during his entire career in school. 

My anecdotal observations were backed up by science, too.  While nationally, SAT scores are on the rise, SAT Writing scores are suffering a decline.  I wondered if perhaps I could apply the theory of immersion language-learning to writing.  If I gave students an opportunity to write volumes and volumes of words, would they start to self-correct their errors?  Would they seek out rule of grammar they may not have ever encountered?  Could I teach them how to write first and edit later?  And would their fear of writing start to wither and die without the constant pressure of grades, anxiety of red-pen mark-ups, and comparative forms of achievement that our test-obsessed culture imposes?

The short answer is yes.

Yes, they do write better at the end of a month-long writing-intensive program.  Yes, they do ask many questions about grammar, usage, and punctuation.  Yes, they do increase their vocabularies.  And more importantly, they gain a confidence with their own use of language.  They become fluent communicators.

And beyond the tangible academic achievement, my students learn to reach out for help.  They learn to make an allies of their teachers.  They learn to ask questions, to research, to manage a big project and see it through to the end.  They learn to be self-starters and self-motivators and self-congratulators.  They also start to see school writing assignments as opportunities to flex their writing muscles.  And instead of writing the minimum required number of words, they write until the project, assignment, or paper has reached its logical ending, wherever that may be.

This is the real Novel Idea: my students learn to trust themselves.  They learn to trust each other.  And they learn that they’re not alone out there in the world, in a cabin in the woods, scribbling in the dark.  The world is full of awkward teenagers struggling to make sense of their adolescence, and writing about those struggles has to be one of the healthiest ways a person can cope with their life. 

Last summer, one parent raced toward me with open arms and hugged me just a little bit too long.  She told me her daughter had struggled with self-mutilation, but since learning to write long-form fiction and giving herself permission to call herself a novelist, she’d stopped cutting.

That’s enough for me. 

Sporty kids have a million opportunities to be part of a group and develop their athleticism.  Social kids have even more opportunities to get together and share experiences.  Arty kids can find classes galore where they can try out pottery and sculpture and painting and photography and mixed media or whatever their arty hearts desire.  But nerdy writer-types, we get the shaft.  We’re the oddballs in class, the weirdoes in the hallways, and the geeks waiting for the next ComicCon.  I’m not apologetic about creating a program where kids who love words can learn to turn those ideas into a novel.  Because watching them learn the parts of a book, and then using those lessons to create the structure, the outline, the shape of their own stories is like watching children discover lightning bugs.  Their wonder is overwhelming.

Giving kids permission to see their struggles as part of a story – part of their story – is a gift I’m happy to give over and over again.  Even if you don’t like what I call them.

 

What would you say to this parent?  Do you agree with her assessment that calling everybody who “writes a volume of words should not be called a novelist?”

Anxiety: The American Crisis

ANI Authors Olivia Laskowski and Blake Bouza with novels written by ANI students in 2011.

I’ve been out of commission lately as an educator and a writer.  Life took over with a tough pregnancy and an early baby, and some delayed marketing efforts made my summer teaching load a lot smaller than I had hoped it would be.  And generally, all this upheaval and disarray would lead me to a state of unequivocal anxiety, set to reach a fevered pitch about a week before my July classes begin.  I know this because I know myself, and I know how I operate.

But I’m not anxious.  I’m shockingly calm.  Almost zen about the situation in fact.  Call it new-mama-bliss or the confidence of finally knowing what I’m doing with my life, but I’m not on a path to self-destruction.

This morning, however, I was met with two  major challenges of the anxious type.  The first was an email from a dear and precious student of mine who was struggling with his own self-effacing guilt over being plagued with writer’s block.  He was ashamed of himself, felt boxed in by his lack of ideas, and was generally desperate for relief.  The second was a phone call from a mother whose son, new to ANI, was facing a similar roadblock.  He was so wrapped up in creating the perfect character that he hadn’t written a word.  He was worried that he had let me down, that I would be angry with him, and the paralyzing fear kept him from being able to break free from his anxiety.

When I got to school this morning, neither boy had arrived yet.  And I thought about those anxious years of my life – indeed, most of my life – and what managed to help.  The only thing – besides writing furiously – that ever pushed the anxiety from my body was a complete and total meltdown.  And I sure didn’t want that to happen.

When my anxious alumni showed up, he was already calmed down.  He’d stayed up until 2:30 writing like a maniac and had over 6,000 words to show for it.  He plugged in his computer and got right to work, banging out another 1,200 words before he took a break.

Shortly thereafter, my anxious newbie arrived.  He was literally knotted with anxiety.  His brow furrowed and he was shaking tapping his pen against his leg while he paced outside the classroom door.  He didn’t show any signs of coming in and sitting down next to the others who were happily typing away at tables and in corners of the room.  Lucky for me, Abintra’s campus has acres of gardens and walking trails. I grabbed my water bottle and went for a little walk with him.

I talked and he listened but his body language didn’t change.  I stopped to smell a particularly impressive rose bush, and he paced back and forth waiting for me.  Twenty minutes later he was still wound just as tightly.  Even introducing him to my alumnus didn’t help.

And then, I thought perhaps a task would do the trick.  “Okay, who’s ready for a word-count challenge?” Many hands shot into the air, but he hid  his face in his crossed arms.  “Okay, everybody decide what your character’s favorite color is.  Got it?  Okay, now he or she sees something that color.  Describe it.  Write 350 words in 20 minutes.  Go!”

And I guess that’s what he needed.  Because for twenty precious minutes he let go and he wrote.  He left the apprehension and guilt and self-doubt in the dust and he embraced the excitement of a new story, a new person, a new discovery.  He allowed himself to escape himself, and in the process, he stopped fretting.

But after 20 minutes was up and he’d finished the challenge, I saw the worry start to creep in again.  He sat quietly by himself and ate a turkey sandwich and looked at the clock while he folded his arms and shook his foot.  His character had hit a quiet place.  And he didn’t know what would happen next.

And that’s the crisis I see in my students and in Americans in general.  The biggest problem they face isn’t the writing or the imagining – all children have creativity in spades – it’s being alone with themselves.  They’re so used to being entertained, posting on Facebook, tweeting, texting, studying for tests, checking tasks off their lists, and being graded that they’ve forgotten how to just be.  Be still.  Be alone with their thoughts without reality tv creeping in or feeling the urge to tweet.

I assign all of my students at least two hours of thinking homework each week.  I ask them to just be quiet.  Stare into space.  Think about stuff.  And stay awake to the world around them.  It’s often the hardest homework they have to do, even harder than writing 1,000, 2,000, or 7,000 words a day.

Being quiet and alert is a problem I never worried about as a child.  I spent hours in my tree-house, swinging on a tire swing, or hiding in the forest.  The thinking was the thing – being alone with my own thoughts has been a central and important part of my intellectual development.  And when I haven’t had enough alone time, I can feel my skin starting to crawl.  I feel like a radio antenna receiving too many signals at once and I have to run away, clear the clutter from my head, and find the quiet.  I usually do that by clicking the keys on my computer.  Or having a complete and total meltdown.  Both are physical releases, the purging of thoughts either by writing or by crying.

As I write this, my anxious newbie is outside, writing about the trees in the upper garden.  He’s working on another 20-minute challenge, and I’m hoping for another 20-minute escape from the anxiety for him.  And for the rest of the anxiety-riddled youth in this country, I wish I could find a way to lay a calming hand on their shoulders and say, “it is enough to just be.  Enough to just breathe.”  And maybe, if they have a pen handy, enough just to write.

Solution for Generational Warfare: Empathy

I have horrible neighbors.  They’re crabby, they complain loudly about completely irrelevant things – like my friends parking their cars on the street when they come to visit – and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get a smile out of them.  They’re older than my parents, and there’s a soft spot in my heart for older people.  I miss my grandparents, and I’m always searching for positive older influences for my boys.  How I’d love for them to have a sweet elderly neighbor that they could go visit every now and again.  These are not those neighbors.  My husband says, “to hell with those old coots!  What are they going to do to us?  We own the house next door!”

While it’s true that they can’t fire me or call my landlord to complain (I’m the landlord!) or force me to move out, it bothers me tremendously that the people who share a property boundary with me find my family so incredibly distasteful.  They sneer at my children when they run and chase each other in the back yard (their house sits on a hill and overlooks our property), they talk loudly about how our dog is a nuisance (she’s a 3-pound Yorkshire Terrier we rescued after the flood), they leave copies of the Association’s by-laws in our mailbox with sections highlighted and sticky notes that say, “just making sure you have a copy of this.”

I wrote them a very long and passionate letter about how we’re good, honest, hard-working people who happen to have two toddlers and another baby on the way.  I told them I envied their lovely lawn and their retirement time and how one day I hoped my property looked as tidy and well-groomed as theirs does.  Then I reminded them that everyone they know is fighting a hard battle and asked for their kindness and respect.  In the letter, I told him that I feel out of sorts, and I feel oppressed, and I feel so sad that I can’t make them empathize with my situation, however silly they think it might be.

They called an “emergency HOA meeting” in response.  Oh, my neighbor is the VP of the HoA. He’s proposed imposing fines for street-parking, excessive  noise, and pets “not under the control of their owners.”

This left me thinking about something I heard on a political talking-heads show.  “If you’re going to engage in generational warfare,” the pundit said, “you’d better side with the generation that always votes.”

I think my neighbor assumes I won’t come to the meeting.  He assumes I won’t be searching out every single swing set in the neighborhood and making sure every family under 60 shows up.  He assumes that because I’m young and busy that he can push me around simply because he’s older, he has a position on the board, and he shows up.  Well, he’s wrong.  If I’ve learned anything from my students, it’s that when you kick a hive, you get a swarm.  And he’s kicked my hive one too many times.

I’ve been driving around in the boat of a minivan that makes me feel bloated just dreaming up ways to dismantle the HoA by-laws, and I have a pretty good argument put together.  I’ve also been fantasizing about what kind of HoA-approved shenanigans would get the better of that old goat.  I’m really a fan of letting my husband’s Appalachian roots show for a few weeks.

And this morning, while I was sitting in a restaurant having breakfast with my two-year-old, it hit me.  I feel like a teenager all over again.  I feel like that mean old seventh-grade math teacher – Mr. So-and-so, the one with the permanent scowl and impossible temperament – is out to get me once again.  Or I feel like I did when the pack of popular kids decided to throw dog-food at me n the hallway during my freshman year.  I feel trapped, just like I did when I was in middle and high school.  I couldn’t change schools, couldn’t change teachers, had no control over my own daily schedule, and I had to live my day side-by-side with people who I felt hated my guts for no rational reason.

Being the pleaser that I am, I tried all sorts of things to get those hateful people to like me.  I showed up to school with cookies for mean teachers.  I volunteered to do homework for cruel popular kids.  I was even more miserable when my attempts to make peace were ignored, ridiculed, or used against me.  It made me feel hopeless and powerless.  So instead of standing up for myself, I retreated into myself, into my journals, into my writing.

Those terrible experiences made me the reflective, kind, empathetic person I am today.  They also steeled my spine against people who might act in a cruel way toward my own children.  And while I tried the nice way – cookies and friendly gestures, and a well-written letter, now it’s time to get my dukes up.

As I was leaving that restaurant with my little boy this morning, a group of WWII veterans stopped to say hello to him.  He shook their hands and said, “Oh, hi!” to each of them.  They were delighted.  They cooed over him, patted his head, and commented about how he was “cute as a bug.”  One old guy in a US Navy ball cap with the name of his ship embroidered on it pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket and handed my son a dollar bill.

“OH!” he said, “Dink you!”

The old guy patted his head and said, “now don’t you spend that all in one place.”  Then he turned to me and said, “I’ve had a tough morning, but that little fella sure did cheer me up.”

My heart melted.  I missed my own grandparents, of course.  My granddad was a Navy man aboard the USS Fessenden during WWII.  But more than that, I felt so angry that I couldn’t replace my jerk neighbors with these sweet old people.  If empathy is the lubricant that keeps the generations happily coexisting among each other, why is it so difficult for some people to muster?  How can it be so hard for my neighbor to remember back to a time when his life was just beginning, when his children were young and his days were filled with worries and errands and bills.  How is so hard for some people to find kindness for those right next door?

I just hope my kids aren’t missing out.  I’d love for them to have a neighborhood where they’re appreciated for the charming, smart, delightful young men they are.  Generational warfare serves nobody.  But a pat on the head, a dollar in the pocket, and a hug from a little boy can turn a dreary day around.

A Literary Promise and A New Baby!

New Baby House is on the Way!

August 31, 2011, 3:02pm – I make this promise:  I will finish Ruby’s story before March 1st, 2012.

“Nice,” you may say.  “Who cares?  You haven’t finished her story in 17 years, what’s another year?”

You probbaly didn’t say that.  And if you didn’t, thank you.  That’s Mildred speaking, my inner editor.  She’s a doozy, that Mildred.  And though I try to follow my own advice every day about imagining her inside a giant Monty-Python style catapult and launching her into the stratosphere, she’s one tenacious octogenarian.  She keeps coming back for more nasty down-with-Kristen talk.

And I have a secret: Mildred is calling for reinforcements.

A baby, to be specific.

Little did I know that right about the time that Ruby started telling me her story, I was growing another story.  The story of my new baby, who is due to be born on March 19th.

Oh, how excited I am!  Baby socks and baby clothes and tiny poems about tiny baby fingers!  Late nights and early mornings with milky breath on my cheek.  Long walks in the pram, yards of white linen pressed into pleats around the bassinet, twirling tiny wisps of hair between my fingers.

And no time to write about Ruby.

So March 19th, or whenever new Baby House decides to arrive, will be baby time.

And until then, Ruby, it’s all about you, baby girl.

Here’s how we start, just as I tell my students.

1.  Outline.  I have pages and pages of Ruby’s story outlined.  I’ve poured over the details just long enough to start changing them.  That’s a key indicator that it’s time to crack into prose-writing.

2.  Back-stories.  I have motivations and histories for all of my main characters crafted and completed.  Even if I never touch them, it’s proof to my own doubting nature that I know my characters inside and out.

3.  The promise.  If I say it out loud, I’m going to hold myself to it.  And there may be a fair amount of guilt and nagging from my husband and my mother and my writerly friends.  I welcome it.  And so does Ruby.

Strangely, my first chapters won’t be the first chapters in the book.  Those first pages are far too important and too delicate to bludgeon with my first prose attempts in this novel.  The first pages call for a light hand and strong, present voice of a character who has lived and breathed for quite some time.  I’ll start in medias res, in the middle of the story, and work my way outward to the ends.

And the most important part of getting Ruby written is to write every day.  To write madly as if my hair were on fire.  To write as if this story is the last one I’ll ever tell.  To write as if today is the last chance to redeem my word-starved soul.

Because it is.

Now off to write.

Missing: Lost and Found

August 4th was my grandmother’s birthday. She would have been 85 today had she not passed away nearly three years ago. And I find myself struggling again today, wishing I could just pick up the phone.

But that’s where life is right now – in flux. I have been kept from my own writing by circumstance and by my own body – so worn out and exhausted that it demands I sleep. But I can’t sleep. And I can’t write. And despite my best efforts to launch my inner editors, quash my worries, and focus on restorative decisions that make me feel happy, I’m left staring at walls.

My husband is away on business, and the kids spent the night with my mom last night. I had several hours to myself in my own pretty house. A meatloaf cooled on the stovetop. I watched an Elizabethan film that my husband would have instantly vetoed. I mopped the kitchen floor without two wild boys running through the clean, smudging the shine. And as I was washing the dishes at my sink, there she was. My Mammy. Or her memory, at least.

I hadn’t realized her birthday was right around the corner. Or at least, I hadn’t said it out loud. And I’m fairly certain that her presence was triggered earlier in the evening by a giant smudge on my living room wall where Shephard, who had been standing in time-out for ages, had wiped a long, spaghetti-colored handprint. I found some Pine Sol and a paper towel and scrubbed it and realized I was “warshing walls” as she would have said.

It did not escape me either, in my night of solitude and rest, that my grandmother was never alone. And rarely rested. Her evenings were spent watching the news or a movie, but she always had sewing in her lap. If she sat at the table with a cup of black coffee, she had a pen and paper handy to make a list of things to do that day. If she shopped, it was with a purpose. And a budget. And I was being positively indulgent last night.

It also does not escape me that Ruby, the character in the book I haven’t been working on, talks as my grandmother might have spoken when she was a teenager in Lebanon, Kentucky. They’re like bookends to me now – a child and an old woman – both specters who haunt me, relentless in their urging. Mammy who never tired. And Ruby who has never had her story told.

Had my grandmother been a writer, she probably would have published hundreds of books, applying her unflagging work ethic to the art and the craft of word-smithing. And if Ruby were a wall to warsh, I would have done it already.

But she’s not. She’s a story. And I’m just so tired that I worry I don’t know where to start.

I wish I could pick up the phone and call my grandmother. I’d ask her about how her old Kentucky Home smelled at the start of springtime, when Ruby’s story starts. I’d have her tell me about walking and riding a bicycle around town. I’d ask her to tell me about someone in town she didn’t trust. Or didn’t like. I’d have her tell me what her mama used to to cook for supper on Saturday nights.

It seems incredibly cruel that when someone dear passes away, not only do you lose their physical bodies, but also their phone numbers, their birthday cards, their reassurances. Somewhere, it seems to me, there should be a consolation prize for loss. A once-per year phone call from Heaven where she could say something, anything. I’d settle for a chiding reproach about why I don’t call more often.

To Ruby, I’ll start writing soon, girl. I promise.

And to Mammy, Happy Birthday, you old thing.

Our Antagonists are our Helpers

“He who struggles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.” -Edmund Burke

Today in class I’m teaching my young novelists how to write effective antagonists. It’s a challenge for young writers. They have a tendency to write good vs. bad. Black and white. Right and wrong.

But what I tell them is that the best antagonists have humanizing motives. Antagonists in our real lives are rarely madmen hell-bent on ruining our lives for no more reason than to see the pleading and fear in our eyes. Monsters in the real world do those awful things we fear. But they do them for a reason.

I keep returning to the awful shootings in Norway this past week. The shooter took out dozens of people in a drug-fueled rage in keeping with a racist diatribe he’d written and published on the Internet.

But why? He wanted to address the media. He wanted more attention for his crazy ideas. And he was afraid that if he didn’t take extreme action, his country would fall victim to anti-Norwegian sentiment. He didn’t just wake up one morning and decide, out of the blue, to go on a rampage. He had a motivation, as all antagonists do.

Now, do I endorse this action? Of course not. But if I were writing an antagonist who was a fictional version of this real-life boogey man, I’d have to spend some time working on his fears. Figuring out his motivations. Making him somewhat sympathetic. Luckily, I don’t want to write a story about this wack-job. Because the more we know about a person, the more likely we are to empathize with them. And honestly, I’d like to go on forever without empathy for this guy.

Of course, I didn’t use this example with my students. But I have been thinking a lot lately about how the antagonists in my own life – often my own fears and worries – sharpen my skill. Theoretically, when I’m faced with a problem that seems insurmountable, I sit down and figure it out. At least, that’s what my protagonists do.

But in reality, before I can figure anything out, I need to freak. Totally and hopelessly. I need to identify the worst case scenario and convince myself that it will happen. I need to alienate my band of loyal and loving companions and stare into the abyss alone. I need to convince myself that I will fail miserably.

Because my antagonist is never just the external bad guy. My real antagonist is myself.

Yesterday, I had a high-noon showdown with myself. I’d made two of my favorite people cry, I could feel the panic setting in, and I knew my own personal duel was just around the corner. In the past, I might have let my antagonist have the upper hand. If I can get myself really hysterical, I have a much better chance of being defeated by the demons within.

But yesterday, circumstances forced me to be even and calm all day. And when I found myself battling with all sorts of phantoms (a hospital administrator, my mother, my husband, a newspaper reporter, the mail lady), I grabbed my pen and started writing.

There on the page before me was the real battle I’d been avoiding all day. Me vs. Me.

And you know what? After much struggling and internal wrestling, I won. No, not the monsters in dark places me. The protagonist me. The one who wanted a plan and needed to be sharper and stronger and better for the big mountain climbing expedition I have ahead of me.

And knowing these challenges are setting me along a path to be better for myself, better for my family,and better for my students is a giant weight off my shoulders.

Thanks, antagonist.