A guest post by Cassie McClure
The long walks frame our days during the quarantine. It starts the day and ends the day. My dog has become slimmer; I have not.
While discussing the abrupt end of the school year for my daughter during one of the walks, I told my mom about a recent article I had read. A data-ladened piece, that somehow was still tinged with anxiety-inducing barbs, detailed how being ripped from school was going to be traumatizing and how the unknown spiral of time before kids went back would be time wasted for them.
My mom scoffed at the notion.
“Is there really such a thing as time wasted? There isn’t,” she said.
In the moment, and even now, it gives me comfort, especially as a procrastinator. But how does looking at “no time is truly wasted” shake out for the writer’s life if you are a procrastinator? How deep can you go down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia, Reddit, or TikTok before claiming that your research and your percolation of ideas are actually just a gluttony for prolonging the anguish of pushing back against time and deadline?
My argument is that as a writer, when you read and take in culture, there is no wasted time, even with the “mindless” articles that come to you via scrolling. Just think about how you’re entering the parlor.
Kenneth Burke, philosopher and rhetorician, discussed a “never-ending parlor” conversation that is happening at the point of history in which we are born. I’ve discussed this as a concrete way for my freshman in our college class to have their writing “make sense” and “have a point” in the flow of academic conversation, so long as they have enough of a grasp of who else is talking and what has been already said.
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.” (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action 3rd ed. 1941. Univ. of California Press, 1973)
Even last year there had been interest from several students in my class to write about policing in communities. One student, originally from the Navajo reservation, couldn’t see an argument he could make within that theme that interested him. I asked him what his experiences had been.
“Not too many,” he said. “Even if you call, there aren’t enough cops and if they do come, it takes hours for them to get there.”
Had he seen that angle told? His eyes widened and he was off to find a place in the conversation for himself, his experiences, and the statistics that could frame a small argument for a freshman composition class. He had to see their work in terms of a larger conversation, and that’s how you must see yours.
Just because we’re in a hot dumpster fire of history right now doesn’t mean we still can’t marvel at the evolution of communication and activism on TikTok. Just because we’ve read another sloppy clickbait article on forgotten couples from the 1990s – Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston? – doesn’t mean that we won’t suddenly think about new ideas for a piece on how our exes don’t define our future. Or… how they most likely don’t.
As a columnist, I’m continually taking one idea and framing it through the lens of life as we live it now. Immersion in our culture is crucial to be the storytellers that report back to those outside the parlor.
Cassie McClure is a writer, wife/mama/daughter, fan of the Oxford comma, and drinker of tequila. Some of those things relate.
She writes a nationally syndicated column called “My So-Called Millennial Life” at Creators.com and can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com.