My bookshelves groan with texts on the writing process, and many of them gather dust for years. Arthur Plotnik's guides are among the handful I reach for repeatedly for their insight, good humor, and inspiration. They wear so well over time.

I was delighted when Arthur agreed to an interview for Choice Literacy, and I wasn't surprised by his humility. Even with his impressive experience, there is a sense in his writing that he is always waiting to be delighted by the next new turn of phrase around the corner in a conversation or book.

His distinguished background includes stints as a writer and editor for the Library of Congress, contributor to publications ranging from La Prensa (Bolivia) and Playboy to The New York Times, and his current work as a writer for The Writer magazine and member of its editorial board. As a publisher, Plotnik brought five national awards to the American Library Association's book imprint. He also won numerous honors as editor of ALA's flagship magazine, American Libraries.

Editors coach writers, and Plotnik is that rare writer who is also able to coach editors with style and flair. My favorite books by Plotnik are Spunk and Bite: A Writer's Guide to Punchier, More Engaging Language and Style and Elements of Expression, and I refer to them often when I am coaching and coaxing the writers in my care. I know his wisdom will help you edit the work of the students in your care, too.

Brenda Power

Editor, Choice Literacy

A transcript of the interview is available below the player.

If you would prefer to read an excerpt from Spunk and Bite before listening to the interview, you can access "Writers' Words, Drops by Dottle" at this link:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/469.cfm

Brenda Power: I first discovered your work at the Poynter Institute site, which is really the professional development site for journalists. You don't find many people who are writers who really look so much at the process of writing themselves. You take a different tack than a lot of writers.

Arthur Plotnik: I think it comes out of editing. I've been editing in school publications -- journalism and college literary magazines, and I was a librarian - but they soon pulled me into an editing position. And editing makes you analytic about other peoples' writing. That's a wonderful way to develop your own writing.

As you learn the elements of what is effective, you see all the faults that you've corrected. I probably ruined a lot of writing careers in my earlier editing experience, but certainly that got me interested in the craft more than writers who don't have that opportunity.

Brenda: It's interesting to me because I started first as a writer and teacher myself, and then gradually over time developed more of an aptitude and did more and more editing. Now I'm pretty much a full-time editor. I found it was so hard in the transition not to try and take over other writers' drafts as I was editing. Do you ever find it's just hard sometimes to keep that boundary between the writing and the editing when you're a writer yourself?

Arthur: Yes, it's called the hardest impulse in the world, not to change someone else's writing to the way you would say it. Learning restraint is a big step in your development as an editor. Then you begin to appreciate individual styles, and you don't hear only your own voice. You hear other voices you can steal from.

[Laughter]

Brenda: That's right. Can you tell me what advice you have for teachers of writing who are working with young students who are just beginning to develop their voices?

Arthur: I was afraid you might ask that. Let me just offer the caveat that I'm pretty naive as a teacher of writing. It's such a complex and challenging field. I had some education courses back in the cave days but things have changed so much. I'll be as naive as people who use to speak to library audiences and tell them that we've got to stop shushing our patrons.

With that caveat, my philosophy swings to the permissive or descriptive approach to writing and teaching in grammar rather than the proscriptive idea that there is one correct form and that choice English is a higher order than the other patterns. The times are right now for an understanding of correctness in relative terms, with the global society and our recognition of all the patterns of expression.

Yet choice English certainly is the most successful one in educated society and the most logical. So that's the approach - to let students run, and then teach them to listen and walk. Let them write something, then teach them how to improve it, but with that philosophy that there is more than one way and more than one pattern of effective expression. All teachers know that - they know that students speak effectively one way to their peers and then have to be persuaded to use choice English as a tool for getting along in society.

Brenda: What really marks your books for me is there is such a sense of playfulness and fun in them with language. I think that a lot of teachers would also say if we need to engage students and help them see that there is play in putting words in different orders. If we don't, they're not going to be engaged to the point where they want to try out different revision strategies or really take the risks that are involved with trying a new word or trying a new way of ordering words.

Arthur: It's such a challenge to bring that play in and yet still drum in the fundamentals of language and mechanics. Textbooks even have seemed to have changed, to embrace of a lot of the playful exercises and better subjects is an example. Among trade books there is a series of vampire grammar books and many others that take a playful approach to grammar and punctuation. For example Eats, Shoots & Leaves brings personality to all the elements of punctuation, Common Sense by Richard Lederer does the same thing -- there is a lot of play in that book.

Brenda: What books have influenced you most as models of writing? Do you look at those grammar guru books as you write yourself, or do you turn to novels and different favorite authors? Certainly you give so many different examples from so many genres in your books.

Arthur: Right now I'm surrounded by a room full of grammar and word books which I've gathered and read and used. Ironically, one of the models from my own work was Strunk and White's Element of Style which inspired my first book on elements of editing. That influenced me not just as a concept, but as teaching text with some personality to it. That's the kind of writing books I want to write.

And how did I pay back Strunk and White? By crying fowl in Spunk and Bite on some of his restrictive advice, proving that no good deed goes unpunished. But I'm also influenced by classics like William Zinnser's On Writing Well, Sheridan Baker's The Practical Stylist. My literary influences go way back to Jack Kerouac and my Iowa writers workshop teachers, Phillip Roth, Vance Bourjaily and just a mix of modern writers, Annie Proulx, John Updike, Bill Bryson, Sandra Cisneros. I love writers who can mix their diction high and low. That's a good thing for students to see -- that choice English is a pallet with a million shades and room for even interjection of nonstandard English. It's not a restrictive form of expression.

Brenda: Right, it's almost that you need to know the rules well enough that you know when and how you are breaking them. There is a real inventiveness - you seem to be encouraging people to try new forms and word choices just to find their own voice too. I guess there is that line between. I can remember when I first read Annie Dillard I wrote so many sentences that were "So." -- I just loved that invention of hers.

You see that with students too. Even the youngest students, when they love a book, when they are six, seven ,and eight, you'll see them in writer's workshop just copying word for word. Their teacher has to tell them the difference between imitation of a style and actual plagiarism. There really is something to be said for taking on lots of different styles as you mentioned, all those different eclectic mix of authors and until you find your own.

Arthur: Yes, you get that mix in your head. All those voices mix with your own upbringing, the expression you learn from your parents, your peers, and certain role models. That comes out as what we call voice. I don't know how much you can work at a voice, it just becomes that down the line. And Stephen Pinker says that we are hardwired for all our sentence structures you know.

Brenda: That's right.

Arthur: Just read and then apply those wires, nothing to it.

Brenda: Well, that's the big question -- how much formal instruction should there be of those, as you said, choice or standard conventions?

Arthur: Writing instruction, I don't know. Maybe as little as necessary to get them going and as they write those that can be applied to individual writing. Of course that is difficult in large classes where you have to work with each individual essay and find where their weaknesses and strengths are, but that is teaching I suppose. I believe in certain fundamentals - they are pretty much fixed. Grammar evolves but it's not a Wiki.

Brenda: Right.

Arthur: And resistance to the core is a good thing or we'd have a battle of Protean forms. Grammar is a tool that evolves right in your hands as you are using it. Students just need to understand that.