In Oak Park, all the schools were named after famous writers. I attended Nathaniel Hawthorne Public School for the early grades, and, later, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The portraits of these two distinguished figures were displayed in the school entrance halls: bearded gentlemen wearing frock coats and cravats, immensely dignified and serious in their expression. Clearly they belonged to a privileged world, a world from which I was excluded.
Here is a confession: I loved my first grade reader, the execrable Dick and Jane, though I understand that the buoyant middle-class images are responsible for alienating and damaging generations of young Americans. I longed to embrace Mother in her apron, Father in his necktie, and I loved Dick and Jane for their clean white socks, their goodness and their almost manic enthusiasm over trifles. But I loved them chiefly because they were the key that opened the door into the world of reading, and for writers, and for many readers, the discovery of the code is the primary spiritual experience of childhood. I was fortunate in my teachers, a Miss Sellers in second grade who turned a corner of the classroom into a little library, furnished with tiny rugs brought from home, a bookcase and on the bookcase a small cozy lamp. When we were done with our work, we could enter this “room” and whoever was first was allowed to pull the chain on the little lamp. The effect was magic; it was a sanctuary, a stage setting, a sort of home.
I had a Miss Pelsue in fourth grade at Emerson who came to school every day at eight-thirty and read aloud to anyone who cared to come, and everyone did. And Miss Hanson—Miss Mabel Hanson, how we loved to ferret out our teachers’ first names—who took me on her lap in sixth grade when I did not win a national penmanship award. And for seventh and eighth grade, another Mabel, Mabel Crabtree, surely that name must have been a burden for a junior high teacher to bear. She was demure, but grew vividly dramatic when teaching the Civil War. (“Oh, boys and girls,” she said of the battle of Gettysburg, “oh, the stench of it.”) She seemed terribly old to us, but when we rang her bell on Halloween night, she invited us in and introduced us to a Mrs. Crabtree who was much, ah, much older. It was unthinkable but true: Miss Crabtree had a mother.
In high school, there was Miss Burt who made us learn a hundred short quotations in the belief that it was good for us, and it was. And still is. Those of us in Miss Linden’s senior creative writing class knew it was a privilege to be there. For this honour, we had to be specially recommended. Mr. Buskie stopped our American history class one day, saying, “I’m feeling philosophical today, and I’m going to tell you what I’ve been thinking.” What he said was necessary and timely, about the importance of human relationships, but what lingers is the shocked relief of knowing the system could be interrupted.
I knew very early that writing was my vocation because everything else I tried—music, handicrafts, sports—went badly. Only when I was writing did the awkwardness diminish. And no one seemed offended that I wanted to be a writer. No one said, “What a crazy idea,” or that ultimate put down: “Who do you think you are?” Instead teachers suggested I write the class play or submit something to the literary magazine. There was something amazing about this.
Which brings me to that question—why do writers write? There is pleasure in the making, the re-imagining, the discovery of patterns that still come together as we grow older. One of my discoveries has been the uncovering of forms that echo our realities, that interrogate the established tradition, taking liberties, and gesturing—crudely, covertly, often unconsciously—toward a dozen alternate worlds.
The resolution to become a writer formed very early in my life, but it took years for me to discover what I would write about and who my readers would be.
Several layers of trust were required before I began to find my direction. I had to learn to rely on my own voice, and after that to have faith in the value of my own experiences. At first this was frightening. The books I read as a child related daring adventures, deeds of courage. The stories took place on mountaintops or in vast cities, not in the sort of quiet green suburb where my family happened to live. It was as though there was an empty space on the bookshelf. No one seemed to talk about his void, yet I knew it was there.
Gradually I understood that the books I should write were the very books I wanted to read, the books I wasn’t able to find in the library. The empty place could be closed. My small world might fill only a page at first, then several hundred pages, possibly thousands. I could make up in accuracy for what I lacked in scope, getting the details right, dividing every experience into its various shades and levels of anticipation. I could write a story, for instance, about Nathaniel Hawthorne School. About the school principal whose name was Miss Newbury (Miss Blueberry, she was called behind her back). About the chill of fear that children suffered in the schoolyard, about a fat, suffering little boy named Walter who had an English accent, and whose mother made him wear a necktie to school. About human foolishness, and about the small rescues and acts of redemption experienced along the way.
I saw that I could become a writer if I paid attention, if I was careful, if I observed the rules, and then, just as carefully, broke them.
In the books I read—and I find it hard to separate my life as a reader from that as a writer—I look first for language that cannot really exist without leaving its trace of deliberation. I want, too, the risky articulation of what I recognize but haven’t yet articulated myself. And, finally, I hope for some fresh news from another country, which satisfies by its modesty, a microscopic enlargement of my vision of the world. I wouldn’t dream of asking for more.
In Brief …
• Writers are readers first, and so all writing begins with reading.
• A writer’s first books are often the ones she finds on her parents’ bookshelves.
• Reading lets us be the other, touch and taste the other, sense the shock and satisfaction of otherness.
• The rhythms of prose train the empathetic imagination.
• Reading shortens the distance we must travel to discover that our most private perceptions are universally felt.
• Why do we write? For the pleasure in the making, the re-imagining, the discovery of patterns that still come together as we grow older. For the uncovering of forms that echo our realities, that interrogate the established tradition, taking liberties, and gesturing—crudely, covertly, often unconsciously—toward a dozen alternate worlds.
• Becoming a writer involves discovering what you should write about and who your readers should be.
• Learn to rely on your own voice and to have faith in the value of your own experiences. There is an empty space on the bookshelf that only your voice and story can fill.
• Set out to discover what you may not have fully articulated even to yourself, bringing forth some fresh news from another country that enlarges your vision of the world.
~ 2 ~
MYTHS THAT KEEP YOU FROM WRITING
IT’S A CURIOUS FACT THAT WRITERS ARE OFTEN INEPT WHEN IT comes to discussing the subject of writing fiction. Alice Munro once said that telling someone how to write is like a juggler trying to explain how he keeps all those pie pans up in the air at the same time. Some writers have even described the act of writing as indescribable, indescribable being the one word that those who describe themselves as describers should never use. Quite a lot of writers can’t tell you precisely what a short story is, and yet we purport to write them. There’s something fairly audacious about this, you might say.
Ask a writer why he or she writes and there’s likely to be a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way and almost no one in this non-heroic age is going to say, “I write because I have to.”
And I have my writing.
“You have your writing!” friends say. A murmuring chorus: But you have your writing, Reta. No one is crude enough to suggest that my sorrow will eventually become material for my writing, but probably they think it.
—Unless
Writing is a mysterious process, and this vaguen
ess about it makes it into a mystique. Writing is so various; it rises up from so many curious undetectable springs; it has so many contradictory intentions, and critical judgment swings so wildly that what is good writing in one decade is execrable in the next.
Like every mystique it has its set of shibboleths, its injunctions and freedoms, some of them true or untrue, helpful or harmful, and a good many constitute a systematic discouragement for the beginning writer. Let me mention a few of these myths.
Writing is performance. This statement has the impact of aphorism, and aphorism is something we must fix with a wary eye. It sounds good; therefore it must be true. Most writers will say that writing is a matter of groping your way to some kind of truth, an act of exploration. Joan Didion plainly said that she writes so that she can know what she is thinking, and V. S. Pritchett, a writer I particularly admire, said that he wrote so he could feel out the surface of what he is and where he lives. Notice the implicit modesty of these statements. And notice the moderate though not unintelligent voice. And notice how these assessments remove the burden some writers feel that they must make every word shimmer and every insight dazzle. Survey the whole field of fiction and you will see that pyrotechnics are only a small part of it. There is a great deal of moving people around, and listening to what they are saying.
Another injunction, a double one this time. All fiction is a form of autobiography. And the command: write about what you know. This is a serious problem for a beginning writer since there’s a good chance he undervalues what he knows and a good chance, too, that he doesn’t want to risk exposure. Writers of course draw on their own experiences, but the fact is, few draw directly. As Alice Munro wrote in an essay entitled “What Is Real” in the magazine Canadian Forum, she requires for her fiction a portion of actual experience that acts as a kind of starter dough—I assume you’re familiar with bread-baking terminology. To the starter can be added the subtle yeast of the imagined. John Irving, a writer I have grave reservations about, said in an essay that his writing comes out of the act of revising and redeeming actual experience. Pritchett goes all the way, saying a fiction writer’s first duty is to become another person.
One of the most discouraging admonitions is this: don’t begin to write until you have something to say. How often have you heard that one? Clearly everyone has something to say, whether he writes it down or not. You don’t get to the age of six without knowing fear or intense happiness. You don’t get to the age of twelve without having suffered. You don’t arrive at eighteen without knowing what it is to love someone or, just as painful, not to love someone. Everyone has something to say; it may not be codified or arranged in the neat linear patterns of philosophy or the point of view of political commitment or as moral conviction, but the raw material is there, the “something” to write about.
Here’s another one. If you want to be published you have to write for the market. I would suggest you begin writing without so much as glancing at the market. Unless you want to devote yourself to what’s trendy: child custody stories one year, volcano disasters last year. Think instead of the stories you like to read, or better yet, the story you would like to read but can’t find. And at this point, you might want to ask yourself if, in fact, you like reading short fiction. Do you prefer other forms? People in one short fiction class I taught told me they preferred long fiction but were afraid to tackle a novel. Short fiction was to be no more than an apprenticeship for the novel they hoped to write, and this is a premise I seriously question.
And we probably all know writers who, to earn a little money, have sat down to dash off a Harlequin romance or something similar. Nothing to it, they think, but the fact is they almost never succeed, for it is a fact that condescension shows in literature as well as in life. On the other hand, there’s Barbara Cartland, the English writer of innumerable costume romances—the kind of book you may quite properly scorn. A few years ago, when she had to go into hospital for surgery, she looked around her house, her castle really, for some convalescent reading, and decided that the only thing that would really interest her were her own books. I think there’s a lesson in this, that you must be committed to a certain kind of story in order to write it well.
Romance novels … are able to fill their pages with dozens of strikingly beautiful women, and literary novels can permit a single heroine a rare beauty, one only. Light fiction, being closer to real life, knows better. Some imperfection must intervene, and usually this is in the nature of a slightly too long nose or a smaller than average chin. It is not necessary to award such disadvantages as giant hips or mannish shoulders and certainly not one eye larger than the other, although breasts may be on the small size or else more generous than normal.
—Unless
There’s a novel in everyone. You’ve heard this one. It’s a myth that has suffered misinterpretation. There probably is material enough and more in every life, but does this mean that anyone, given the time, can write a novel? Time is what you sometimes hear people say they need. In fact, I have heard of one writer who got so tired of hearing people say, “I’d write a book if I had the time,” that when he came to write his autobiography he titled it I Had Time. Time isn’t enough. Skills of observation and skills of language (attention to rhythm, extension of vocabulary and distortion of syntax) are required. A feeling for structure. Stamina—for it takes an extraordinary effort to write even a bad novel or a completed short story.
Finishing has always seemed important to me. The end of a story is as important as the process. The feeling of completion, however imperfect, is what makes art, when we feel something being satisfied or reconciled or surrendered or earned. As Clark Blaise wrote, “an ending is after all the writer’s last word on the subject and he’d better choose his words carefully.”
You often hear that serious fiction needs to be underpinned by a myth structure, but work that is consciously manufactured around a myth tends to show all its nuts and bolts. Straining for seriousness almost invariably looks bogus while simple adherence to the truth does not. You may ask why I’m talking about truth when in fact we were talking—weren’t we—about fiction. Fiction can be regarded as one of the purest forms of truth telling. Here is the truth that doesn’t get into the biographies. Here are the unuttered thoughts of a human being laid bare for the first time. Even fantasy requires a truthful stretch of terrain in order not to look ludicrous. Myth, symbol, and, I would suggest, dream must be handled with extreme care. You’ve probably heard the story of the publisher who asked a writer if his book was done, and the author replied, “I’m all finished. I just have to go back and put the symbols in.”
Another discouragement is this: all the good stories have been told. Or a variation of this: it’s impossible to write a masterpiece and who wants to be a hack? It may be our literary critics who have put this burden on us. They talk for instance about something called unity of vision, as though anyone has ever possessed unity of vision or even wanted to. They talk about such and such a piece of work being flawed, as though there were ever an unflawed piece of work. They talk about major and minor work—and this is something to be careful of. Major, as Mary Gordon pointed out in an essay, often means Hemingway writing about boys in the wood; minor is Katherine Mansfield writing about women in the sitting room.
You also hear that writing is hard work, and with this I cannot disagree. There is an unfortunate myth that, once started, a story tends to write itself. Don’t believe this. Writing is hard at the beginning of a story, hard in the middle, and hard at the end. There may be good days, a little momentum now and then, as though, as E. L. Doctorow said, “If you have one good day, you’re punished for it the next.”
In Brief …
Writing myths to ignore:
• All fiction is a form of autobiography.
• Write what you know.
• Don’t begin to write until you have something to say.
• If you want to be published, you have to write for the market.
• There is a novel in everyone.
• Serious fiction needs to be underpinned by a myth structure.
• All the good stories have been told.
• It’s impossible to write a masterpiece, as they’ve all been written.
• Once started a story tends to write itself.
Writing truths to embrace:
• Writing is hard work. Writing is hard at the beginning of a story, hard in the middle, and hard at the end.
• Straining for seriousness almost invariably looks bogus, while simple adherence to the truth does not.
• Pyrotechnics are only a small part of writing. There is a great deal of moving people around and listening to what they are saying.
• The end of a story is important. It is the feeling of completion, however imperfect, that makes art.
~ 3 ~
BOXCARS, COAT HANGERS AND OTHER DEVICES
A NOVEL IS A WILD AND OVERFLOWING THING. ITS NARRATIVE, even when it is short and straightforward, includes a sort of encyclopedia of fact and notation and the gray spots in between, jumping from idea to idea, leaping continents and centuries and changes of mood. Novels—at least the novels I love to read—are mad-stuffed with people, events, emotional upheavals, and plateaus of despair. Their scenes dramatize arrivals, departures, births, marriages and murder, success and failure—the unsorted debris of existence, in fact, and yet their chaotic offerings are, when I look closely, attached to a finely stretched wire of authorly intention that reaches from the first page to the last.
Startle and Illuminate Page 4
