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Robert Ausura Writing Scripts, Speeches & Presentations |
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Something that Erskine Caldwell said is very true about writers. But before I tell you what he said, I want to warn you that what I am going to be talking about this morning is not a very big thing. In fact, it is very, very small. It doesn’t have anything to do with business. It’s something that I’ve discovered very recently, and it is the pleasure part of what I do. Anyway, Erskine Caldwell said, "I think you remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with and go on that basis. He’s not a great mind, he’s not a great thinker, he’s not a great philosopher, he’s a storyteller." With that in mind, I’d like to tell you the story of how I ended up here this morning.
How I Got Here So I was here the morning, about three weeks ago, when Paul Vance [Superintendent of Schools of Montgomery County, MD] spoke. I didn’t know what to expect when I pulled into the parking lot and got out of my car. But there was a gentleman getting out of his car right next to me, and he said hello and seemed very friendly. We were walking toward the building together when I looked up at the sky, and there was this beautiful morning rainbow. I had never seen a rainbow that early in the morning before, and it was perfect. It could have been on a postcard. Writers get all excited about that kind of thing. "Wow! A rainbow!" But, you know, when you’re with people you don’t know, you tend to keep that kind of thing to yourself. Well, much to my surprise, the gentlemen I’m walking with looks up and says, "Wow! Look at that rainbow!" And we reach the front door of the building, and two more Rotarians come rushing out, and one of them says to us, "I hear there’s a rainbow!" And I turned, and there out in the parking lot were three or four of you all looking up at this picture in the sky. Right then and there, I realized that coming here and talking about business wasn’t necessarily what I had to do. And when I looked at your membership roster and saw that all of you are successful in your own right, I realized that I had an unusual opportunity here. Because here were dozens of very busy, very involved people who still find time to stop and look at the rainbows. Smell the roses. Sometimes even before you’ve smelled your first cup of coffee. So I decided right then and there to talk to about something personal to me, something beyond just business. I still didn’t know exactly what to talk about, but as the meeting went on and I learned a little about your program – the Four-Way Test and your involvement with Character Counts – I realized that you are very, very involved with children and youth in this community. That made my decision for me. What I have come to talk to you about today is something to connect children and writing. Something that I think will help children use their time and share their time more wisely.
Children, Us and Our World
Childhood should be given an environment that meets kids’ needs to explore, to observe, to think, to imagine, to create. Their job on this planet is to be what they are — new people with a lot to learn not just about what’s in the world but what’s inside them. That’s why they are so naturally self-absorbed. They are supposed to be seeing everything through their own eyes, their own imaginations, their own creativity. Being able to ignoring all of the world’s preconceived notions about itself is one of the great things about being a child. It’s what makes children childlike. And we have largely taken that part of their childhood away from them. Now we expect, as we get older, to have to give up that treasured position in the world. A crust forms around our brains, made up of schoolbook knowledge, logical common sense, and other stuff we learn from others. We take on responsibility. We deal with and think about adult things all the time. And as a result, we lose touch with our own imaginations. Our own creativity. We lose touch with what’s inside. Our thoughts fall into a daily routine. Our imaginations wither. Our internal lives become dull and bland. And at that point, when we can’t seem to muster sparks inside ourselves, we begin to rely on outside stimulation to inform us and to entertain us. Instead of drawing pictures, we collect art. Instead of playing games, we watch others play them. Instead of daydreaming, we watch TV. We look at this change as a normal part of growing up, the end of childhood, and we have developed a vast assortment of media to cater to it. The problem is that the media we have created to stimulate our dulled grownup imaginations and curiosity are so pervasive that not only adults who may feel they need the stimulation, but children who almost certainly don’t need the stimulation are being bombarded with them. TV. Radio. Nintendo. Play Station. Computers. The Internet. All of it designed to appeal to the widest possible audience — the lowest common denominator — because mass volume is where the profits are. And so, we are bathing ourselves and our children in a dazzling but largely mindless electronic glow that I believe is killing what we all should be developing — what is inside us. For adults, this is a shame. For kids, it’s a tragedy. And we can see the results. My wife is the Attendance Secretary at Quince Orchard High School [Gaithersburg, MD], and she gets along very, very well with children and teenagers. She has become an unofficial counselor there, and she comes home almost every night with horror stories of what these kids are going through. And I’m not just talking about the ones she refers to almost affectionately as her "bad kids" — the ones who cut classes or are chronically late and have to come to her office for passes and readmittance slips. I’m talking about the "good kids," too — the kids who come to school, get good grades, are conscientious and involved. A lot of these kids are in emotional trouble. And not just because they’re smack dab in the middle of adolescence. That’s bad enough. What’s really throwing these young people is that they can’t seem to find the center in themselves. They have nothing solid inside themselves to hold on to. They have been stimulated so long from outside and have looked so long outside themselves for approval, for acknowledgment, for affirmation of what they are, that when things begin to unravel, as they always do during adolescence, they don’t know how to deal with it. They haven’t learned to listen to that little clear tone inside them that can guide them. Of course, what can we expect? Look at the way we ourselves live. Look at the models of success that we hold up for these kids to imitate. There’s one commercial on television that’s a particularly good example of what I’m talking about. It’s a very slickly edited piece that starts with a video news crew out chasing someone down for an interview. They find their quarry. The cameraman shoots off his shoulder as the reporter sticks a microphone in the subject’s face. We cut to a scene of other young professionals working out on treadmills in a gym while speaking on cell phones. You get the idea. And over all this, the voice-over narrator is saying, "Fourteen, fifteen hours a day. No weekends to call their own. This is what Young Lions are made of." And what is it a commercial for? Headache remedy. What is the message? Run, strive, work long and hard. Push yourself. Don’t stop. Don’t relax. And when you get a headache, consider it a badge of achievement and take a few pills. And who is watching this? Not just us. Our kids are, too.
A Little About Me My mother had been writing a column called "Around Roslyn" – I grew up in Roslyn, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia – for our local weekly newspaper. It was essentially a social column — announcements of birthdays and anniversaries, family reunions, small community events like bake sales and paper drives. It brought in a few bucks a week, and she enjoyed it. Then, when I was sixteen and a half, she had to go out of the house to work. This was the mid-1960s, and our family, like so many others, was beginning to need a second income. So she got a job as a secretary and planned to give up writing the weekly column. I saw this as an opportunity — for fame or money, I’m not sure which — and I begged her to let me take over as the journalist of the family. Well, the labor laws in Pennsylvania at the time were that you couldn’t work until you were eighteen. Not even for the newspaper. Looking back, I’m not sure whether that was true or whether saying it was just a way for my mother to try to talk me out of the whole thing. In either case, it didn’t work. I finally wore her down to the point where breaking the law was better than listening to me beg any longer, and she agreed to let me try writing the column — under her byline, so that no one would know what criminals we were. As I remember, I made 10 cents a column inch. Most weeks that meant $2.50 to $3.00. During graduation and wedding seasons, maybe $4.00. So it wasn’t a lot, but it didn’t take long to do and there was not a lot of thought involved. Most important, it taught me how to combine facts in fairly interesting ways and meet weekly deadlines. So it was a good experience. And I got away with it – almost. Like a lot of things in my life, I blew it right at the end. About two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, our neighborhood letter carrier – we would have called him a postal carrier today – retired. His name was Glen. Glen had been our letter carrier for as long as I could remember. He was one of those wonderful, warm, personable men who loved kids. A real grandfatherly man. As little kids, all of us in the neighborhood would chase him up and down his route as he delivered the mail. We chased him with our wooden G.I. rifles, then with our cowboy hats and six shooters, and then with our Zorro capes and swords. Glen was a terrific sport. He would draw a his index-finger pistol from his big brown leather bag and shoot back at us. We would fall dead and roll down the lawns. Sometimes Glen would hide behind bushes during a gun battle. Once, I remember, he even fell down dead — bag and all. We loved Glen. And in honor of his retirement, I decided to write an article -- under my mother’s name, of course. It was a masterpiece. Not only did it get published on the front page of the next issue, it got nominated for a state journalism award and won runner-up in the local features category. At that point, my mother said, "If you think I’m going to go up and accept this award for you, you’re crazy." So I ended up accepting the award — and then getting fired.
Becoming a "Real Writer" Anyway, I wanted to become a "real writer," so I decided to write a novel. At the time, my father was a salesman for a food company, and every three months or so the company would gut his inch-thick three-ring binder of price lists. The price lists were mimeographed — remember mimeograph? — so they were printed on one side. This gave out family a steady supply of scrap paper for drawing and rough drafts of school assignments, and the like. Anyway, I sat down one summer with a stack of this paper and started feeding it into the old Underwood typewriter where my mother and I had earned our journalistic fame. It was on a card table in my parent’s bedroom. By the end of about three weeks I had 179 pages. It wasn’t a very good novel, but this was a big challenge, and I really wanted to complete it. 179 pages. And I stalled. I could not finish, no matter how hard I tried. I was devastated. My parents were thrilled. Our 17-year-old son is writing a novel! But at the end of it, I felt like a failure, and I always remembered that. In high school I wrote articles for the student newspaper and copy for the yearbook. I started dating, and falling in love, and that cranked up my output of poetry. As a matter of fact, that’s been a pattern throughout my life ever since. Every time I fall in love, or think I’m falling in love, I gush poetry. Poetry is very short, very intense. You can do it very quickly when inspiration hits. You express your passion and then you move on to something else. At the same time, doing it well is artistically as well as emotionally satisfying. I went on to college, won a couple more journalism awards, wrote a lot more poetry. After graduation, I came to Montgomery County Public Schools, where I taught 11th grade English at Charles W. Woodward High School — a 22-year-old teaching 16-year-olds. A very interesting experience. And I got to "teach" poetry — actually, more like "present" poetry — which gave me a whole new perspective and let me see the effect poetry can have on young people. Finally, in 1975, I realized that all I knew was school. I had been in the classroom for seventeen years as a student and three as a teacher. The classroom was all I knew, and I knew there had to be more out there. So, using the American Bicentennial as an excuse, I stuck out my thumb, and, for a year and a half, hitchhiked around the country. Outside of a little journalism in Maine, I didn’t do much writing. Too much new and interesting other stuff to do. I worked as a bartender, a migrant farm laborer, a welder’s helper, a carpenter, a telemarketer. I was an itinerant hippie — one of the last of the age. By the time I came back to Maryland, my friends and especially my family were thoroughly disgusted with me. In no uncertain terms, they told me it was time to settle down. I was 26 years old. It was time to cut out the nonsense. After teaching and traveling and trying my hand at a lot of different things, I realized that writing was all I knew well. It just so happened it was also what I liked to do best. So I found a job writing. I started with a consulting company. I moved on to a video training company. Then an association. I did business writing, educational writing, science writing. All the science and math that I didn’t learn in high school and college I finally ended up having to learn. There are two chemistry teachers and one algebra 2 teacher who would be astonished at the kinds of things I now write for clients like NIST and the Naval Research Laboratory. Essentially, what I learned to do was apply the writing skill I had developed to expressing other people’s ideas. In that context, the big projects that I feared on my own became very easy. I could write a 200 or 300-page manual. I could write a five-hour script for a live teleconference. I could do it all, because they were based on other people’s ideas. All I was supplying was the creativity and the words. In 1982, I decided to go out on my own. I started my own business. My first client was Orbital Sciences Corporation. That was back when they had 24 employees and were in a small third-floor office in Vienna, Virginia. My second client was the Mechanical Contractors Association of America – a national association. Then Marriott. So I felt pretty confident about writing. The projects were getting bigger and more real-world. My fees were getting bigger. In fact, I was making pretty good money, for a writer. But I still did not feel successful. I would go to a meeting or a party, and someone always asked, "What do you do?" I would tell them I’m a writer, and they’d say, "Oh! What have you written that I’ve read?" "Well, actually, I write video and film scripts and multimedia –" "Oh! What have you written that I’ve seen?" Despite all the business success I was having, I found myself still buying into the stereotype of writing and writers. I hadn’t written a novel. I wasn’t really a writer. So again I started struggling with large creative projects on my own. I wrote two screenplays and two television dramas, with mixed success. More important to me, I started two novels. I couldn’t finish either one. I was getting more and more afraid that I didn’t have "what it takes."
A Small Discovery True to form, when I met Sheri, I started gushing poetry again. She looked at this poetry, and she said "Robert, you’re struggling with these ideas of writing novels and screenplays and things, and this poetry is really very good. Why bother with all the big stuff when you do the little stuff so well?" Hearing it from her, suddenly a little bell went off inside me — that clear, unmistakable chime that denotes truth — and I realized what I should have realized thirty years ago when I fell short on page 179: I am a miniaturist. I can do the big projects. But in my own head, in my own personal creative life, I am a miniaturist. I really should have known this all along. My entire adult life I’ve collected little boxes – wood, metal, ivory. I grow bonsai — dwarf trees. I have a whole collection of miniature medieval castles and cottages that I create landscapes for. I love quotations – little snippets of wisdom. The bottom line is that, finally, I came to understand who I am as an artist and learned that in this world of big movie deals and big book deals and young lions, it’s okay to be a miniaturist. I recently became interested in the history of clock making, and if I were a clockmaker during the late Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment, I wouldn’t be the one building the big clocks for towers in the town squares. I’d be the one making pocket watches. And I know that’s okay. I like to write small. I like reading things that are short and intense. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite short stories is one by Richard Brautigan, and I would like to read it to you now. It’s called "The Scarlatti Tilt."
See how it kind of sneaks up on you? Desperation, tragedy, humor, humanity — it’s all there in two sentences. And because it is short, it packs a wallop that a ten-page story can’t. I think it’s real important that we apply this kind of carefully crafted miniaturism to our lives. But learning to write this way, learning to appreciate this way of thinking is contrary to what we do as business people. We’re all writing these long reports, long memos, long legal briefs -- details, details, details. And we teach kids to do the same thing — compositions, essays, term papers. There’s nothing wrong with this. They need to master longer forms of expression that sustain and develop ideas. But there should be room for the little stuff, too. Anyway, I decided that I was going to go miniature. Now all writers are a researchers and perfectionists to some degree, and I had to find out what is the purist form of miniaturization in all of world literature. I found it. It is haiku — Japanese haiku. Many of you are probably familiar with haiku. The classical definition is a three-line poems — five syllables, seven syllables, then five syllables. A more modern definition is that a haiku is a "one-breath poem." The number of syllables doesn’t matter as much as capturing a personal experience. A haiku is a pure, childlike response to an experience. It is simple. Yet surprising. Let me read a few haiku to show you what I mean.
How many of us as children shook crabapple trees in the fall so that the little apples rained down on us? As adults we don’t think of it very often. We probably never do it. But every once in awhile, in the fall, don’t you get the urge just to shake one and see if the apples still fall?
That poem is 400 years old.
The thing that’s very interesting about haiku is that they are so simple and quick. You can write them – a dozen of them – in moments, with what you think is very little effort. They are captured impressions, little meditations. They are resonances between you and the world around you. A way to get back in touch with the child inside.
Back to Children What does all this have to do with kids? The 4-Way Test, Character Counts, and similar programs all demand a certain amount of self-reflection. They are based on the premise that, without self-reflection and self-awareness, people lose their center. They blow in the wind. Haiku is just one more way to help young people stay in touch with themselves When I taught in high school, I introduced my students to haiku. I didn’t know much about it then – a lot less than I know now – but the kids responded enthusiastically. We had "haiku meditation moments" in class. They sent each other haiku. They posted their favorites on the bulletin board in my classroom. The magic of it was that haiku gave them an easy, yet satisfying way to respond to their world and share the experience with other people. Writing a haiku became so quick, natural and effortless for many of them, that they could do this meditation without interrupting the normal flow of their lives. What I am proposing today – and this is the whole point of this speech, this is what giving me a warm breakfast this morning has gotten you — is this: I would like to see haiku taught in Montgomery County Public Schools. I would like to see it taught at the elementary and the middle school levels. I would like to see it become as popular here as it is in Japan and much of the rest of the world. I would like to see teachers educated about it and about teaching it. There are already published lessons plans available, and I believe that we will find here in Montgomery County, as they have elsewhere, that haiku can be a valuable in the classroom and outside of it. The bottom line is that after 30 years of writing I have finally arrived at a place in my personal life that fits my creative self. I think it can serve others as well. It is a way for all of us to continue to share rainbows. Thank you. "The Scarlatti Tilt" from Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962 - 1970 by Richard Brautigan, Simon and Schuster, New York. Back to top
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Copyright © 2001 Robert Ausura Last modified: January 31, 2001 |