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 #679: THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

 

So I found this last week or so while going through my things, trying to figure out what I want to save and what I'm OK with never seeing again. I thought, why not save this for a GF? And then I posted last night's column, and I realized tonight would be the perfect time for this.

If you can't tell what that is in the picture, it's a photocopied bundle of pages from a Writer's Market book. Once upon a time, around when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, I took a creative writing course in high school. I'm fairly certain it was the first year it had been offered, and it was supposed to be for seniors, but I took it as a sophomore.

Mr. Langner was the teacher, and he must have recognized something in me because I'm pretty sure he didn't take any of his other students aside like he did me. That bundle of pages above? He put that in my hand and told me that there are people in the world WHO ACTUALLY MAKE MONEY FROM WRITING. It was a real eye-opener for me. He even knew what I wanted to write, so he copied the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror section of the Writer's Market. The keys to the kingdom.

If you weren't writing back then, the Writer's Market was an annual book published by Writer's Digest. It contained places to send your work to. That was our version of the internet back then. So I pored over those pages and started submitting stories immediately.

Long story short, if you're looking for someone to blame for me, you might want to think about Mr. Langner. I probably would have found out eventually, but because of him I got a very early start and got the hope appropriately beaten out of me earlier in life and got me very familiar with rejection from the beginning.

More things a beginning writer needs to know. But that's all for tonight. Goodnight, fuckers, and good luck.

PS: If you want to know what is in those boxes, they are packed to the brim with reject letters. There are three boxes there, and that's not even all of the rejects I've gotten. I've gotten rejected by some of the best. One day I might go through those and look for the ones with personal notes. For nostalgia.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #578: CREATIVE WRITING

 Earlier today I decided to upgrade my tiny notebooks in which I kept track of all of my story submissions over the years. I had some Office Depot points, so I got a couple of Moleskine notebooks for free. I'll be using those going forward.

But I've been using these things since high school, when I first learned that I could actually make money from writing stories. I'd taken a creative writing class with Mr. Langner. It was a class for seniors, but I took it as a sophomore. They let me in because they saw how serious I was about writing. There were fourteen of us, I think, including my friend Rob Tannahill's sister. At the end of the year Mr. Langner published a booklet with the work we'd created as a result of our time in that class.

He was the one who introduced me to Writer's Market, and up until the internet age I got that book every year and sent thousands of submissions out. He'd photocopied the SF/Fantasy/Horror section and put it in my greedy little hands.

Anyway, almost everyone wrote poems for that booklet. I wrote a story. A very long story, actually. Considering the subject matter, if I had done this as a student today, I'd be on the news as some kind of potential school shooter stopped by a forward thinking teacher. Even by the standards of 1994/95 it was pretty bad.

I'd written a story called "Serial Killer." And you don't have to imagine very much to figure out what it was about. There were a few grisly murders in that one to say nothing of the sexuality involved.

I still have a copy of that one. Two, actually. I'm pretty sure Rob gave me his sister's copy at some point in my life. I eventually expanded it into a novel length work, and it is the one and only novel I've ever written that a Big Five publishing house wanted to see in its entirety. This was back when there were more than five. In case you're wondering, an editor at Random House read my sample chapters and asked to see the rest of the book. I can't tell you how happy that made me feel. I had a chance at the big time!

And then they rejected me. They probably should have. If I remember correctly I was a freshman in college at the time. That book, by the way, will never see the light of day. It's pretty bad, and there's no amount of editing that can fix that.

To think of how different my life could have been!