Donald Hall's Letter

Today was a glorious day indeed.

I started by doing the most specific of the revisions Mrs. Lemeris and I discussed yesterday for the playground, classroom, and car essays. Most of these were based on diction, syntax, and sometimes, as I am embarrassed to admit, mechanics. A lot of these revisions breezed by pretty quickly, although there were a few that confounded me. For example, there's a specific paragraph in the car essay that contains a lot of complex ideas and syntax, and it took me half an hour to fix it up. I was constantly switching words and phrases around in different ways. I plan on returning to it, because I'm still not sure that it's perfect.

After this, I added endings to the pieces that were lacking them, and I'm proud to say that all of the pieces but the church essay have endings. Finally adding a conclusion to these pieces after two weeks of obsessing over their main bodies was relieving, to say the least.

Afterward, I went through the playground essay and added to some parts where I hadn't quite finished my ideas. I love the way this essay has come out.

I plan on working more tonight. I want to read through every essay and figure out what's left to be done. While reading, I want to keep in mind that the entire piece should be focused on the development toward the end. I predict that the revision that's left will be mostly refocusing essays.

The best component of today was not in the work, however. I received a letter from none other than Donald Hall! I had written him one just before senior project started, a letter that sang his praises and then asked him questions about being a writer, but I had not sent it until Friday purely out of anxiety that it was not a perfect letter. But Mr. Hall responded with great interest in everything I had written; he responded to my praise (although he seemed bashful to do so), he responded to my story of my personal connection to his poem "Name of Horses," and he answered all of the questions I asked about the life of a writer.

I was surprised at how his life and mine are both similar and different. For example, he says that he does not keep a journal regularly, although he likes the idea, but uses his letter-writing as a form of journal writing. I, too, like the idea of journals but have trouble sticking to them, and I love to keep my letters as records of my personal development. However, while I have had trouble with writing multiple drafts of my essays, he says that he never creates less than forty drafts of a piece and has even made two hundred for a few poems! When I spoke about this with Kris, he pointed out that that is especially amazing because he is such a prolific writer.

I found out all sorts of wonderful things about his life through his life, and I actually got to communicate with one of our nation's greatest writers, and he actually took interest in what I had to say!

One of his final messages was in response to my request for general tips for young writers:

"Tips: Read the old poets! The 17th century is the best for poetry. I have moved from one infatuation to another, which has been my education. Take a look at the poetry of Thomas Hardy some time. My other tip is excessive revision, but I think that the number of revisions, in my case, has grown exponentially as I have gotten older. Probably I wrote poems in my twenties when I used only ten drafts or so."

At least there's hope for me!

Thanks so much to Laurie for providing me with his address!

A glorious day indeed!

This entry definitely contains the greatest amount of exclamation points I have used in any blog entry thus far!