A Youthful Experience That Made Me Hate Outlining

 

Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay

September 4 question - Since it's back to school time, let's talk English class. What's a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

Thanks to my sixth-grade teacher, I literally became anxious to the point of panic attack when I even thought about outlining fictional work. I was okay with outlining essays, but making an outline for a story nauseated me. 

Let's call this teacher Professor Dullard. I was a shy, sensitive, awkward kid who hated gym, was bad at math, did okay in science, and excelled at writing. One of the skills assessment tests we took in the fifth grade indicated that I was writing at an eighth-grade level. Although I didn't really like myself very much, I was proud to be an advanced writer.

Professor Dullard was a man obsessed with outlines. Looking back on him with nearly sixty-year-old eyes, I realize he was possibly also in an intimate relationship with Jack Daniels and his partner Jimmy Beam. He was quick to anger, verbally abusive, and, on at least one occasion, physically abusive. He shouldn't have been teaching children, adults, guard dogs, or anything else.

I was always excited when it was time to write stories because this was an area where I felt confident throughout school. Professor Dullard was about to rob me of my one area of confidence. 

Here are the rules for writing a story in Professor Dullard's style.

1) Write an outline.

2) Follow your outline closely. Stay consistent with your outline. Don't deviate from your outline. You wrote the outline; the story must follow the outline.

Get the picture?

 However...

3) If your story is exactly like your outline, you will fail the assignment because Professor Dullard will know that you wrote the story first.

I always thought that even if I sucked at everything else, I was still a good writer. However, Professor Dullard managed to not only strip away my confidence in my literary abilities but also to make me start hating an activity that previously brought me comfort. I was not a popular kid. I was severely bullied. Writing took me away from that. 

Now, it felt like I couldn't even do writing right. Maybe it felt like even writing hated me. I was so stupid. I'd been doing writing wrong all along.

Until now, I have always thought that my defiant attitude started in seventh grade. The bullying was even worse than it had been in elementary school. I started smoking (both kinds: tobacco and weed.) I started drinking. I started taking pills when I could get my hands on them. I started listening to "devil music" (I grew up during the height of the Satanic Panic). 

I went from being a sweet, docile girl who just wanted people to like her to an angry, sullen girl who lashed out and just wanted fuckers to leave her alone. I went from daydreaming about being beamed up by Scotty and becoming a member of the Enterprise crew to daydreaming about having a favorite musician pull up in front of the school. I'd jump in his car, and off we'd go. 

I know what many of you are thinking, but these weren't usually Prince Charming daydreams. I wasn't the groupie type. The knight in faded denim usually presented as a platonic friend rather than a love interest. Someone like Ronnie Van Zant saying, "C'mon, Kid, ditch these losers and come hang out with the band. We'd love to hear what you think about the new songs."

Pardon my trip down memory lane. What I'm getting around to is this: my defiance didn't start in junior high. It started in the sixth grade. That moment when I saw nobody was looking, I swiped Professor Dullard's key from his file cabinet and tossed it behind his desk, then I pushed the button to lock the file cabinet. He was so pissed off, and nobody suspected me because I was always a goody-two-shoes who hardly said boo. 

I'd never been a vengeful person before, and I was ashamed of my actions even then. On the other hand, I thought he deserved it for making my and several of his other least favorites' lives miserable.

From that day forward, I avoided writing outlines for stories. I cut class a lot in my sophomore year of high school, so I tried to make up for it in my junior year. I was doing independent study with a teacher I remember kindly, unlike Professor Dullard. 

When Dr. Dave told me he wanted me to create an outline for a story, I said, "Oh, no!" and nearly burst into tears. He was surprised by my reaction and asked me why I was so upset. I told him all about my hellish sixth-grade year with Professor Dullard.

Dr. Dave told me Professor Dullard's approach was erroneous. I had the feeling he wanted to say the man was an idiot but was trying not to bash a fellow educator. He told me he simply wanted to see my ideas for the story laid out cohesively. The story would be graded on its own merit. If it completely deviated from the outline, I wouldn't be punished. 

Dr. Dave reinforced the idea that outlining was a tool. Still, once school was behind me, I never outlined a story again. I was a complete pantser until a few years ago when I began utilizing a separate document for notes while writing, and I morphed into a plantser. 

I now use AutoCrit's story planner to help me organize my thoughts. A proper planner would be horrified by my haphazard, scattershot notes, but they work for me. The word outline no longer makes me feel like I'm going to barf or need a toke or a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves. I've finally removed Professor Dullard's poison from my psyche. I call that a win!

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Free use image by Prawny on Pixabay

"I remember that time you pooped on Professor Dullard's head, Ornery. That was a hoot!"

"I didn't poop on his head, Beaks. The top scoop fell off my ice cream cone when I was flying above him."

Use my link to check out AutoCrit for yourself. After writing everything in Word for literal decades, it's now my preferred method for drafting and an essential editing tool.

https://bit.ly/SelfEditEasier

A Response to Life's Journey by Dawn of Dawn's Night

 

Free-use image by Enrique Meseguer on Pixabay

https://dawnsnight.wordpress.com/2021/10/10/life-journey

Ah, Dawn, I really feel your words! My nuclear family wasn't physically or sexually abusive but they didn't understand me at all and were often inadvertently emotionally abusive. I was badly bullied at school and was inasmuch as asked what I was doing to cause it. 

My father (RIP) once suggested to me that I had "weird mannerisms" because I tended to talk with my hands, the result of not being able to speak above a painful whisper during a severe month-long strep infection. Because of his words, I became very wooden, rarely gesturing with my hands at all and being very self-conscious of it when I did.

When I was fifteen, I was sexually assaulted by a nineteen-year-old guy. This was 1980 and I didn't believe there was anything reportable because there had been no PIV sex. The cops would have laughed at me. My friends supported me, but like me, they didn't think it was "real rape." I started acting out more than ever at that point. Not one adult bothered to ask what was going on with me. I was just scolded for being bad and told that I needed to be fixed.

I suppressed that event for 40 years. It really wasn't until I was in my fifties that I started being able to acknowledge that the bullying my classmates inflicted on me was abuse. I was 54 years old before I was able to acknowledge that I had been sexually assaulted by that fellow.

I still have trouble acknowledging that my parents psychologically abused me, even if the abuse was inadvertent. But they did. It doesn't mean that I don't love them but if I'm to move forward I need to be able to acknowledge it.

Thank you so much for this very powerful poem. I mean it.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Free-use image from Open Clipart Vectors

OctPoWriMo 2019: Day 2: Changelings: A Senryu Trio

Image by prettysleepy1 from Pixabay

the most docile soul

may transform to a changeling

if abused enough

a child's mind comes to
fear what waits in the darkness
when left all alone

a fantasy world

is better than what is real

for the outsider

~Cie~

Song Inspiration:

Also dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft in honor of his story, The Outsider.
He wrote it about himself.
I always felt as if he could have written it for me.

The Cheese Grates It: Manosphere Morons and Other Idiots on the Internet vs. Reality

(via Why the "cock carousel" is bullshit, according to SCIENCE)I 

I wanted to share with you all my response to this post, first because David Futrelle is really cool and I love the way he takes apart the assholes who populate the so-called “manosphere.” 

Second, to rip a new one for all the assholes who love to claim stupid shit like “if you ship Wincest, it means you want to fuck your relatives” or for whom “pedophile” means “you ship something I don’t like.”

The following is part of my reality, and here are a few other delicious tasty morsels to chew on. Trigger warning for discussion of self-harm and sexual abuse.

I am celibate. I am not having sex with anybody. I don’t want to have sex with anybody. I don’t do relationships right, and casual sex is toxic to me. I don’t like it at all. Above all, I most assuredly don’t want to have sex with my relatives. When I was 19, my cousin hit on me. I handled it poorly. She was a broken person, and my running off to the other room rather than talking to her about what had happened destroyed our friendship. I regret that. But I most assuredly did not want to have sex with her. In all honesty, though, even though I am heterosexual, I would have been twice as upset if one of my male cousins had hit on me.

My cousin and I were both molested by her father. I was very young when it happened and I don’t really remember any details. I started having nightmares after my son was born and I eventually put the flashbacks together. My parents moved away from there when I was still pretty young. Obviously, my cousin would have memories of it happening to her because she was still with him. I was never alone with him after that.

So, the reality is, I don’t really like sex very much, and I certainly don’t like the idea of sex with my relatives.

This doesn’t mean I should get a pass to ship Wincest because I’m using it to work for trauma. I should be allowed to ship what I damn well want without being bullied and so should everyone else. If you think that people need to have been molested to earn the right to ship something, you can go fuck yourself.

I ship Wincest because I see a romantic dynamic between Sam and Dean. I love the idea of a relationship that triumphs despite impossible odds and societal taboos. I do not have an “incest kink.” Sam and Dean are the exception, not the rule. I never thought I’d ship an incest pairing, but they shipped themselves. I just write the stories.

Anyway, the following is my response to the blog post. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but maybe there’s a tiny chance that some ship shamer has a spark of humanity in them and will learn something from this revelation.

My 28-year-old son's high school friends who have married got married older than my high school friends, many of whom married right out of high school. Maybe better sex education and a generation of parents who were less reluctant to talk about topics like sex and drugs helped. 

Personally, I lost my virginity at 16 and I was definitely not emotionally ready for such a thing. Much though I joke about riding the cock carousel, I really never did. The guy I lost my virginity to was this gangly fellow about six foot six and he looked a lot more like Bob Denver than Brad Pitt. 

I was totally in love with him, was planning the wedding in my head and all, and he broke my heart. That colliding with a bunch of other fucked up stuff in my life earned me a trip to the mental hospital over the weekend with superficial cuts on my arms. I was treated like shit in that place which led to my pact with myself that I have kept for the past 37 years: I would die before I ever allow myself to be institutionalized again, even for a second.

What I didn't know at that point and what I wouldn't learn until I was 38 years old was that I had type 2 bipolar disorder, which is trickier to spot than type 1, and I had borderline personality disorder. 

Far from wanting to ride the cock carousel, I had a very romantic mind and a very low self-esteem, which led to my being taken advantage of by a number of less-than-honorable guys. After a horrific and extremely psychologically abusive relationship with a misogynist who would force me to watch really awful porn--we are talking bestiality and scat here--and who would force me to do things like kiss his feet under the threat that he would take his "love" from me, I ended up at his place one night with blood dripping from both wrists because, surprise surprise, after the initial thrill wore off he replaced my position as his "best girl" with someone who hadn't yet "hit the wall." She was in her early 20's. I was 34 at the time.

I wasn't done with ill-advised relationships yet, but even dense as I was I realized that I could not allow myself under the thrall of a creature like this ever again, if not for my sake than for my son's.

Admissibly, my situation was a bit extreme because of my undiagnosed mental illness. But make no mistake, guys like this prey on vulnerable women. They even say things like "the crazy ones are great in bed," and the line from Orange Is the New Black where Sophia tells her son about the philosophy of practicing on an insecure girl isn't a lie. These assholes don't think of women as people, they think of them as things to be used.

Maybe women of my son's generation are savvier about these creeps than women of my generation were. Women of my generation expected a certain level of misogyny. The younger generation may be less willing to put up with it. I certainly hope so.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It Hardcore~