As the Moon Climbs

Legend has it that on his deathbed, the illustrious Roman poet Virgil asked that his manuscript for The Aeneid be burned because it wasn’t finished. Thankfully, the emperor Augustus intervened and saved it from destruction, and over two thousand years later a lowly student now finds herself studying it like so many other students before her. The idea that one of the greatest works of literature might have been lost if someone had been a little more considerate of a dying man’s wishes, or a little quicker with the matches, is amazing and somewhat terrifying. The fact that we even have a surviving copy anyway is pretty mind-boggling, all things considered.

Unlike The Odyssey, this is not the story of one man trying to get home, it is the story of a man and twenty ships full of his closest friends and family leaving a burning city and looking for a new place to live. Odysseus has a crew, certainly, but its members exist mostly to ramp up the body count, so that when he finally gets home alone it is more significant. Aeneas, on the other hand, doesn’t have the luxury of sacrificing six of his least favorite uncles to Scylla if the going gets tough. It’s a very different dynamic, and says a lot about Virgil’s thematic interests as opposed to Homer’s. I look forward to exploring the dichotomy further.

This is probably not an earth-shattering revelation, but I find that when I help other people do things, I get better at them myself. Or at least I get better at helping other people do them. Writing is no exception; the more I read other people’s work and think about how to make it better, the more I learn about my own writing. And the more I write down my thoughts on writing, the clearer they become and the better I know my own needs and goals and prejudices.

I also think I’m getting better about trying to judge different pieces on their own merits rather than trying to force them into preexisting molds. Sure, deep down I still roll my eyes when I think about people writing (and reading), say, romance novels. But at the same time, I can put that scorn aside and be helpful despite whatever involuntary reactions I have to the genre as a whole. Writing comes from different places for different individuals, and far be it from me to judge anyone for having a different muse. I’m sure plenty of people roll their eyes when they pass the fantasy section at Borders.

Putting together a sort of curriculum to prepare for NaNoWriMo is another way for me to be somewhat metacognitive about the whole writing process. In thinking about how to help others create characters and premises and settings and outlines, I have to confront my own opinions and sift through the years of teaching and experience I’ve had. Luckily, I think most of my teachers had good ideas that I am privileged to pass along, and the ones who weren’t so good have taught me how not to approach the process. Plus, I’ve made more than my fair share of mistakes along the way, and I will almost certainly make many more before I’m through with writing, and mistakes are nothing if not instructive.

So by helping others I am really helping myself. Also, screwing up makes me a better writer. At least that is what I intend to keep telling myself.