The NSS Awards #10

From the Washington Post: "Paper by Cho Exhibits Disturbing Parallels to Shootings, Sources Say."

Reactions to real horror

Various writers chime in on the Virginia Tech shootings.

• Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post:

First is the peculiar nature of the gun violence. Cho, it seems, wasn't a sniper, a marksman. He wasn't shooting carefully, at a distance. He wasn't, one can assume, aiming. He was shooting very much like Chow in the Woo pictures, with a gun in each hand, as witnesses state, up close, very fast. Woo saw gunfights in musical terms: His primary conceit was the shootout as dance number, with great attention paid to choreography, the movement of both actors within the frame. He loved to send his shooters flying through the air in surprising ways, far more poetically than in any real-life scenario. He frequently diverted to slow motion and he specialized in shooting not merely to kill, but to riddle -- his shooters often blast their opponents five and six times. Perhaps all that was at play in Cho's mind as well.

• A. O. Scott in The New York Times:

From this near-certainty Mr. Hunter makes a short trip to the assertion that during his rampage Mr. Cho “was shooting a John Woo movie in his head.” Evidence for this speculation is found in Mr. Woo’s fondness for two-fisted gunmanship, which Mr. Hunter credits him with introducing into movies, and also in a scene from “The Killer” that Mr. Hunter finds “strikingly similar to what must have happened Monday.”

It is hard to say what all this proves, other than that Mr. Hunter has no peer when it comes to wielding the conditional tense on deadline. He does not suggest that Mr. Woo is to blame for Mr. Cho’s actions. But his article does conjure a story line — the loner in his room watching ultraviolent movies on DVD, gathering inspiration for his own real-life action movie — that has unmistakable and familiar implications. Like guns, it seems, certain movies in the wrong hands can pose a threat to public safety.

This may be true, but only to the extent that a disturbed mind is apt to seek external confirmation of its own disturbance. It seems somewhat fair to conclude that Mr. Hunter, in linking Mr. Cho’s rampage to Mr. Woo’s films, was simply trying to make a guess as to the features of the killer’s mental world.

• Finally, Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly:

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

Context is everything

• Sarah Elizabeth Richards details the unique challenge faced by creative-writing teachers in Salon.

A well-balanced look at how creative writing teachers have to judge the stability of their students, based on their classwork. This was a tricky tightrope to walk across even before the Virginia Tech shootings:

"Traditionally, [instructors] have thought of themselves as nurturing academic or creative faculties. They don't think of themselves as counselor or being warning systems for spotting mental health problems," says Rob Jones, senior vice president and general counsel for claims management and risk research for United Educators, an insurance company for more than 1,000 educational institutions. "We'd like them to think of whether they could be gatekeepers for identifying students at risk."

The company currently is making the rounds at colleges to present and discuss this training scenario: An English professor comes across the worrisome writing of a suicidal student. What should she do? The correct answer, according to Jones, is for the instructor to contact the student affairs office or campus counseling center. "You can't expect an English professor to make those kinds of determinations based on someone's writings," he says. "But they are the ones who have a window into someone's soul."

People seem to be fascinated by the line that separates fact and fiction. Anytime a writer stands up in front of a group of people, the same questions are always asked: "Is this based on your life?" "Who were the characters inspired by?" And so on and so forth. It's true that you reveal yourself through your work -- it's inevitable. Especially if you're really good -- the best writers always seem to have pet themes, obsessions that pop up everywhere. English teachers aren't therapists, no, nor are they necessarily qualified to make an informed call about someone's mental state.

But if I'd ever brought a piece to the workshop table that in any way resembled Cho Seung-Hui's, questions would be asked immediately. Which leads me to:

While writing instructors can't ignore alarming screeds, a better barometer may be to see if a student's behavior matches. "It's one thing when [a student] hands in a disturbing story, and he's friendly and nice," explains Tamas Dobozy, a visiting scholar who teaches a fiction writing workshop at NYU. "He's just trying to create a horrific story. Then you get a student who hands in normal work, but is strange. Is there a connection between the work and student? Sometimes yes and sometimes no."

Landau, creative writing director at NYU, adds that a lot of students deal with troubling topics in their writing, from date rape to incest to mental illness. "Students are often bringing their lives to class in the form of their work," she says. Teachers should worry, she says, when students also act troubled in the classroom. If a student seems dangerous, Landau immediately reports him or her to a dean. Otherwise, her first strategy is to call students into her office, ask if they need help, and remind them of counseling services.

At her new job, Richman tries to assess the level of horror at the outset. If students bring in disturbing work, she's much quicker to tell them, "I think you put this in for shock value. There's no literary merit." She adds: "I don't want to squelch anyone's creativity. But there's a tendency for young people to say, 'I'm going to be as gross and twisted as I can be.' [The goal] isn't just to push limits. There are skills to be learned."

Good point. Context is everything. Writers are thin-skinned by nature. Writing is personal expression and it's very, very important. Put something out in front of others and you get all parental and protective: This is my child, don't hurt my child. Lots of times you'll see the intent of a writer -- they're trying to show you how funny they are, or how smart they are, or how intense they can be -- without seeing work that actually relays those intents. Workshop anything and you'll definitely get the guy who's grandstanding, trying to shock people or outrage them, and nine times out of ten it's transparent posturing.

An authentic whiff of madness shouldn't necessarily be taboo, though. Great art is very often a daredevil highwire act -- pushing the envelope is the reason that most of us crack our knuckles and get down to it. But those 99.9% of us who understand that a dramatic device like an act of violence is meaningless if it has no context. You do structure a work around its most piercing moments, so that it makes sense in the world that you've created -- it has no real impact otherwise. You don't fill up pages with bile and cruelty and hatred and get away with it clean just because it's shocking. There's shocking in the sense that a well-timed and -structured plot bomb can have, and then there's just madness spewed out onto the page.

To be perfectly honest I'm still trying to sort all this out for myself. But I do think that the signs were there. The writing was quite literally on the wall. Yeah, it's easy to see all this in hindsight. But when you come up against something like real evil, you always know it, and more -- much, much more -- should have been done about it.

One of the fallen

My childhood friend, Jeremy Herbstritt, who died on Monday in the Virginia Tech shootings. Rest in peace.

A teacher chimes in

• Nikki Giovanni talks to CNN about her former student Cho Seung-Hui.

Professors and classmates were alarmed by his class writings — pages filled with twisted, violence-drenched writing.

"It was not bad poetry. It was intimidating," poet Nikki Giovanni, one of his professors, told CNN Wednesday.

"I know we're talking about a youngster, but troubled youngsters get drunk and jump off buildings," she said. "There was something mean about this boy. It was the meanness — I've taught troubled youngsters and crazy people — it was the meanness that bothered me. It was a really mean streak."

Giovanni said her students were so unnerved by Cho's behavior, including taking pictures of them with his cell phone, that some stopped coming to class and she had security check on her room. She eventually had him taken out of her class, saying she would quit if he wasn't removed.

A plea for sanity

Like everyone else I've been following the story of the Virginia Tech shootings with equal parts horror, shock and disgust. Now the AP is reporting that the gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, was an English major at VT whose writings (go here to read two of Cho's one-act plays) so disturbed the faculty that he was recommended for counseling:

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws.

Obviously we cannot and should not rush to judgment until more facts are in. Nor should we penalize anyone for not having the correct amount of psychic ability to see into the future. My parents are professors at Penn State and believe me, I can understand and sympathize with the enormous challenge that managing and overseeing hundreds, if not thousands, of students every day presents.

However, it was a catastrophic and terrible decision on the part of the VT faculty to not address Seung-Hui's situation immediately and forcefully. There's no excuse for letting bureaucratic nonsense slow down a counseling process that should have begun quickly and ended definitively. Again, hindsight being what it is, it's unfair to direct blame at VT, however they may or may not have botched the situation, but this type of thing always has its warning signs. And that, unfortunately, is exactly the type of contradictory truth that these situations have in spades.

The photo above, it needs to be said, does not represent all writer-types who are quiet and like to be left alone and who write things that are occasionally wacky and a little fucked up. I write stuff like that all the time. According to my sister, I'm a little nuts. And I own guns -- I have since I was 14. But I've never, ever, ever picked one up and wanted to use it to hurt someone. Guns don't kill people. Crazy does. There's a line and I've always known exactly where it is. Most people do.

I drive through Blacksburg all the time. I've been on the VT campus more than once. In the spring of 2000 I visited a high-school friend who was attending VT, and at the time she was living in West Ambler Johnston Hall, the site of the first of the shootings. When this story first broke yesterday morning I felt a chill, because I've been there.

[UPDATE: And, sadly, as it turns out, I know one of the kids that was killed. His name was Jeremy Herbstritt. I grew up with him in rural Pennsylvania; we were in 4-H together for many years. He was a skinny, energetic, bighearted and crazy kid whom I loved to hang out with. This just keeps getting worse and worse.]

Lots of blaming and finger-pointing is going to fly around over this for a while. It will inevitably become someone else's fault that Cho Seung-Hui picked up a pair of 9mms and started blasting away, regardless of the simple fact that his was the only finger on the triggers. And as I said, there are also going to be a lot of contradictory truths flying around. People with major, major issues don't just blow their stacks apropos of nothing, but then again, events like this cannot, by their very nature, be predicted with any certainty. I can sympathize with a young man who's confused and angry and uses writing as an outlet to express dark fantasies, but I cannot condone the actions of someone who systematically murders 32 innocent people in the coldest of blood.

This is a terrible, terrible tragedy in the truest sense of the definition.