Re: young orthodoxies
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sun, 19 Jul 1998 11:03:39 +1000
Although I could very easily just dismiss this post right off (as anyone
who knows me in my real life persona as a freedom fighter for teenagers)
but I don't want to. I don't think it's wholly productive to do so. Debate
is much more productive than outright dismissal and I'd like to toy with
some of the points raised here.
> `... that knows to value what young people do. And on this list
> and in Salinger's writing, if we don't learn to value the insights
> and experiences of youth, we may be wasting our time..'
>
> I'm sure that PLAY is an essential component of all artistic
> endeavour. And that when Goethe suggested that artists were
> people who, among other things, managed to perpetuate childhood,
> or at least adolescence, into adult life it was another way of
> saying the same thing.
I've thought a lot about this - the old `genius is childhood rediscovered
at will' portent. I wrote my first book when I was twelve, and my second at
sixteen (if the stars align correctly there'll be another this year). I
don't know whether these books were original, etc, but the people who have
read them have enjoyed them, which is the main thing to me. One thing I do
know is as I've gotten older I've found it exponentially more difficult to
be creative. As a child, people are practically forcing crayons and
cartridge paper into your little mitts going `create! create! create!'. But
this impulse is almost reversed in later childhood - originality is
downgraded to a perfunctory activity that only weirdos bother with. This is
really sad to me. When I used to be a drama teacher, it was the five to ten
year olds who would come up with the most amazing stuff. When I taught the
teenagers though, I found that 90% of the job was to unblock them - for the
simple reason that their society tells them : You are wrong. Creativity is
wrong. Originality is wrong. It's wrong to express yourself and be
different from the pack. Artists never make any money, why not go into
advertising instead?
> Yet - though I realise I'll win no popularity contest for saying so
> - young people themselves are surprisingly unoriginal. In youth,
> we tend to be terribly conventional in our thinking. It may have
> the spurious look of rebellion & defiance to our elders but it
> usually stays well within the confines of the current peer group
> fashion.
I've found this to be superficially true - but it is facile to assume the
old `peer group' explanation. I was a teenager not too long ago and I
certainly found over the past decade that the idea of the peer group is
disintergrating. Far less people are afraid to tell someone to fuck off if
need be. And in keeping with this, you don't have to dig very low under the
surface to find some startlingly original stuff - beautiful, emotional
things that no one else but the paper and pen will listen to. It usually
takes a little while to get them to reach into this level - to know that
no, it's not wrong to break the rules, unlike what every single school
teacher has told them; you're not writing an essay, don't censor yourself
... but when they do, some stuff has come out that has truly impressed me
with its depth and originality. And once it's out there, this gives them
the enthusiasm to let more out, which I think is incredibly important as
teenagers are given so few outlets today for the myriad pressures put on
them.
What I envy most about these kids is that they haven't learnt the rules
yet, so they often make them up themselves, which is really what every
writer should do. I spent an awful long time de-evolving - trying to get
back to that place where I wrote my first novel with such ease that I so
envy in my younger self. I often wish I could de-program myself of all the
rules and portents so I don't have to worry about them. Yet, as I'm
realising now, once you get over that plateau you reach a place where
technical mastery and emotional resonance meet, which (I think) I'm at now.
It was a long haul getting there though, but I think I've forgotten just
enough to really fly now.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest