A student in one of my first-year writing classes wrote an essay on the debate
between PC and console gaming, and a damned good essay it was. It wasn’t a typical essay, though: he cited
the advantages and disadvantages of each argument before explaining how
ridiculous it was to argue these differences at all, and ended with a page
full of happy gaming memories playing Call of Duty on couches with friends and
trying to beat the original Super Mario Bros. on his grandmother’s old tube TV. It’s not
about asserting one platform’s superiority, these anecdotes implied, but about
the fun you have playing the game.
“So, I didn’t really get which side you were on,” a girl in
our peer conference admitted. “Do you
prefer PCs, or consoles?”
There were four of us in the classroom, the student who’d
written the essay, his two groupmates, and me, the teacher running the
show. The other girl in the group
admitted to knowing nothing about video games and also being confused about
what the writer’s opinion was, having completely missed the significance
of the happy gaming memories. This
placed me in an awkward position as the authority figure: if I felt the
original ending forged a moment of great significance, but others had missed
its meaning entirely, could the ending be considered effective?
I slouched in my plastic chairdesk and looked at the ending
again: it was poignant, well-written, and evocative, while never quite spelling
out in an obvious manner what the writer wanted to say—he was more subtle than
that. Still, two out of three readers
had weighed in with their confusion.
“As a writer,” I began when it came my moment to speak, “you
have to consider your audience. Every
reader reads differently, and every reader will pick up different aspects of a
piece depending on their experiences. If
something you’re trying to say isn’t coming across to two-thirds of the group [and
here I let hang the unspoken implication that this was a very large percentage]
then you might want to think about stating your point more clearly.”
And that was all—we then moved on to an essay about
Christian stereotypes.
All day I thought about what I’d said, how I’d encouraged
this young writer who’d written a damned good essay to compromise his vision
because two classmates who’d never played a video game and had probably skimmed
the essay the night before didn’t understand it. The ending was valuable for its subtlety—it
had made readers realize for themselves how ridiculous the PC-console debate
was—and here I was, an authority figure who held the power to grant this
student a letter grade telling him to bow to the whims of a few readers he
wasn’t even reaching out to. I hadn’t
said this directly, but I’d pressured him to follow the mainstream—to do what
everyone else wanted.
So I wrote the student an e-mail. It was a medium-length e-mail, sent late at
night, with a sincerity I hadn’t shown in the classroom fourteen hours
before. It said that he’d received some
opinions from his readers, but that only he, the writer, could decide how valuable
these opinions were. Did he want to
write an essay that spelled things out in simple terms, or did he want his
readers to think for themselves? It was a
choice he had to make.
I felt a lot better after writing that, and the student did
too—he replied saying he was glad to hear I’d liked his original ending, and
that now that he had my approval he planned on keeping it. It was a victory for artists and independent
thinkers everywhere.
I wonder now, though, what kind of path I’d set him on, and whether
he was prepared to face the challenges of arguing for what you know is right
despite the put-downs of the majority. I
think about this path and how difficult it is, how many nagging voices come at
us from groupmates and authority figures, how often these people tell us what
we’re doing isn’t working or is just plain wrong. I think about how sticking to an unpopular
vision is one of the most difficult choices in the world to make, but it’s
where great art comes from, because the ideas that get remembered are always
the ones that break free from the mainstream.
Fuck if it isn’t a difficult struggle, though.
