Two years ago, on April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech was the scene of a heinous shooting rampage. Soon after, I wrote the below essay, which was published as the cover story in Liberty magazine in July 2007.

The Failed Playwright of Virginia Tech

After Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech on April 17, 2007, media attention quickly turned to the “warning signs.” Whenever one of these mass school shootings occurs, much is made of the warning signs that were missed. How could school officials or family members not have known what these shooters were planning? How could they not have known about the bullying, the hours in the garage building pipe bombs, the rage, the isolation? How could they not have seen the violent video games and aggressive music as the clues that, in retrospect, some believed they clearly were?

This standard narrative that follows mass school shootings unraveled before it really got going in the Virginia Tech case. Cho’s warning signs were everywhere, and no one seemed to miss any of them. There were stalking accusations, psychological evaluations, police reports, and freaked-out professors and students. Even Cho’s creative writing — the ostensible cause of the freaked-out professors and students — was taken as a warning sign. 

In fall 2005, Cho’s poetry professor, Nikki Giovanni, insisted that, because his “poetry was so intimidating — and his behavior so menacing,” he be removed from her course. According to cnn.com, “Giovanni went to the department’s then-chairwoman, Lucinda Roy, and told her, ‘I was willing to resign before I was going to continue with him.’ Roy took Cho out of Giovanni’s class.” Roy taught Cho herself, one on one, but “[h]is writings were so disturbing, she said, that she went to the police and university administrators for help.” His poems, to my knowledge, have not been made available to the public. However, two of his plays have been. Shortly after the shooting, Cho’s former classmate Ian MacFarlane, an AOL employee, posted an entry on AOL News Bloggers containing the full text of “Richard McBeef” and “Mr. Brownstone.” Both pieces were submitted by Cho to a playwriting class that he and MacFarlane attended. The plays are described, in a warning by AOL, as containing “disturbing content.” MacFarlane goes further:

When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.

Early in the blog’s comments section, there was broad agreement about the clear signal the plays were sending. One woman, Judi, wrote, “Why didn’t his instructors see that something was very seriously wrong with this man at the time of this writing[?]” Another commenter, Blackdog, wrote, “I’m very surprised that writing like this didn’t get the attention of the school authorities. He was obviously a very angry young man and relayed issues that he had through his writing.” A third commenter, Linda, wrote, “Guess I’m naive, but this piece of porn should’ve elicited some kind of action when he turned it in. Perhaps, in our depraved society, this was not considered out of the ‘norm’.”

These early commenters on the blog did not know when they wrote the above that, indeed, Cho’s creative writing had attracted the attention not only of school authorities but also of the police. When asked, however, “about Roy’s concerns that Cho was writing troubling plays and poems in his classes,” Chief Wendell Flinchum said, “These course assignments were for a creative writing course and the students were encouraged to be imaginative and artistic. The writings did not express any threatening intentions or allude to criminal activity. No criminal violation had taken place.”

Giovanni said that the poems were not violent. “It’s not like, ‘I’ll rip your heart out.’ It’s that, ‘Your bra is torn, and I’m looking at your flesh.’ ” No student or professor who had read Nabokov’s Lolita or much that has been published in recent decades would be frightened by this sexually charged content, in and of itself. If the plays — which, unlike the poems, do contain violence — are any indication of the disturbing content in Cho’s creative writing, I would argue that not only hadn’t a criminal violation taken place, but the writing itself wasn’t much cause for concern, and wasn’t enough reason to contact the police.

I’ve been teaching creative writing on the university level for about seven years. I’ve taught such courses as writing fiction, writing humor and comedy, and introductory creative writing. Before the Virginia Tech shooting, receiving a story with the kind of violence contained in Cho’s plays — absent some exceptionally odd student behavior — wouldn’t have elicited a second thought. Cho’s classmate MacFarlane refers to the plays’ “twisted, macabre violence,” and a commenter refers to them as “porn.” While “Richard McBeef” certainly has some violent content, it’s rather tame, cartoonish violence and is not gruesome. “Mr. Brownstone” is hardly violent at all.

In “Mr. Brownstone,” the characters do curse a lot. They are at a casino and spend much of the play complaining about their mean teacher, Mr. Brownstone. They talk about wanting to kill him. They see him at the casino, and they taunt him. They sing a song. Then they win a slot machine jackpot, and Mr. Brownstone accuses them of stealing his jackpot. Brownstone is believed, and the kids are thrown out of the casino. The play ends with all three kids yelling, “You won’t get away with this, Brownstone! You old muthafucker! Muthafucker! Muthafucker!” That’s it. No one is killed or even assaulted.

In “Richard McBeef,” John begins by saying to his stepfather, Richard, “What’s up, Dick!” Richard attempts to have a talk with John, to try to get along with him, but John is having none of it. He chews on a cereal bar “angrily.” When Richard casually rests his hand on John’s knee for a second, in an apparently innocent, fatherly manner, Cho throws in a couple of lame pedophilia jokes, having John refer both to Catholic priests and to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. John accuses Richard of murdering his biological father in order to get into John’s mother’s “pant.” Richard denies it and remains calm, and John stays on the offensive, continually cutting Richard off and finally saying, “You want me to shove this remote control up your ass, buddy! You ain’t even worth it man. This remote was five bucks. You are such a–”

This impertinence brings the first threat of violence from Richard, who says, “NOW THAT’S ENOUGH,” and “raises his hand to strike his stepson.” John’s mother, Sue, walks in at this moment, confronts Richard, and mocks his “chubby face.” John accuses Richard of trying to “touch my privates,” and Sue then attacks Richard, slapping him in the head “multiple times” and even hitting him with her shoes, hard. The violence and over-the-top dialogue continue from here, with Sue throwing a plate at Richard and calling him a “fat piece of pork” and a “bisexual psycho rapist murderer.”

John is alone in his room at this point, throwing darts at a picture of Richard’s face and talking to himself about killing Richard. He then rejoins the others and once again accuses Richard of molesting him. Sue drives Richard from the home by brandishing a chainsaw. At the end of the play, alone in the car with Richard, John goes on an extended rant, insulting his stepfather for a long paragraph before sticking his “half-eaten banana cereal bar in his stepfather’s mouth and [attempting] to shove it down his throat.” Richard removes the cereal bar, and the play ends with stage direction: “Out of sheer desecrated hurt and anger, Richard lifts his large arms and swings a deadly blow at the thirteen year old boy.”

“Richard McBeef” does conclude with, presumably, a murder (taken literally, John is killed by Richard’s “deadly blow”), and there is the use of shoes, plates, and a cereal bar as weapons. But the violence hardly seems real, and is mostly derivative — killing with a chainsaw is a movie cliche, seen in both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Scarface. And it should be noted that in Cho’s play the chainsaw never actually harms anyone. An angry woman throwing plates at a spouse isn’t original, either. We’ve all seen that in a movie or TV show. Richard isn’t even injured by the plate that hits him in the head. The violence reads like a cartoon, without the glee, of course, though Cho makes a pathetic attempt at wit with the insults hurled at Richard by John and Sue. Only the shoving of the cereal bar down Richard’s throat stands out as truly violent. It’s the play’s most intimate, visceral moment, coming closest to projecting real rage. Having characters chase each other with chainsaws is easily dismissed as imitation. The cereal bar, the forcing of something down another person’s throat, is angrier, more personal.

Lacking the context of Cho’s behavior and demeanor, even this violent use of a cereal bar would not ordinarily be viewed as a warning sign. Actually, it’s the only bit in the entire play that successfully conveys what the author intends, and is just the sort of memorable detail that a writing instructor might point to as effective. It isn’t genius or anything, but it beats “brandishes a chainsaw.”

The violence in “Richard McBeef” is not remarkable. There’s an entire genre of horror movies, and a subgenre of slasher movies. And action movie fans have delighted in high body counts for decades. Short story writers and novelists haven’t shied away from scenes of torture and murder, either. The movie Saw and the novel American Psycho, just as two examples, contain far more explicit horror and violence than anything a student is likely to produce, though some students try. Whatever one thinks of such works, they have received their share of commercial success and critical attention, and it shouldn’t shock anyone that writing students have been influenced by these and hundreds of other works full of violence. Every reader can name, in a minute, dozens of respected and popular works that are far more violent than anything Cho wrote.

One need not point only to contemporary examples. Cruelty and murder abound in Shakespeare’s tragedies; the treachery and the body count in “Hamlet” are impressive. Just the other day I was discussing Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat,” with my students. More than a few of them found it disturbing, particularly when the narrator tells the reader that, furious with his cat, he “took from a waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” Few writers have ever commanded prose to such concisely powerful violence as when Poe’s narrator tells us that, in a rage at his wife, “I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot without a groan.”

Whether writing students are influenced by TV shows like 24 and The Sopranos or by writers like Poe, some of them are going to produce violent stories and plays. I’ve had stories handed in to my fiction workshops about all manner of murder and mayhem. “Richard McBeef” doesn’t come close. There is no shortage of mobsters and hitmen in student stories I have read, with someone always getting whacked. Students trying to write thrillers develop convoluted fight scenes, with loving descriptions of each punch and spin kick knocking some teeth loose. One student recently wrote about a suicide club that the protagonist stumbled upon; blood was on the floor and walls, and people were slashing their wrists. Another student wrote about a woman who lured men to her apartment on dates, and then, after invariably discovering that they were hiding from her the fact that they were married, killed them. An especially ugly story was about a home invasion that ended with quite graphic descriptions of people killing each other. The list goes on and continues to grow. Should I have reported the author of the suicide story to the counseling center, for the student’s own protection? Pedro, responding to the comments on MacFarlane’s blog post, said it well:

You can’t “turn someone in” because they create a piece of art that you think may say something about them. It’s a work of imagination (or it’s supposed to be). Perhaps he was just getting inside the mind of a young sociopath. Turns out he had issues obviously, but you know how many thousands of plays, stories and poems are submitted to creative writing classes that are way more disturbing than that? You can’t just assume that means someone is demented.

The violence in a creative writing piece isn’t itself a warning sign. Stephen King, known for writing some violence of his own, agrees: “Certainly in this sensitized day and age, my own college writing — including a short story called ‘Cain Rose Up’ and the novel RAGE — would have raised red flags, and I’m certain someone would have tabbed me as mentally ill because of them.” Despite the attention being paid to Cho’s plays, creative writing instructors must avoid reading student stories as predictors of future real life violence. King writes, “For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do.” Pedro is right that these kinds of stories are handed in every semester to writing workshops across the country and that they don’t tell us much about the writer. Some of the stories are even well-crafted. Cho’s plays are not.

King thinks that this matters: “On the whole, I don’t think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.” CNN tells us that Cho’s poetry “had no meter or structure or rhyme scheme. To Giovanni, it was simply ‘a tirade.’ ” She said, “There was no writing. I wasn’t teaching him anything, and he didn’t want to learn anything.” It is true that Cho’s plays are very, very bad. They aren’t stories at all. But I can’t agree with King that identifying violence without talent might help us “pick these guys out.” There are a lot of people out there without any talent filling their screenplays with blood and guts. Most of these people will never hurt anyone. Maybe the imagination serves as an excretory channel for the untalented as well as the talented. Maybe the violent content has nothing to do with an excretory channel, and aspiring writers are just imitating what they have read and seen.

Although Giovanni was referring to Cho’s poetry, I would also describe his plays as “tirades.” It’s just him emoting, projecting, and posing. There’s no plot development, no coherence, and no attempt really to tell a story. The plays also demonstrate a lack of maturity and logical thought. As a blog commenter named Stacy asked, “This is something written by a senior in college? It reads and sounds like something a 9th grader might write.” An immature, not overly bright ninth-grader, one might add.

So it’s tempting to say that, though it isn’t especially violent, Cho’s writing’s immaturity and illogic indicate that he was dangerous. Of course, when I read the plays for the first time, I already knew thathe’d killed 32 people. But had I not known that, if I am being honest with myself, I believe I would have thought, “This is a crappy play by a bad writer.” Probably, even though I have read some directionless student work in my time, I would have also thought, like some blog commenters, “This is a college student?” Cho’s work is markedly immature and illogical, but I just don’t think I would have seen any of it as a warning sign about impending violence in the real world.

Yet his professors and fellow students did. Based on what I’ve seen of it, I believe that Cho’s writing could not, or should not, by itself, have driven a professor to contact authorities. His behavior and demeanor were the main warning signs. He barely talked with anyone. Lucinda Roy “recalled Cho exhibiting a palpable anger and secretly taking photographs of other students while holding the camera under his desk.” Giovanni described him as “menacing.” The police had also received stalking complaints. It was Cho the person, not Cho the writer, who was the warning sign.

College professors become accustomed to having troubled students — students who stop showing up for weeks at a time; students who grumble under their breath; students dealing with depression or drug problems or family crises; students with odd personalities; students who are socially awkward or say inappropriate things; students who cry because of a recent breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend; students who are angry at the whole world. Long before Cho’s rampage at Virginia Tech, many professors have found themselves becoming wary of a student or two and have had to decide whether to seek outside assistance, and not necessarily because they were expecting a violent outburst. In creative writing classes especially, where the order of every day is critiquing a student’s work — work in which a student may have a great deal invested emotionally — tactfully managing the personality of the occasional troubled student is required.

Even given all the troubled students whom a career in teaching exposes professors to, Cho’s demeanor and behavior must have stood out. The raw, pointless anger in his writing might have completed the picture for his professors, but that alone doesn’t explain their concern. It’s worth keeping all of this in mind as the fear caused by the massacre at Virginia Tech brings an inevitable overreaction when dealing with students’ writing and other forms of self-expression. Already, little more than a week after the shootings, a high school senior was arrested for the violence in his creative writing assignment. Eighteen-year-old Allen Lee’s essay seemed to contain an outright threat, and he faces two disorderly conduct charges. Given recent events, the least that can be said is that Lee’s work was monumentally stupid:

According to the complaint, Lee’s essay reads in part, “Blood, sex and booze. Drugs, drugs, drugs are fun. Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, s…t…a…b…puke. So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did.”

It seems clear that this student is messing around, but he also wrote, “[D]on’t be surprised on inspiring the first CG [Cary-Grove High School] shooting.” Does a high school teacher ignore this? Should he? Note that the assignment told students to “write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing.” Whether you think Lee is guilty only of poor judgment or of making a serious threat, whether you think the school and police overreacted or were vigilant, this one case is just the beginning, if we fool ourselves into thinking that we can prevent future horrors by looking for warning signs in student writing.

 —  —  — 

References:

“Killer’s manifesto: ‘You forced me into a corner,'” CNN.com (April 18, 2007); http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html

“Cho-Seung-Huis’ Plays,” posted by Ian McFarlane, including comments by readers, AOL News Bloggers (April 17, 2007); http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/04/17/cho-seung-huis-plays

Allen G. Breed, “Giovanni confronted Cho in poetry class,” The Enquirer (April 19, 2007). No longer available online.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Dorset 1989). 478.

Stephen King, “On Predicting Violence,” Entertainment Weekly (EW.com; April 20, 2007); http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20036014,00.html

“Student arrested for essay’s imaginary violence,” CNN.com (April 27, 2007). No longer available online.

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Scott Stein

Scott Stein's most recent novels are The Great American Deception, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and The Great American Betrayal, which Vulture.com named one of "The Best Comedy Books of 2022." His older novels are Lost and Mean Martin Manning and his short satire and fiction have been published in The Oxford University Press Humor Reader, McSweeney's,The G.W. Review, Points in Case, Liberty, National Review, and Art Times. He is a professor of English at Drexel University. His author site is scottsteinonline.com.

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