How I Wrote The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List

One of my favorite comedians, Suzanne Westenhoefer, has a bit on her most recent album that I adore. She and the audience have grown quite chummy, and she confides in them that she doesn't always have such a perfect rapport with her listeners. For instance, in a very granola town in Oregon, she shared (much more entertainingly than I will here) the following anecdote:
 
Suzanne's partner is an animal lover. Suzanne, who is prone to asthmatic allergy attacks, is not. Once, when Suzanne's partner was recovering from surgery, Suzanne had to handle the animal chores that were usually her partner's domain. Including changing the kitty litter. As Suzanne reported, after a couple of days of that job, her thoughts began to run along the lines of "We don't need that *&#%ing cat."
 
Her current audience laughed. "Thank you," she said. "That would be an appropriate response." Apparently, the Oregon audience was horrified by what they saw as an implied threat to a poor, defenseless kitty. "Like I'm actually going to kill my cat," Suzanne said. "I'm not making a speech here, people! It's comedy!"
 
I found this delightful because it seemed like such a duh. Comedy is only funny if it's safely untrue -- though it does have to bear a close enough resemblance to reality that the audience can visit, without straining disbelief too much, the what-if universe that the comic has created.
 
That's a hard balance to strike. Jim Gaffigan, another favorite comedian of mine, achieves this by adopting a stage persona that is often ridiculously hostile. He'll mention things that people say, and then come back to them with a response that obviously no one would ever really utter -- but it's hilarious to imagine doing so. He brings up, for instance, how personally people take it when you haven't seen their favorite movie. "Wait a minute -- you haven't seen Good Fellas? What are you saying?" Gaffigan mimics an indignant acquaintance, and then answers in his own voice, "Apparently, I'm saying your sister's a w---e."
 
The reason that this is funny -- if you'll pardon me for indulging in the ultimate unfunniness of breaking down and analyzing humor -- is that Gaffigan's reaction is so extreme that it's reassuringly, over-the-top absurd. Obviously he's not running around really talking like this, for the simple reason that he wouldn't be running around doing anything for long if he mouthed off like that too much. And just as obviously, it wouldn't be funny if he really did talk like this in real off-stage life. It would border on scary. But his comic universe is a place where people get to say all the smart-alecky things that run through their minds. It's a fun place to visit.
 
I bring all this up because, though I've steered as clear as possible from the negative response to the list (more about that another time), I skimmed enough of it to see a recurring theme:  namely, whoever wrote this piece is really defensive, bitter, and just plain mean.
 
It's sort of a compliment, if you squint. The fact that these readers believed that the voice I used for the list is my real one means that I wrote well enough to be thoroughly convincing.
 
I know I'm preaching to the saved here, but let it be said for the record:  The list was a humor piece. I'm not making a speech. I don't hate non-homeschoolers who make innocent, well-intentioned remarks. I think your sister is a perfectly nice girl.
 
And I'm not bitter. Not that bitter, anyway. I couldn't be. Anyone who walked around in the state of perpetual snarl I crafted for the list would have exploded, imploded, or jumped off the nearest cliff years ago.
 
I spend a lot of time thinking about humor, comedy, and what makes funny funny. For years, I had a passionate amateur's interest in the subject; when my writing began to go pro, I realized that though I was often drawn to serious subjects, it was sometimes difficult for me to keep a straight face while addressing them. When I let go a bit and let my comic voice have a bit of play, I got a good response from editors and readers.
 
It was a humorous piece about homeschooling that started me down the path to writing the list. Home Education Magazine bought the article from me, and liked it enough to post it on their web site as well as including it in the print edition.
 
And I got fan letters. Real live actual readers wrote to tell me that they'd nailed my words to their wall as a reminder never to be afraid of being different.
 
That was exhilarating, amazing, humbling. In spite of all the rejection slips that had come my way (and would continue to come, as long as I had the energy to send my work out), I had evidence that I had something to offer readers. I love my loved ones by definition, but there's nothing like the praise of strangers to keep you going when the cold sets in.
 
That particular piece had been rejected more than once before I sent it to HEM. I learned a forcible lesson in not giving up. I'd known the writing was good, and yet I'd let the rejections get to me and sat on it for months before sending it out one last time and having it accepted by return mail.
 
I also learned, as I continued writing and submitting my work with renewed energy, that crafting humor is serious work. And the better you are at it, the less credit you get, because really good comic material sounds as if it just rolled off your tongue.
 
People who work hard in other fields also strive to make their accomplishments appear effortless. The difference is that everyone knows that an Olympic gymnast, ballet dancer, musician, or magician spent years practicing, training, and generally working his or her tuckus off to get to the point of achieving the amazing with a seemingly careless flicker of motion. But humor comes in the form of writing or talking, and pretty much all of us know how to do those. The idea that a lot of thought and planning may lie behind the words one reads or hears isn't intuitively obvious.
 
I'm not complaining for one minute about my job, which I love and feel deeply lucky to have. I'm just mentioning some common basic misunderstandings about its nature.
 
The Wish List is a quick read that was years in the making, if you count percolation, pondering, and filing away things I'd heard, read, or thought in the course of my homeschooling career.
 
When you're writing a piece -- fiction, nonfiction, humor -- figuring out the tone is the first and most important job. It's also often the hardest.  Sometimes you can have a very clear idea of exactly what kind of voice your writing should have for what you want to do with it; but once you're putting pen to paper, it just isn't there. You watch helplessly as each effort comes out all wrong. This is too sappy; this is too flip. This isn't what I meant at all -- and where did that come from? You feel like the little old lady who lived in a shoe, surrounded by out-of-control mental offspring. All the ideas that were so sweet and perfectly ordered while they were sitting in your head are now zipping merrily about, with no thought or worry about what you'd like them to do. Beating them all soundly and sending them to bed before they send you to Bedlam is a serious temptation.
 
Sometimes this disconnect between what you hoped or intended and what comes out is fruitful. You let the words do as they please, and end up with something better than a strict obedience to your carefully laid plans would have given you.
 
Sometimes you just learn to recognize a false start, or ten, or twenty; the whole day is one big erase and redraw, erase and redraw, and you try to convince yourself that this must qualify as healthful exercise on some level or other.
 
For once -- and that may be quite literally true, since I can't remember another piece where intent and result eloped before I could attempt the usual arranged marriage -- I didn't have to struggle with tone or content. I knew exactly what I was doing when I sat down to create the infamous List. Instead of a painful birth process, it was more like putting together a quilt for a doll's bed:  I had some scraps of usable material left over from another project, and I knew just the little project I wanted to make with them.
 
The list format was freeing. There was no tedious outlining and laying out. I simply jumped in and started writing. Usually, that's only a good idea as a warm-up exercise, when you need to loosen up and get the ink flowing. You can end up with some usable material toward the end, but the beginning is generally worthless.
 
For this piece, another loosening-up exercise -- jotting down thoughts and ideas as they come your way -- was most of the writing process. I didn't have to hunt up quotations, or come up with illustrative anecdotes (or worry that I'd already used too many). All I needed were a couple of dozen items that wouldn't seem out of place on a bumper sticker or T-shirt. I worked in a feminist bookstore for years; I knew the drill.
 
The writing I do is usually positive, in the sense that whether I'm researching or turning inward for material, I'm hoping to find something new to offer my reader. Writing the list was, in the best possible sense, more like the self-appointed task of Frankenstein. I was working with the discarded, incomplete remains of a corpse. I needed to stitch the most usable fragments together -- never mind if the seams showed, this was never meant to pass for human anyway; it just needed to walk and breathe and speak a little. Could I get the blood flowing through the disjointed pieces, or had they been cold too long?
 
I can think of worse analogies for describing the pivotal piece of a Halloween baby magazine.
 
I don't remember doing much in the way of rearranging. Of course I had to mention the questions we hear the most early on; and there were a few items that had to go together and in a particular order. Other than that, the only really important issue was coming up with an ending that felt like an ending.
 
That was tough. Every other item on the list could just be itself. But the last one had to really read like the end of the conversation.
 
That last item is one that has actually showed some drift. Several blogs that reprinted the list otherwise accurately rephrased it, and only one acknowledged with square brackets that a change had been made.
 
It's a rude ending. But the whole list is rude, in the sense that it's completely inappropriate for polite conversation.
 
Several civilian readers, and I think a few homeschoolers, too, objected to that last item because it sounded as if I were saying that anyone who disagreed with me should just stop talking. That could only be the case if you accept the idea that the list is really me talking. As humor, that last bit is pretty much the only thing that works for the end of a bitter homeschooler's wish list. My alternatives were just stopping with a last item that didn't close the piece, or going all soft sister and writing something that a reasonable human being might utter. Either way, the piece would be seriously flawed.
 
Endings are hard. Every writer struggles with them. Some think that beginnings are more difficult, but I've always found shutting up trickier than starting to talk.
 
Maybe you noticed?