Category: Creative Writing

The Oxford comma and I have a complicated relationship.

I have no quarrel with the comma itself—it’s often a leisurely, much-needed pause in an otherwise long and droning serial. 

On the other hand, well—it’s not A.P. style.

Throughout my academic career, throughout every piece of writing I’ve scribbled and submitted on a whim, I can say with certainty that I never cracked a style book. Never did it cross my mind to find out how to properly refer to senators, nor the best abbreviation for the states of the union. I didn’t know that “internet” only recently lost its capital I in the eyes of the A.P., and I didn’t care about the superiority of “OK” over “okay.”

Perhaps the persnickety details of one style guide aren’t enough to paint a convincing picture, but the point remains: I have long worked under the fatal assumption that creative writers don’t give a damn about the rules. 

I’d read enough “experimental” writing—funky spacing, out-there poetry and bad-on-purpose-but-you-just-don’t-get-it prose—that I assumed creative writers (myself, of course, ranking squarely among them) reached down into their subconscious and produced a fully-formed, Pulitzer-winning first draft on command.

I thought that creative writing was a high art reserved for those born with arms long enough to reach it. I was, in a word, insufferable.

More slowly than I’d like, but with a finality I’ve never experienced before, I believe that I have finally begun to mature as a writer. Call it peach fuzz or that first bullseye zit between my eyes, but something’s there. 

To be a student of English and a creative writer at the same time is a bit of a contradiction—to study authorities on writing while writing with one’s own authority seems like a misplaced bout of hubris. However, the truth and value to the study of creative writing is exactly that—it’s a process, it’s a contradiction and it’s the only way to find out who I am as a writer and a person.

The Pablo Picasso quote goes like this: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” Echoed by the likes of Alexander McQueen and the Dalai Lama XIV, this revelation is like any other equivalent college-age epiphany—though one can hear it ad nauseam, it’s only learned and internalized through experience

For me, it began with A.P. style.  

This year marks my third with the student newspaper at Fordham Lincoln Center, The Observer. This time two years ago, I submitted my first piece to the paper, expecting to never hear back from them. Instead, I got a Google Doc full of edits—and a saccharine note at the bottom encouraging me to “Keep writing!” 

I hated it. People telling me that “this might work better” were purely critics to me—not individuals with my best interests in mind. I cringed at every last “lil awk” commented offhand on a compound sentence gone awry. 

Every writer needs someone to tell them that their stuff is trash sometimes. When that someone gets to the heart of your writing—of you—and explains what can be improved, everything grows. The writer, the editor and the piece itself, I found, were beneficiaries of this process. 

Slowly but surely, I worked through those edits. I tuned my voice, sharpened my focus and deleted every last one of those infernal Oxford commas. 

I stuck with The Observer, becoming an editor myself. Then, I became Editor-in-Chief.

My new role is tougher than I ever expected. The idiom “herding cats,” when applied to 37 unpaid members of a biweekly newspaper staff, has become my favorite turn of phrase. My week invariably involves poring over 40 or so pieces of student journalism—op-eds, theater reviews and administrative exposés among them—and ensuring they’re fit to print. 

Of the standards to which I hold my writers, most are traditional. Journalistic integrity, ethics, grammar, punctuation and the all-powerful A.P. dominate. 

But some are my own. I know that writing worth reading is creative. It tells stories in unique ways and dares—not begs—the reader to listen.

When I pull up a new submission on Google Drive, I’m faced with what sometimes seems like two irreconcilable responsibilities. It’s my job to mold and trim the writing before me to conform to an unwavering, annually-issued style book—and I need to make it sound good. But it’s also my responsibility to retain the original voice of the author. Their style and unique perspective matter. 

While they may not think they’re writing creatively, I believe that they are. Journalism is formulaic by trade, but it’s a lot less gloomy and gray when the ability to tell a story in a multitude of ways is treated as a strength, not a distraction. 

Editor-in-Chief implies that I must know a little about how to improve a piece of writing. My title doesn’t imply the second part of the job, however—that experientially, I’m just as much a fledgling writer as any first-time contributor on our staff.

As I do my best to help my staff and contributors grow as writers—and, more importantly, grow as people—I find myself growing along with them. The lessons I try my hardest to instill in my peers are just as much for my own benefit. 

I tell them to learn the rules, hoping that one day they will build a strong enough foundation to be able to break them. I tell myself to learn the rules, hoping that one day my strength—as a person and as a writer—will allow me to shatter the what I’ve known into just enough jagged pieces with which to build something new and meaningful.

With every lede suggestion, source attribution and endless debate over that damn Oxford comma, I told people what I myself needed to hear most. Learn the rules. Then break them—effectively, carefully, and creatively.

¡CIENTO VEINTIDÓS!

¡CIENTO VEINTIDÓS!

¡CIENTO VEINTIDÓS!

There was no significance behind it. To the three whiter-than-white seventh-graders chanting “one hundred twenty-two!” in the back of Señora O’SmithSchneiderStein’s Spanish 1 classroom, the syllables that tumbled from their mouths simply felt good on their tongues—and, after all, it was funny.

Funny in the same way that kids would shout things like TAREAAAAA and PAPAS FRRRRRITAS during vocabulary review sessions to get a laugh out of their classmates.

The way we learned the cultural significance of the baCHAta before donning colorful dollar store sombreros and filling paper plates with tortEEya chips and UNE POCOE de SAALSA.

But not guacamole. It was green, after all. VERDAY. We were a little suspicious.

Have you ever heard kids with heavy Philadelphia accents go through their first years of learning Spanish? The same people that drink WOODER bottles and root for the IGGLES on winter Sundays send children off to school each day knowing that their offspring will butcher two languages before the day is done.

~

The United States of America has no national language. Our melting pot PR is very good. However, thirty of the fifty states in the union have laws mandating English be spoken in all important official interactions and exchanges, and Geno’s Steaks is famous for proudly displaying “This is America, when ordering, speak English” in its window.

Obviously, people here care a lot about how they are allowed to express themselves and tell their stories. The fear of people saying things we don’t understand (while also never making the effort to understand) has inevitably taken root in the public school system. Suburban Philly kids are not alone in their hatred of Spanish class. The nation’s majority cry out from the un-air-conditioned half-open windows of their schools with an arrogance almost as palpable as their ignorance: 

When are we going to actually interact with someone who actually speaks Spanish? Like “Gimme a cheesesteak wit” is even English.

But it’s cool to be ignorant. Doing terrible in a foreign language class is just as acceptable as struggling with math—communicating with others is permitted to be “just not my thing.”

 The “humanities” surely include literature, but we’re under the impression that only what we can already comprehend counts. To deny another human’s expression—to render their literature, their language inapplicable to you—is to negate their existence. I’ve polled the room, and the 11^th graders bored out of their minds in Spanish class don’t seem to mind all that much.

~

Accent and emphasis are the two key elements of Spanish pronunciation. In Spanish class, you’ll get along just fine without them. While it is assumed that emphasis is placed on the penultimate syllable, sometimes it lies elsewhere, wherein we denote this emphasis with what we call an ACK-SCENTO ( ´ ). The funny little snake atop the N in MANYANA is called a TILL DAY  ( ~ ). Accents define regional dialects and can give you a good sense of where someone’s from or who they hang out with. If they replace their YYYs with soft JJJJs, they’re probably Argentinian, Uruguayan, or somewhere in that neighborhood.

If they say things like pWEDO EER ull BAHNYO right before the quiz to go study and vape in the bathroom, they might just be an American teen duped into thinking their world is far smaller than it actually is.

~

I like to imagine that, just as we enjoy characters in movies with heavy foreign accents, people from Spanish-speaking countries see movies with Americans that have that perfect mixture of Spanish mastery and unmistakable English steamrolling of syllables. Perhaps that’s why I’d be able to understand Spanish with impeccable accuracy so long as everyone spoke like the skipping cassette recording we used in middle school.

Ac-Actividad… uno. Escuchen a las siguientes palabras y marque con un circulo la respuesta correcta que corresponde a cada pregunta.

Perhaps the Spanish learning experience—foreign relations in general, even—would be better for everyone if we spoke loudly, slowly, and only about the weather and the whereabouts of the nearest library.

~

The last time anyone bothered to check (2008), 58% of middle schools in the United states taught foreign languages. Twenty-five percent of elementary schools, if you care. We are creatures born with a desire to communicate and an unabashed love for language, but that magic biological window that ends on one’s 18^th birthday for learning a language seems to be a resource yet untapped for the better part of America’s population of monolinguists. The kids don’t really care.

They’ve never been given a reason to care. 

Nations around the world brag about their high percentages of bilinguals, but we have the luxury of speaking from birth the language everyone on Earth strives to master if they want to puncture the international seal and inject the tiniest bit of personal experience and struggle. The future engineers and stockbrokers and English teachers of the world sit through Spanish class because they have to, letting riches go in one ear and out the other simply because they cannot be bothered to convert the currency. 

By the time English-speakers get to high school, where a foreign language is required in 91% of schools, it’s too late. Their best language-learning years are running out, and there are more pressing matters to attend to than Spanish 1 workbooks. A token class period to sing songs about “EEZKEYERDA, DUHRECHA, DUHLANTAY, DUHTRASS” and whisper test answers in English does little to build the foundations of language. More often than not, these efforts amount to no more than shallow graves.

~

CircumloCUTION means “talking around the word I need to say because I forgot my dictionary and just blanked on how to say ‘where is the discoTEca.’” Talking around something is excusing your monolinguity with a dismissive wave because you will never, ever, have to communicate with someone who doesn’t talk like you. And you really don’t want the hassle, anyway.

CircunloQUIo is how students ramble on and gesticulate wildly in the middle of their presentation on Bodas de Sangre because they never really bothered to read it because, you know—it was in a foreign language.

It was someone else’s story. If the literature was that good, how come we didn’t learn it in English class?

~

Words that sound similar in English and Spanish are called “cognates.” CogNAtos. Kids in Spanish class love those. Beware, however, of false cognates—Pope and potato, pregnant and embarrassed, exit and success headline words that should not be confused with each other across languages. If someone spills a drink and tells you that they’re emBAraZAda, ask them when the baby’s due. Confusion is inevitable when you present someone with something significant but told in a manner to which they cannot fully relate. The lack of one-to-one comparisons is more than enough to discourage those who demand mathematical answers to human questions.

Have you ever tried watching the news in a different language? Suddenly, everything is happening outside yourself, in a world where your words mean nothing. You may sit diligently though every last mediocre Spanish class in high school, score decent marks on your placement exams and pursue it as an avenue of study in college, but I think I speak for all the whiter-than-white college kids still chanting CIENTO VEINTIDÓS under their breath with a grin when I say that feeling like an outsider in Spanish class is some poetic irony.

~

Should I tell my story in a language I’ve only co-opted? I question whether I’d even be communicating authentically using words that are not my own. To make them mine smacks of the very process of conquering that made my mother tongue the alpha throughout the world. My problems are minute when we speak of relativity; but just as I am free to communicate and co-humanize with the majority of my country, I am locked out of so many others. At its worst, Spanish class is less a passport and more a ticket to gawk at the Other; to imitate its movements and mimic its vocalizations. Call it lip service, satire, or blatant farce—most just call it fifth period. A prerequisite to graduation. A participation trophy.

But I do not study the language to apologize for my countrymen and classmates in TEXCESS and LOSS ANJULUS demanding their neighbors speak American. 

My EMbarAZO when I talk is the very thing that chains me to the back row of my high school Spanish class. The eggshells I crush underfoot with every butchered proNUNciAciON are, I suspect, self-placed. That if I simply let go of the parts of my identity that stick out when I fumble over TILL DAYs and encaBALgamiENto, I’d finally do the language justice. I’d be someone who shares—not takes, nor simply observes from afar—the experiences, the life, and the humanity of a fellow human.

How do you know if you’re really, truly honoring a language? Ask a native speaker, and I suppose they’ll give you an answer. But they might just ask you the same question instead.