Coffee Talk

I got my entry into the For Better or For Worse Elly’s Coffee Talk (http://www.fborfw.com/fun/blog/) today (Paul S. from Oro Valley, AZ, in case you want to look for it). It was not the first time I had sent something in, but it was the first one accepted and displayed. It was also the first one where my comments were swallowed in an effusion of praise for Lynn Johnston and it is because of this quality of the contribution, I am sure it was accepted.

Usually the nature of snarking the stories in For Better or For Worse also includes as a part of it snarking the person who wrote the stories in For Better or For Worse. There have certainly been a number of stories over the last year where the quality of the writing has been poor, at best (the Howard Bunt trial comes to mind). However, from time-to-time, things show up in the strip, which I cannot tell if they are poor characterization or excellent.

For example, when Elizabeth was in Mtigwaki, her school-teaching focus seemed to be almost entirely on one boy, Jesse Mukwa. The usual criticism of those stories has to do with Elizabeth showing a poor teaching habit of concentrating on Jesse and forsaking the other students in her class. However, Lynn Johnston showed Elizabeth having a similar problem during her student-teaching with a boy named Dylan, and even had a strip where Liz received criticism for concentrating on one student by her student evaluators. Then when Elizabeth went back to visit the boy in Mtigwaki after she moved, he confessed he had grown so attached to her, he had stolen a harmonica from her to have as a keepsake. Liz ultimately lets him keep the harmonica and rejoices internally when he says he misses her.

In Elizabeth’s newest school, we have seen her teach twice and in both cases, she concentrated on no one particular student. If I am looking at this from a writing perspective, I could draw the conclusion that Lynn Johnston has subtly shown us that Elizabeth has finally realized the lesson that the teaching evaluators tried to tell her during her student teaching. This could be an example of a nice, delicately-told story from Lynn Johnston in her characterization of Liz Patterson. The message comes across without the use of a sledgehammer, but it makes me wonder if Lynn Johnston simply hasn’t gotten around to establishing the bad boy in Liz’s classroom who will fulfill the Dylan / Jesse Mukwa role, and I am making a mistake in complimenting the writing.

The problem I have is that the point of so many of the For Better or For Worse stories are driven home by a sledgehammer, when one is told more gracefully, I mistrust that this is the effect of good story-writing. I think, “Well, this must have happened by sheer accident.” Or “She’ll get around to messing this up. Just wait.”

In my Coffee Talk submission, I complimented the writing of Becky McGuire’s dialogue from Saturday, saying that Lynn Johnston chose the words precisely to show that Becky misunderstood how particular April Patterson is about the qualifications for her friendship. The presumption of many who read the strip is that the Patterson character’s opinion is Lynn Johnston’s own, and I don’t know that this is truly the case. April has bad-mouthed Becky McGuire over and over again. Is this Lynn Johnston’s opinion of the character also? I have my doubts. Becky’s dialogue could have been worded in such a way to make it unmistakably clear that Becky is completely at fault for the problems she has had with April for the last 2 years. Was the dialogue poorly-worded because it didn’t spell that out explicitly, or was it cleverly-worded because it pointed to the real truth in their relationship, i.e. a good deal of why Becky and April are no longer good friends has to do with April?

The Coffee Talk monitor had no response to my submission, so I cannot tell. Needless to say, I have become motivated by my success and I plan to submit more such writing to Coffee Talk, if I can find another storyline where the writing is similarly ambiguous in its quality.