Whether or not you can tell, I studied English Writing and Rhetoric in college.

I’ve been reading Michael Ventura’s columns in The Austin Chronicle for years now. Oftentimes, I’ve found them the only items of substance in that weekly (discounting the music listings).

Since the start of the war in Iraq, he’s gone off on more than a few tangents that I never finished reading. It’s when he writes about himself, his experiences, his history and when he talks about writing (his column is called “Letters@3am“) and slips into philosophizing that I most love him.

In his most recent column, he focuses once again on writing, and I want to quote extensively the pieces with which I agree.

He begins by discussing the solitude of the writer sitting in a room writing, and how “no classroom can teach solitude.” This is true. Ventura adds, “Which is why most writing courses, by their very nature, ignore the fundamental thing a writer needs: the ability to cultivate the subtleties of solitude.” I think the word “subtleties” is very important here. I’m not certain that I agree with the oft-visualized image of the writer cloistered in a room in order to create something. Learning the “subtleties of solitude” requires finding that place in yourself — whether alone or in a crowded room — that allows you to focus and flow and work (because writing is no doubt work, no matter how much fun it may be).

Back to Ventura:

Good teachers can foster your strengths and alert you to your weaknesses. Bad teachers can swell your head or make you feel destructively insecure. Both good and bad can challenge you – the good challenge you to meet them on higher ground; the bad challenge you to learn in spite of them and to learn to be immune to their damage. But no one can teach you how you, in particular, are to write. You learn that only by writing. When you sit down to write, you discover the vast distance between experience and language. Then, painfully, by fits and starts, with many failures, you learn how to build your own bridges between experience and language until, for you, the two become one and the same: Your experience creates your language, and your language embodies your experience. When this is achieved, it’s called having a style.

. . .

[T]he development of your vision and hearing is as important as the development of your language. Your writing will only be as good as your seeing and listening.

A good teacher can make you aware of what you must learn on your own, and a very good teacher can ignite elements in you of which you were previously unaware. A bad teacher will give you rules and regulations for what writing is and is not, and a very bad teacher will only approve writing that’s like his or her own or like his or her favorite writers. The techniques of prose and poetry can be taught by any competent teacher, but only through reading many and varied writers can you learn the range of what words can do and how words behave.

. . .

In the arts, a degree means nothing. Completed work means everything. When I taught a graduate-student seminar, I regretted that the degree they worked for is called “master.” I told them, “When you complete this degree, you’re in no way a master. This degree only certifies that, according to the standards of this institution, you’re ready to begin.”

Of course, anyone can begin at any time. Just sit down and start. It’s never too early or too late.

. . .

(Don’t look for shortcuts. If you’re to be a writer, there aren’t any.)

. . .

As I told my boy, when he was still a boy, “I don’t care if you go to college as long as you read one or two good books a month – books about anything, as long as they’re good and they speak to you. Do that, and by the time you’re 30, you’ll be way ahead of most who attended college.” College or not, if you don’t read one or two good books a month, then by the time you’re 30, your conversation will become, to put it kindly, confined.

. . .

Forty-odd years ago, my 17-year-old girlfriend Antonia summed up literary theory (of which we’d not yet heard) when she said, “I have learned that no one can write fast enough to write a true sentence.” And yet sentences can bear truths and put them in our reach.

. . .

Meanwhile … write, read, discover. Find your voice. Use it.

On the first day of any class I teach, I hand out a saying of the Buddha. It is a maxim that I pray my graduates will tape to their dorm-room mirrors throughout their college years: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.”

I agree with those parts in particular, but you should read the whole piece for yourself.

And the quote at the end, let that be the maxim of this blog.