I had a memory trigger today while I was writing a post for Middle Grade Minded; it will go live tomorrow if you’d like to read it, and I hope you do. It’s called “Dear Middle Grade Minded: How to Write for Middle Grade.” In this post I tried to answer a question one of our readers sent in, asking about online writing classes we might know about that could help someone learn to write a book. While writing my response, I used one particular word — infested — that I have something of a history with, dating back to my freshman year of college.
It was the last few weeks of my freshman English class, part of that first battery of seventy or so credits that felt all too much like High School Plus. Most of the class was about writing, so I went into it feeling pretty sure I’d be able to sleepwalk my way to a good grade; try to imagine the insufferable overabundance of confidence I would have been carrying at eighteen years old. When I saw the professor liked to make points about what worked in our writing by reading different examples of student work, I started showing off more than a little to make sure she would bring up my name more than once. (This had a lot to do with my trying way too hard to get a cute redhead named Jennifer sitting three rows away to notice me. Again, eighteen.) My writing did read somewhat frequently, which had as much to do with me as it did with most of the others in the class being business students who planned on having careers where their assistants would do most of their writing for them someday.
The final paper of the course was a contrast/compare exercise. I chose to write about the two most popular pizza places back in my hometown — Dino’s Pizza and The Pizza Station. My paper clearly favored Dino’s for several reasons, the biggest being it was just beyond the edge of town. This made it next to impossible for junior high kids to get to since they couldn’t drive, while The Pizza Station was only a twenty minute walk away from the high school and whatever home game was going on that weekend.
In trying to illustrate how much better it was to go out with friends at a restaurant not filled to capacity with loud and obnoxious newly-minted teenagers, I made the creative choice to describe The Pizza Station as being “infested” with junior high kids. Our professor had a significant problem with this.
“Oh, no,” she said. “‘Infested?’ That’s really not the right word at all.”
“No,” my cocky young self replied. “It really is.”
“Oh, I don’t think you want to use that,” she continued. “Calling a restaurant infested is too negative of an image. It makes it sound like this place is filled with insects.”
At this point, one of the non-traditional students in our class, someone we all kind of looked up to because the guy was a real adult after all, spoke up. “That’s the point he’s making,” he said, gesturing back toward me. “You wanted comparison. He’s telling us that having a pizza joint full of thirteen-year-old kids would be just as bad as having it full of insects.”
“No, I’m sorry, I just don’t see that point at all,” she continued. Her high heels would have been dug into the neutral-colored floor tile if her legs had been strong enough.
Anyway, things ended in a draw, with her strongly encouraging me to find a way to revise the passage and me being convinced it was already perfectly communicating my point. Apparently we both felt very strongly about this, because I left the word in the final draft, and circling it was the only note she left on the paper for me, along with a big red “B” on the top of the first page. One word I wouldn’t budge on, one dropped grade on my final.
When I decided to use “infested” in my post today, I didn’t hesitate, but I did think back to this exchange. And I felt a tiny bit of smug satisfaction about it. My esteemed professor didn’t like the word, and here I was including it in a post written for a website regularly visited by any number of people in the publishing community.
I suppose if I got this far, my instincts must occasionally serve me well. So all these years later, I’m just going to say this:
I was right.
*mic drop*
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