on-writing-well

The Tyranny of the Final Product 261
By which they meant that the traditional assigning of short-term
papers may be a tradition that teachers have followed too
unquestioningly for too long. They began to muse about writing
assignments that would give their pupils more room and would
be judged by different expectations.
I always remind my New School students that there are
many good reasons for writing that have nothing to do with getting
published. Writing for yourself is a powerful search mechanism:
there's no better way to find out who you are and what
you know and what you think. Writing for your children and
your grandchildren—the family history or the personal or local
memoir—is also satisfying.
My father, a businessman with no literary pretensions, wrote
both a family history and a history of the family business, which
he gave to each of his four children, his sons-in-law, his daughter-in-law
and his 15 grandchildren. Pride of ancestry was not
what got him going; the Zinssers, he said, "came over from Germany
on the pickle boat." But the process of re-examining his
German-American roots and his turn-of-the-century New York
boyhood not only kept him engaged when he was an old man
with few talents for self-amusement. His two histories also have
considerable charm as social history. In my own older years I
find myself dipping into them surprisingly often.
The methodology of my course—thinking of a particular
place—is only a pedagogical device. My real purpose was to give
writers a new mentality, one they could apply to whatever writing
projects they might try thereafter, allowing as much time as
they need for the journey. For one of my students, a lawyer in
his late 30s, the journey took three years. One day in 1996 he
called me to say that he had finally wrestled into submission the
subject whose organizational problems he had presented to our
class is 1993. Would I look at it?
What arrived was a 350-page manuscript. I'll admit that one
part of me didn't want to receive a 350-page manuscript. But a