Special Guest Blog! Rich Rodriguez Tells Us How Not to Write (or Coach)

ANN ARBOR, MI—

Well, dadgumit. Just dadgummit.

Yeah, I’m a country boy from West Virginia, but you can stop making assumptions right there, mister. Even though you may think I sound like I’m a hillbilly, I’m pretty smart. Doggone smart.

I just wish I were still a Michigan Man™, if I ever was one.

After a school from Starksville, Miss.—Mississippi! hell, we even make fun of Mississippi in West Virginia!—trashed the Wolverines the other day, my boys are no longer my boys.

That’s because I lost my job as head football coach from the school that has more wins than any other in college history, that has the largest stadium in the country, and the greatest helmets known to humanity. Of course, if my defense hadn’t been as loose as a hooker at a traveling salesman convention…ah, forget it.

Now, this here Bookfraud fella went to Michigan, and tells me he covered the football team for the school paper or some crap when that there Bo Schembechler was coach. And the quarterback was Jim Harbaugh! The Stanford smarty-pants coach who everybody thought was gonna replace me before some NFL corncob offered him $8 billion to coach the 49ers! Dadgummit!

But I ain’t here to complain. I made my bed, leaving my alma mater three years ago (man! Were those Mountaineers pissed!) so I could go chase the big time. Bookfraud wants to act as if he’s productive as a blogger, but he’s really a lazy ol’ coot, so that sumabitch asked me to fill in today.

Here’s the thing: I read a lot, but I can’t say I’m a big writer. But the more I think about it, the more I gotta say there’s more than a little sumpthin’ similar to writing and coaching. At least at Michigan.

Now Bookiefraud still writes, he says, and I never met a sportswriter who was worth more than a loaf that a bear tossed after eating a fried prune po’boy. Fiction writers, sportswriters, court reporters, they are all about the same to me. A buncha nimrods, not Rich Rods, if you ask me.

Know the rules before you break them (especially about words)

Here’s the four sins them writers in the media said sunk me:

1. I was  a “bad fit.”

2. I didn’t know any of the Michigan “traditions,” whatever the bubbasnot those were, like giving the number “1″ jersey to the top receiver, and beating Ohio State, Michigan State, Toledo, and just about anybody else.

3. I was arrogant and didn’t listen to advice.

Let’s just stop at three, Okee dokee?

What Bookfraud tells me is that all three of these are applicable to writing. Like the “bat fit” stuff. You start writing stuff that’s “bad fit” the medium, and you better make damn well sure you have the right form for the right material. You don’t want to stuff novel-length plot into a short story, or make raccoon stew from a possum.

Number two, traditions. “When writing, break all the rules you want, just as long as you know that you’re breaking them,” I read somewhere. Meaning that you don’t piss everyone off for no reason and you don’t write stories with the word “buttjuice” unless you have a damn good reason for them. And I can’t think of not a one.

One tradition Rich Rod left intact
And there’s arrogance. When Bookfraud was a young ‘un, he didn’t listen to advice with his fiction, trying to develop his own voice, and he suffered. Then he went in the opposite direction, and let everybody’s every ass-backwards critique influence him. You got to learn to be humble, and listen to the people you can trust.

Aw, hell, what am I saying? I just got fired, I don’t know squat about writing, and Bookfraud is some Yankee cracker who thinks he knows better than me because he doesn’t speak with a twang.

What? You say Bookie’s originally a  Tennessee boy. And his dad grew up in Arkansas. Arkansas!

My last chance to make it seem like I’d been wronged, and Bookfraud ruins it by being a bigger redneck than me.

Dadgumit.