Opinion: Listen to your muse

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By PARKER POTTER

Published: 08-10-2024 8:00 AM

Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dog walker who lives and works in Contoocook.

I have always been a writer, and not long after I first put pen to paper (yes, I am that old), I began making unconventional writing choices.

In high school, I glued a Wheatie (I assume that “Wheatie” is the singular of “Wheaties”) to a book report on Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions,” and I even got some extra credit for the massive size of the wheat flake I dug out of the box.

In college, I concluded a comparative literature essay this way: “What ties these novels together is that each author asks, in his own way, ‘why do I feel like a rusty blade on the rototiller of life.’” My professor must have also been a gardener; he gave me an A.

When an archaeological journal I frequently published in banned the use of the first person, I wrote a protest essay in which I substituted “Eye” for “I.” After my Eye essay appeared in one publication, the editor of another publication liked it so much that she reprinted it.

In a law school class on judicial opinion drafting, I wrote an opinion in which I referred to “Alice in Wonderland.” My instructor told me that no judge would ever make such a reference. Years later, I published three or four lengthy law-review articles documenting several hundred references to “Alice in Wonderland” in published judicial opinions, including one by my father-in-law, who was a U.S. Tax Court judge.

As a law clerk, I worked for judges who preferred to write in an unadorned style. Once, when I came across a quotation from an ancient Chinese philosopher, Mencius, that applied perfectly to the judicial task of statutory construction, I knew I could never get it past my judge, so I offered a $20 prize to the first law clerk in the courthouse who could get the quote into an opinion by his or her judge. It wasn’t too long until I had to pay up.

The long and the short of it is that listening to my muse has usually served me well. Two longer stories really drive home the point.

In college, I had an English professor who was a real stickler for proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar. He stickled. I stunk. Or stank. You see my problem. Once, after calling the paper I wrote on “Paradise Lost” the best essay on Satan he had ever read, my professor gave me a B- for all my technical shortcomings.

At the end of the semester, I was locked into a C, regardless of how I did on the final paper. Me being me, I decided to go out in style, and I tried for an F. We were studying English romantic poetry, and I decided to write about a poem by Robert Southey, who was not on the list of suggested subjects. Southey, a minor poet, is best known for writing “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

In my paper, I discussed Southey’s use of irony, calling some of his irony too big, some of it too small, and some of it just right. You get the idea. At the end, I even managed to work in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Here’s the kicker. While I tried to earn an F, I got my highest grade of the semester on that paper. Completely by accident, I managed to BS the one professor I would never have tried to BS. Go figure.

Many years later, in law school, a partner and I entered a national moot court competition that required us to write an appellate brief. We were each responsible for half of it. The biggest lesson I learned in first-year legal writing was to stifle any thoughts of clever writing or creativity.

With that in mind, I tried to take the most conservative approach I could think of to the legal issue before me, so I took a deep dive into legislative history. I did my research and wrote my half of the brief. Then, my partner and I sent our brief to each of the other thirty-one teams in the competition and waited for their briefs to arrive.

As I read the other teams’ briefs, I became increasingly concerned because nobody else had taken the approach that I had. Despite trying to do the most conservative thing I could think of, I was all alone on my little island of legislative history.

My concerns persisted and grew, all the way through the first two rounds of oral arguments at the competition site until a most amazing thing happened. My partner and I won the award for writing the best brief in the entire competition. All my fretting and second guessing were for nothing.

At a time when more and more writing is being generated by artificial intelligence (say it ain’t so, Sports Illustrated) it seems like a good time to reflect on one thing that AI doesn’t have, a Puckish muse whispering in its ear.