GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #754: RON WIGINTON

 

I went to Elmhurst University back when it was still called Elmhurst College. Class of 2000. During my last two years there I worked on the newspaper and the literary magazine. I was a double major, English and philosophy, so naturally I took a few courses taught by Ron Wiginton. He also advised the newspaper, so I worked with him there, too.

Almost no one reading this will remember, but back then I had a writing partner on the paper, my high school friend, Jesse Russell. Together we were GonZo and THE STRAIGHT, and we investigated the primitive underbelly of Chicago. We called ourselves, unsurprisingly, Primitive Underbelly. Today I got a text from Jesse notifying me that Ron Wiginton had died of a heart attack on his way back from vacation. My first thought was, "At least he didn't make it back to work first."

But I thought I should talk about him a little tonight because of all the creative writing teachers I've had, he had the most influence on my writing.

I remember when I first met him. It was for an American Lit class. He was a bald guy with a ponytail, and he didn't have a lot of teeth. He looked like an aging hippie, but aside from his love of playing bongo drums, he didn't act like one. I remember thinking, who the hell is this guy?

I think he came from Tallahassee before he got his job at Elmhurst. He'd worked there as a journalist, if memory serves correctly, which made him the one and only creative writing teacher I ever had who made a living as a writer. He was a no bullshit kind of guy. He was harsh, but he was that way because of love. He wanted his students to be the best writers they could be.

Now that I think about it, I've mentioned him before in Goodnight, Fuckers. He was the professor in question from this column. He believed in tough love when it came to learning how to write, emphasis on the love part of that. He taught me to be tough with my own work, so I thought I'd list a few things I learned from him as a memorial tribute.

I made a horrible blunder while I was reporting for the Leader. I was assigned a masturbation story. I swear it was not my idea. It was the editor-in-chief's idea. It's just, well, you all know me. Who else would work on that kind of story? I was supposed to interview people about how normal masturbation is. Part of that was interviewing the college minister. The minister wanted to see a copy of the article before publication, and I said I'd do it. I was lying a little bit, though. I figured I'd slip it under his door the morning the paper was supposed to be printed so it would be too late to STOP THE PRESSES! STOP THE PRESSES! I did that only to learn that there was a problem with the printer, and he was able to stop the presses and get the article kicked out of the paper. Dr. Wiginton took me aside and told me to never do that again under any circumstances. The subjects of your article should read it in print, not one second before.

I also wanted hate mail pretty badly. Yeah, that's kind of a weird thing, but that's what I wanted. I never got anything UNTIL I wrote a negative review of The Blair Witch Project. Everyone on the planet at the time was talking about how awesome and scary the movie was. I said that I'd give it an A if it was a student film, but as a movie it did nothing for me. I finally got hate mail for that, and I wanted to respond, to open a dialogue (which was code for "get in a flame war over something that doesn't matter"). He told me to never respond to hate mail. NEVER. If you're responding to hate mail, you're fucking yourself as an author. Never do that. Ever. Did I mention that you should never respond to hate mail?

Now for some creative writing stuff. When in doubt, cut it out. If something doesn't fit into a story, get rid of it. It doesn't matter how brilliant you might think it is. If it doesn't serve the story, it has to go.

Character motivations are important. That I already knew, but he wanted me to constantly ask myself this question: Why today? Why did the character decide to do the thing today instead of yesterday or tomorrow or whenever?

He also said that you've always got to care about what you're writing. It seems kind of obvious, but take a look around. Think about the things you've read. You can always tell when a writer is phoning it in, right? When you catch one red-handed (and, I might add, he was a big crusader against clichés), you always have to wonder why they bothered. If you don't care, don't write it.

He gave a lot of other advice, but those are the big ones.

Most of my creative writing teachers focused on teaching their students how to express themselves. I suspect that's because getting students to commit to that kind of thing is like pulling teeth, especially if they're just there for an easy course credit. Of them all, Ron Wiginton alone wanted to teach me to be a better writer. For that I will always be grateful.

Thank you, Dr. Wiginton. Rest in peace.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #703: "FIRST YOU GOT TO COCK IT"

 

There's this great scene in Unforgiven. Hell, all the scenes are great, but there's one I think about a lot and how it's a lesson in gunfighting, but it can be applied to a lot of things in life. Little Bill and Beauchamp are discussing the fine art of killing people with guns (with guns) while a beaten and raw English Bob rests in the jail. The salient point of the scene is this: if you're trying to be the fastest, you will fail. Accuracy is more important than speed. Sure, you might fire first if you're trying to be fast, but you'll probably miss. If you take your time and go for accuracy, you will always hit your mark, and that is of paramount importance.

The reason I think of it is because not too long ago I found my old journalism textbook from when I was in college. This is the thing that made me think of Unforgiven:

I hope you can read that. It looked fine when I took the picture, but it looks kind of blurry here. It's late at night, anyway, so maybe it's just that my eyes are failing me. That's OK. They've been failing me since I had to get my first set of glasses in 3rd grade. Ethics in journalism made me think about how much the world has changed since I took that course and wrote as a journalist for the Leader. For reference, the year I'm talking about is early 2000, when the internet wasn't fucking everywhere and an integral part of one's life.

Our project for the semester was to find a part about Elmhurst that not a lot of people think about and write about that. Half-joking (but kinda serious) I said, "Latent bigotry." So my professor made it my assignment. I did research and found out that not all bigotry in Elmhurst is latent. On the one hand, there was a sign at a local park saying that the basketball court was meant for neighborhood kids only . . . because Black kids from Berkeley would walk down here and use it, thus invading the white neighborhood. The sign didn't say that part, but it was the latent part of "latent bigotry." Then I discovered that there were actual cross burnings on lawns not too far from where I used to play when I was a kid. A Black college student maybe ten years before my time at the college was harassed for dating a white woman, and his car was vandalized with the n-word keyed into it. That's the tip of the iceberg and not quite so latent.

My intent with the piece was to get my fellow Elmhurstians (is that a word?) to find that place inside of themselves, to look at their own actions (or lack thereof) and ask, "Am I racist? Do I do something that contributes to the bigotry of my community?" But the discovered intent was, "Holy shit, there are real full-blown racists here, and the community just lets that happen?" My lesson was this: no matter what you think is going on, it is your duty to print the truth. That's what ethics in journalism is about.

But the problem is, now that everyone gets their news from the internet, it's next to impossible to live up to journalistic ethics. Because the one thing that the internet values over all else is SPEED, not ACCURACY. Investigative journalism has taken a back seat because that shit takes time. You have to research. Talk to people. Look at all the angles. And so on.

But no, everyone wants to get the scoop, and if you get it wrong? Who cares? Just issue a correction that no one will ever read, and you're gold. I have my doubts that any online news site even has fact-checkers anymore. Maybe not even editors. It used to be that an editor had to go over the story, check everything out, make sure you can't get sued, and then (ONLY THEN) rack it up for print.

As a disclaimer, I feel it is necessary to note that even back then, when I was in college writing for the Leader, not everyone was ethical. Here's something that happened on a regular basis: newspapers printing shit they get off the AP without vetting it. Or even worse, printing press releases word for fucking word without a second thought as to accuracy. And then there were journalists who got fired for flat-out making stories up. And, going all the way back to the infancy of journalism, fighting with advertisers. If you write a story that an advertiser doesn't like, guess who's getting a kick in the ass? Hint: not the guy who pays for the paper's existence. But my point is, ethics in journalism used to be possible.

Now? I can't think of a single journalist with ethics. It doesn't help that on 24 hour news channels that opinions have taken the place of reporting. Almost every talking head you see is spouting an opinion as fact. And those who don't? They're pretty people reading things off a teleprompter. They've done none of the legwork.

That fucking sucks. I used to dream of being a Kolchak-type reporter (or, more to the point, a Spider Jerusalem-type reporter) dedicated to the truth at all costs. Worm out the evil pricks and reveal them to be what they really are and HAVE THE FACTS TO BACK IT UP. But no one wants that anymore.

It's too bad. It used to be that journalists like that kept the lying cocksuckers at bay, but without a watch dog, well, look around. See what I mean?

Here's an added bonus to tonight's GF, warning journalists about their own sexism:

I'm glad to say I currently pass the test, but I can't help but think that the general attitude of this is kinda sexist in and of itself. The textbook seems to assume that the journalist in question is a man . . .