I ain’t got no book learnin’
Had a conversation today with an author who’s preparing to put together his biography. The dude was feeling a little timid about what the bio will say about him. After all, he told me, he never went to college or had any formal training at all. His parents had to work extra hard just go get him through high school. What might readers think of him?
To which I say: ha! Not long ago, I wrote a newspaper column about my own lack of higher education. When you say higher education, I think only of the bong hits I took in high school. That was it. The rest of the training I got was out on the streets, under bridges and in nasty bars with dirty girls. Real life 101.
It sounds like nothing more than a shabby way to explain away youthful lack of ambition. But is it? The greatest writers in the world, after all, were hard-living alcoholics who chased skirts, went on drug benders and occasionally got tossed into prisons or asylums. They wore their flaws like badges even if they remained insecure little boys way down deep.
The argument could be made that these boastful scribes never overcame the inner turmoil that drove them to write in the first place. Hemingway ate a bullet as did Hunter S. many years later. Others went crazy, went missing or perished in the sea of booze.
The fact is, the greatest writers were a peculiar lot, loved or hated because of the depth of their character, not because of the college degrees they collected or the corporate ladders they climbed. Accountants and advertising executives go to college, get married, have 2.5 children and buy houses at great finance rates. They conform. Authors tend to buck those traditions and instead seek out stranger courses on which to wind through the landscape of their lives.
God bless their chaotic souls. The author bio should be an adventure, not a resume. Give me a person who had to struggle for everything he’s got and who learned through doing. Show me the man who had everything handed to him and learned all that he knows through textbooks and I wonder if he knows any damn thing at all.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
“Give me a person who had to struggle for everything he’s got and who lived through doing. Show me the man who had everything handed to him and learned all that he knows through textbooks and I wonder if he knows any damn thing at all.”
I think that qualifies as a healthy dose of common sense.
Cool post – The school of hard knocks & hard work – There’s a payoff that results eventually. I’m a huge Hemingway fan & that LaFlamme guy does a pretty damn good job with ‘the craft’ as well.