Why My Students Can’t Use the Word Good

Irene used to drive me crazy.

There were many reasons Irene drove me crazy. Sometimes it was because she told me that, if you squint real hard, you could see the ocean from her porch, smack-dab in the middle of the Valley. Usually, it was just that she was there. And when she was there, she was there. Impossible to ignore. She wouldn’t let you. Once, it was because she hit me in church after I thanked god for “fine German engineering,” like it were blasphemous or something. I’d just been hit head-on. My C280 was dead. And I didn’t even want to tell Irene. But thank god I did – how else was she supposed to know that she could have died that night.

But often, it was because she called herself “a writer.” And though, I suppose, she did have a way with words, every time she said it with an air of prestige and I would twitch.

You don’t like it ’cuz you’re a writer too.

And I counter. I’m not a writer, I write.

Same thing, right? This distinction may seem trivial. Or cheesy. But I’ve always had this understanding that to write is something that anyone can do. I tell my students this. Not as a joke or to motivate them. I just believe it. But to be a writer … To be “a writer” there needs to be a consensus. It’s not something you can call yourself. It’s a title that is given to you by others who have read your work. It’s a nomination. It’s a matter of the times. But it’s also an economic determination. Being “a writer” has nothing to do with whether you write. Less, whether you write well. It’s a reflection of the moment. And the culture. And, sadly, the market. And if it’s been called “good,” than it’s been accepted into the ethos of whatever the fuck “good” means by the gatekeepers – intellectual, literary, journalistic, challenge judges on theprose.com. Take Hemmingway – we consider him a classic. He defined a generation. The modernists. The “lost.” He influenced people to come and there’s a very specific reader who has championed him from the midcentury to now. I can’t stand Hemingway. It’s pretty common to not stand Hemingway these days. In fact, it’s in vogue. And those of us who can’t stand Hemingway constantly ask that question: what makes him “a writer?” Then, if we are bold, we might ask what makes him a good writer. And, if we’re real bold, we might ask this question in front of one of his champions … This usually ends bad but I would recommend it.

I think there are two difficulties to defining a good writer. It’s not just that it’s subjective – socially and culturally constructed. Dawn Powell was a woman who made fun of writers like Hemingway and she did it well. Her only claim to fame now is an aside on an episode of Gilmore Girls. For a long time “women’s writing” was not considered “good.” Romance is not “good.” In an anthology about pulp fiction magazines – an already distinctly low-brow genre – decided that romances, despite being the wild success of the Love Story magazine, were not worth looking at because they were “brain-dead.” But without providing any examples, I’m inclined to say this was gendered. And this happens across several lines of difference. So I have no right to say what’s good because I am just one person and, like I said, it needs consensus. All I can do is point out the problems with the word good.

I was once told that I wrote a good story. My instructor said I should submit it for publication. I told my dad. Then I told him I wrote it from the male perspective. And he said women can never write good men.

I never submitted.

Good is a word I tell students to avoid. It’s too vague. When we say the word “good,” we could mean several things. It can express approval. I could mean having the required skills. It can be a display of morals or a pleasurable feeling. It can be thorough. Or large. Or valid. And I think the question – what does it mean t be a good writer – is asking for a specific response. And asking if it matters – or have … turned us into mindless, unsophisticated zombies – is asking for a bias to be confirmed. It’s asking us to jack off to our own sentences and flex our grammar, punctuation, vocabulary, or creativity. And I’ve read so much syntactic masturbation that I’ve begun to understand that we conflate the good that means skill to the good that means moral. Intelligence – narrowly defined as having grammatical skill – is equated to a moral superiority. The wellatleastIcanspellandknowthedifferencebetweentheretheirandtheyre syndrome. And I know the rules of your basic composition classroom. Don’t use I. Don’t say I think. Don’t use the passive voice. Don’t use a comma splice. As one of my students said, don’t use “no-no words.” She highlighted words like but and also … how can you write without the word but. And for all her “good” advice about the rules of writing, her papers made one thing clear. She did not know what she was saying. I’m not under the impression that new media has ruined language – that’s what I’m going to call it – it’s opened possibilities. Now we have novels and poems using these forms to be creative. We have writers self publishing online, using platforms to challenge those gatekeepers. And sometimes the sophisticated writer – and I take that to mean the one aware of the fashion and culture that this question asks us to subscribe to – are more zombified than the Tweeters or that one girl on America’s Next Top Model that the show made fun of for combining considering and deliberating into a portmanteau. When Joyce does this it’s good. When Jade does this, it’s laughable.

That’s bullshit.

Which is why I just write – good or not – because that good is meaningless. And I think about the poem “38” by Layli Long Soldier. Where she says “the sentence will be respected.” Sentence being a play on words, she goes on to say:

I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate.

For example, all sentences will begin with capital letters.

Likewise, the history of the sentence will be honored by ending each one with appropriate

punctuation such as a period or question mark, thus bringing the idea to (momentary)

completion.

and yet, the most compelling parts of her poem

are

where

our rules

break

and words

run free