a. Does it have musicality?
b. Is it concrete, not just a flying package of feelings?
c. Does it say what you really mean, or are you trying to be poetic?
d. Are all the words as effective as possible? For any weak word, get a thesaurus and find a better one.
e. Who do you imagine reading or hearing it?
f. Is this person going to understand it?
g. Are you being overly sentimental or manipulating the reader?
h. Can you shout this poem out loud without sounding ridiculous and without getting your tongue in a knot?
i. Does your poem have an idea of some kind? It should be about something.
2. Discuss: Can a poem be bad?
3. Write a poem, short story or play of approximately two pages in which a change of direction is announced, i.e., set something up and then turn it.
4. Write one good sentence. Not pretty, not full of metaphor. A good, pure, solid slug of a sentence.
5. What is something you have always wanted to write but never have?
6. Write a sentence about a Matisse painting.
7. Write a sentence about a squash.
8. Write a poem in the same rhythm as the Lord’s Prayer, but use your own words.
9. Write 250 words in the form of a complete stretch of dialogue or prose poem that includes a needle, a ticket stub and a glass of milk.
10. Look at a photograph of a hand and write about the specific talents and experiences the owner of the hand has.
11. Look at a headshot of a man in a suit and write about who he is.
12. Write 250 words about one person giving a gift that is refused.
13. Write something in which the world is a blank slate, without history.
14. Look at or imagine an antique postcard with this written on the back: “I am going to get one like this for Aunt Etta. You want to be sure the door is locked when you go to bed. Lillian.” Bounce off the postcard message and write one sharply focused page.
15. Translate the following passage creatively. Look at the shapes of words. This is an exercise in spontaneity and boldness of attack.
Nie wurden flue hawkender est ålt dek bitten. Duo wingen bresse plus tet plus pies groupen “English.” Michélene floten sur el duro puis la reve. Sel cran, “Nie, nie, nie.” Loes frags cran lottisment plus strangement. Ottrest ållo plus quiété. Calssico classico, clangenhart classico. “Hush, hushen,” lo cran. Plasticity dur colunber est trister quan brite-meet. Injery? Broden? Lo sense, “Les toiles bran son ciecle des Bruxelles, plus la west ciecle.” Blesse plus centres, janais outframe. Argent spile otre nos pies, plus los crans. Yaf nie Holland, yaf nie Belge. Los brancher torn plus crassa. Lo flue est blue, dek plus bitten. Silénćo, silénćo. Warden para chaumiére.
~ 6 ~
WHAT YOU USE AND WHAT YOU PROTECT
A WRITER OF A FIRST NOVEL FOUND HERSELF DEEPLY INJURED BY the few and grudging reviews she received, but she was affected even more by something else: how much of herself, her life, her experience she had given away in her book—wasted, she called it, used up. Her experience was her capital, as she loved to say, and how much experience was left to her for the next time around?
How often can you write away the well of yourself? I am going to speak here about a writing life and how the parts of the self seep into a writer’s fiction, and spill out, flowing into literary biography.
Let me suggest to you that when a writer sits down to write, there are two people at the keyboard, not one. There is the performer, the creator, the storyteller. And seated next to her, or perhaps crouched inside her, is the source—that being who has laid down a bedrock of thought, of experience, or perhaps of bewilderment and inexperience, and she is now eager to write out of the sum or distillation of that reserve, to name what Philip Larkin once called “the million-petaled flower of being.” For no matter how much objective research a fiction writer does, no matter which realms of the imagination are attempted, there is inevitably a trace or a teaspoon or an arm or a leg of herself in what she writes. This, in fact, is what is so frightening about writing fiction: what we inadvertently reveal, the degree to which we expose ourselves.
One critic wrote that there was a series of detached and ineffectual fathers appearing in Carol Shields’ fiction. Really? Can this be true? Well yes, on examination, those fathers do seem to pop up rather often. I am cagey about this confession; I need to think more about it. What can it mean and where does it come from? Another example: The literary editor of Le Droit interviewed me in Paris after having read with extreme care everything I’d written. I had never met before or since such a well-prepared journalist. And she had discovered something I hadn’t known: “Il n’y a pas d’animaux dans vos livres,” she charged. “There are no animals in your books.” I was astonished, but yes, I agreed, on reflection, that she was quite correct, although there is a passing reference to a parrot in a 1985 short story and another to a fish—but then it is a painting of a fish that is mentioned and not the creaturely fish itself. Distant fathers, an absence of animals—what do these unintentional gaps signify, if anything?
We scatter our texts with unwitting clues to who we are and what consumes us. Not long ago, I received a letter from a dental hygienist in North Carolina, a woman who writes a monthly column for the American Society of Dental Hygienists newsletter. “You have a great many references in all your books,” she wrote, “to teeth,” and she then supplied me with a long list of page references. What precisely was my relationship to teeth, she wanted to know. Well!? Teeth are part of life, I ventured in reply. We have an emotional investment in our teeth—but even to me this seemed not quite answer enough. Am I just a little obsessed with chewing and grinding? Is my unconscious view of the world dental-driven?
We are as writers responsible—or are we?—for our offered up passions and for our buried themes, even those buried out of sight of our own eyes, even that which we have not articulated to ourselves.
My early novels all included teenaged children—not at the centre of the story, perhaps, but caught somewhere in the web of the narrative. But a 1987 novel, titled Swann, had, I realized when I read the proofs, no children at all. By 1993, children had returned to my pages, and even I could figure out what that meant.
Writing a novel set in Winnipeg, I was faithful to the sense of Winnipeg as I saw it, but carefully skewed the spellings of some of the street names and institutions, a subliminal message to the reader that the Winnipeg I was writing about was a city dressed in its fictional robes, not quite the real thing. This seemed important, perhaps for my own protection against error or perhaps to assert and protect the freedom fiction writers are accorded.
And early on, while I’d decided not to write about my friends and family, I realized that even writing about acquaintances can be tricky. In the midst of writing my first novel, for instance, I was out shopping one day and ran into an acquaintance, a woman of about my own age. She, too, had been shopping, and she opened her shopping bag to show me a beautiful sea-green nightgown she’d bought. “And now,” she said, “I must be on my way. I’m trying to find some candles to match my nightgown.” “Really,” I said, and she must have seen my jaw drop because she said, “Oh, I have candles to match all my nightgowns.”
I couldn’t resist preserving this moment. This little anecdote found its way into my text, a delectable throwaway—but when I read the proofs, I really did decide to throw it away, reasoning that she was quite likely to read my novel, and that she might recognize herself, being probably the only woman in the Western hemisphere or even in the world who carried bedroom coordination to this degree.
We’re told that certain people feel their soul is appropriated when their photograph is taken, and this strikes me as being at least partly reasonable. There is no one, even in the cause of Great Literature, upper case letters, who wants to be ridiculed, injured, or even embarrassed; there is no one who wants even to feel overly observed and commented upon, thoug
h I do defend to the death those writers who live closer to the autobiographical bone than I’ve chosen to do and who write about their own ex-husbands, beastly mothers and ungrateful children.
For every writer the degree of required social involvement or distance must be differently gauged, but novelists who take refuge in isolated log cabins tend to be a romantic minority, or perhaps even a myth. Most novelists, knowing that ongoing work is fed by ongoing life, prize their telephones, their correspondence, and their daily rubbing up against family and friends.
—Jane Austen: A Life
However, using the great world about me and the droplets that fall from it is something else. This is the source of at least half a fiction writer’s material. A friend of mine who suffers from frequent laryngitis told me her husband claims her throat is her Achilles heel, a witticism that appealed to me, and I asked her if I could use it—yes, she said, she expected me to use it. She had told it to me because she knew it would appeal to me.
I’ve heard writers say that their friends wouldn’t recognize themselves if they apprehended their image in the pages of a novel. Writerly paint would have blurred the outlines; writerly invention would have added enough ornamentation to conceal the true identity.
But readers are not so easily fooled as this, especially readers who have collided with novelists or even befriended them. They know they are in danger the minute they are admitted to a writer’s life, and they read the published text with a magnifying lens in hand.
Could that be me, that fool dribbling coffee down his shirtfront and babbling about the tyranny of life in the suburbs, about the betrayal of love? Yes, of course it’s me.
During the twenty or so years I taught classes in creative writing, I never once encountered a student who didn’t worry, at some level, that a friend or family member was going to be violated, punished or crucified in a piece of writing. (Mothers take an exceptionally heavy rap with younger students.) This fear persisted even among students whose work would stand scarcely any chance of ever being published. The concern was real, and often it afflicted young writers with classic writer’s block before they’d written so much as a single word.
I always urged them to say what they had to say anyway, unshackled by any thought of personal response. They could revise afterward, I said, burying the real person by altering gender, race, the time frame, the geographical context. The choices were limitless. Write bravely, truly; revise with discretion, tact. This is easy enough to say, but I have come to understand exactly how difficult it is in the end to make the small and necessary sacrifices once words are committed to paper. There are times when changing even a name feels like a hideous compromise.
Like most writers, I have become an attentive eavesdropper. A whole short story slid into view one day when I found myself sitting behind two divinity students on a bus and overhearing a discussion about why Lot’s wife was turned to salt when she disobediently looked back. The use of public transportation, I should say, can be extremely profitable to fiction writers, who are always looking to restock their supplies. And so are such public places as elevators or restaurants. Seated one day at an outdoor café, I found myself caught between two discussions, a conversational cross-draft if you like. At one table, two women were discussing a highly dramatic love affair one of them was having, and at the other table were two businessmen, suits, haircuts, the look of seriousness. The older man turned to the younger and said, boomingly, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to the bottom of the barrel.”
My favourite eavesdrop of all time, and one I was able to use eventually in a book, occurred at Niagara Falls, where I stood on a summer’s day not far from a group of tourists from Brooklyn, one of whom turned to his friends and said, loudly, clearly, as he gazed out at the beauty of the falls, “Jeez, it makes you thoisty, don’t it, lookin’ at all dat watah.”
Years ago, on a soft spring evening, I went for a walk and observed a young man sitting on a folding chair on his front lawn. He had an ironing board in front of him, and on the ironing board a portable typewriter, and he was typing with such speed, such verve, such happiness—never looking up, of course—that I knew as he flung the carriage back that he was in the midst of an inspired creative act. “What are you writing?” I longed to call out, but didn’t.
We live after all in a society that forbids the intimate interrogating of strangers. Inquisitive people are discouraged and certainly disparaged. Journalists and biographers may be given special privileges, allowed to ask their Nosy Parker questions, but the rest of us are forced to deal imaginatively with the great gaps.
For novelists this means observing, listening at the keyhole as well as peering into it, gently probing, but in the end risking ourselves and our small truths, guessing at the way other people live and think, hoping to get it right at least part of the time.
I long ago understood that the silences our society imposes give to the novelist a freshness of opportunity, a way to bring spaciousness and art into the smallest, most ordinary lives. Even so, I suffer as many writers do from a scavenger’s guilt, and always experience a desire to include on the title page of my books some small message of acknowledgement: “Forgive me.” Or “I’m sorry.”
Notes for Novel
Tweedy man on bus, no change, leaps off
beautiful girl at concert, husband observes her legs, keeps dropping program
children in park, sailboat, mother yells (warbles) “Damn you David. You’re getting your knees dirty.”
letter to editor about how to carry cello case in a mini-car. Reply from bass player
West Indians queue for mail. Fat white woman (rollers) cigarette in mouth, “what they need is ticket home.”
story in paper about woman who has baby and doesn’t know she’s preg. Husband comes home from work to find himself a father. Dramatize.
leader of labour party dies tragically, scramble for power. wife publishes memoirs.
hotel bath. each person rationed to one inch of hot water. Hilarious landlady.
Lord renounces title so he can run for House of Commons, boyhood dream and all that.
—Small Ceremonies
I’m sometimes asked what it was like to be a novelist living in the city of Winnipeg, and beneath this question, I believe I hear a certain floating skepticism—how can works of the imagination be written if there are no magnificent mountains to provide inspiration, if there is no pounding surf to carry one away, no fragrance and persistence of tropical foliage? The city where I live does have its own smells and landscape and music, but, despite what my friend Eleanor Wachtel reminds us—that geography is destiny—none of this matters much since writers perform their tasks in small rooms on the whole with the door closed. Their scenery is the interior life with its collection of images, discoveries, scenes, observations, dreams—that whole unwieldy cotton sack of material we refer to as memory.
What is produced in the shut room by way of the lint of memory is often fiction, not memoir. Yet even memoir is more than the pinning down of actual experience. The critic Brigitte Frase calls the memoir “an artful dodger, slip-sliding though the facts of autobiography and journalism into the techniques of fiction. It is,” she says, “the most rhetorically dramatic of forms, in the way it shines full-glare lights on some episodes, while others are left in haunting, suggestive shadows … dealing out revenge, wallowing in showy humilities.”
We live in an anti-romantic age, and so we are uncomfortable with the idea that writers do not choose their work out of a combination of interest and ability but are somehow “chosen.” Also rejected by most is the narcissistic idea of the writer as filter through whose fine mesh God speaks, or else nations or history or the channelled voices of greatness. The writer, in fact, is a person with a self as slippery as your own and as prey to amnesia or distortion, as fearful of death as you, and, like you, always fighting against a sense of lowered consequence. Writers are also beings in need of clean clothes, heat, a fairly comfortable chair
and good lighting. Their writerly fidgets, doubts, skin rashes, and aching teeth—those teeth again—spill directly into the false efforts and random successes of their writing.
This is why it seems strange to reflect on the force of the New Criticism, sometimes called the Cambridge Movement, which was the prevailing literary theory of the late thirties, forties and early fifties, the time that I first encountered literature in its formal shape. The New Criticism eschewed any interest in the writer behind the writing, the separate self with a personal history who sewed together the fabric of language and narrative.
A life is full of isolated events, but these events, if they are to form a coherent narrative, require odd bits of language to cement them together, little chips of grammar (mostly adverbs or prepositions) that are hard to define, since they are abstractions of location or relative position, words like therefore, else, other, also, thereof, theretofore, instead, otherwise, despite, already, and not yet.
—Unless
The New Critics worked by means of close textual analysis, considering the text as the final—in fact, the only—authority. They distrusted the lights and shadows of the writer’s life and experience, the writer’s methods and attitudes or, in fact, anything that did not actually appear within the margins of the finished page. I remember being quite worshipful about the New Criticism; believing absolutely in this clean and pure form of literary response, I stole only a few guilty glances at the author photo on the back cover. Indeed, author photos shrivelled in size during this period and sometimes disappeared. It was as though all the writers of the world belonged to the same scout troop and drew from a shared pool of images and style so that their texts—that crisp and useful word—could go out into the world on their own sturdy, anonymous, boy-scout legs.
Startle and Illuminate Page 7
