by From Where You Dream- The Process of Writing Fiction (mobi)
Lloyd will eventually come to rape Anna Brown. But let me tell you first about that atomic bomb and Lloyd's work. The first atom bomb was a fusion device, which means that in the middle of the bomb is a bit of fissionable plutonium to start the chain reaction. Around it are packed conventional explosives, and then surrounding all of that a lens (and it requires a very precise development to get it just the right shape). When the explosives are set off, the shock wave travels outward, but instead of dispersing outward, it hits the lens and is redirected with exponentially greater force into the center—that is, into the plutonium. And that force is sufficient to start the chain reaction.
Early in the book, Lloyd meditates on the bomb he is creating, and how in his own mind does he see this fusion process? He says, "The plutonium waits in the center of the bomb like a bride."
Well, the fusion process is exactly the process of Lloyd's psychology. He's a man of the mind, rigorously so. He keeps the explosive potential of his violence within him. He proposes to Anna—he wants to make her his bride—and she turns him down pretty sharply. It's the way he shuts in—ignores— his explosive rage that eventually leads him to rape her. The rape scene, which is very near the end of the book, though it is an in-the-moment, through-the-senses scene, is also a precise metaphor for the bomb Lloyd has created. It waits in the center like a bride.
You understand what I'm saying now, in this artificial way, with regard to this one novel, about the sensual patterning of details. The bomb, the fusion process, the abusive father, the trowel, the sword, the bride, the ancient murders, the hostage-taking rancher, the rape, the Holocaust, the uncovering of the past, and the containing of violence: event echoes detail, sensual moment becomes metaphor, returning, recomposing, and reincorporating toward the phenomena of resonance and motif.
Don't underestimate the powers inside you that would have you flinch and convince you that you are doing the right thing.
Here's a good one. Let's read a good book. Let's read the latest Janet Burroway novel. Now, of course you must read in order to be a writer, and read ravenously. But there are points in your writing day, and even in your life, when you run the danger of hiding in somebody else's voice, somebody's else's vision and sensibility. A moment comes when it's time to find your own artistic identity and find a way into your unconscious. And then you will need to manage your reading carefully. There are even wonderful ideas that another voice will give you, which seem to be furthering your writing career but in fact may be invitations to avert your eyes. You have to write.
Readers as well as writers need to understand that if a work of art is not an object of the mind, if a work of art is a product of the dreamspace, then a reader's primary encounter with this object also needs to be in the dreamspace. As I mentioned
earlier, as readers you need primarily and necessarily to thrum to the work.
When I say that, I know I put myself in the position of contradicting much of what you've learned about how to read. So be it—because I think that some very basic mistakes have been made in how you have been taught to read. The peda-gogical approach itself may not be inappropriate, but there are important caveats that need to attend it in order for you to make sense of the process.
Walker Percy made a wonderful point about the semiotics of the novel: he thinks that a novel, for all its length, is just an extremely long name for a complex, evolving emotion that has no name but that. I've often thought that if someone were to ask me what's the meaning of my novel Fair Warning, the only answer is: read it again. Fair Warning is a 75,ooo-word name for a complex, evolving emotion or state of being or state of the universe—and, therefore, even what it's the name of is not statable. The Maori of New Zealand have a name for a hill that translates as "The Place Where Tomatia, the Man with Big Knees, Who Slid, Climbed, and Swallowed Mountains, Known As Land-Eater, Played on the Flute to His Loved One." And that's rather like a novel. What's the name of that mountain? Well, it's this. To ask, What does that name mean? is meaningless. It has no other meaning; the name is irreducible. So too are the novel and the short story, irreducible names.
Your experience of this name should be aesthetic, not analytical. A kind of harmonic resonance is set up within you. That is the primary and appropriate response to a work of art.
You don't listen to a Beethoven symphony or look at a Monet painting or watch Suzanne Farrell dance and walk away with your head full of ideas, having, say, sat in your chair and had the keen intellectual enjoyment of watching the way the t hemes of the first movement were echoed in the second and then turned into that crescendo in the fourth. That's a separate kind of pleasure with certain value, but it is not the aesthetic response.
It seems to me that a lot of literature classes go wrong because the teachers, unintentionally but often intentionally, give the impression that writers are rather like idiots savants: they really want to say abstract, theoretical, philosophical things, but somehow they can't quite make themselves do it. So they create these objects whose ultimate meaning and relevance and value come into being only after they have been subjected to the analysis of thoughtful literary critics, who translate that work into theoretical, philosophical, ideational terms. And that is somehow the final usefulness, purpose, and meaning of the work. In how many literature classes have you heard it asked, "What does this work mean?" As if it had no meaning in the mere reading of it. Or, worse, "What is the author trying to say?" Trying. You've been in the presence of these attitudes, have you not? Well, this is nonsense, folks. Absolute nonsense. In the presence of such attitudes, your ability to read a work of literary art is actually being destroyed. I suspect the reason cinema is presently the most popular art form in our culture is that so few people have had film appreciation classes. They still are capable of an aesthetic response in a movie house.
But, ironically, I think that many of those literature classes could be taught exactly the same way and be beneficial if two things were said, which everybody then understood and believed. Every literature course in the country should begin with this announcement: What we're going to do this semester is a purely secondary and artificial thing. We are going to do that in order to tune up the instrument inside you which thrums. We're going to add some new strings in the upper and lower regis-ters. We're going to tune up all the strings, so that after you've taken the course, when you encounter a work of art, you will thrum to it more harmoniously and completely.
Then it's OK, teach the same things that are taught.
The last thing that needs to be said in every literature course in the country is this: Now that we have done this artificial and secondary thing in order to tune up your instrument, your final assignment is: forget everything we've said. Because if you don't forget it, when you encounter your next work of art, if you begin to translate it into terms of ideas and theory, breaking it into its parts even as you read—then I have destroyed your ability to have an aesthetic response and to encounter a work of art in the way it was intended. I have taught you how to miss the essence of this object.
If you take literature courses and these things are not said, then please fill in those blanks. Give yourself that warning at the beginning of the course and that final assignment at the end.
Let me say that what I stress here, what I obsess about, I think is absolutely crucial to assimilate into your artistic process. There may seem to be resident in that obsession a criticism of the way others teach this subject. That criticism is not intended and would be wrong. I think you absolutely need to hear the things that I obsess about, since they are the foundations for other insights—you need, for example, to get to the matters of craft and technique once you have earned that step by getting your process right. But do not infer any criticism of anybody's else's workshop here at FSU. We are a bunch of obsessives, each in our cage, and you slip into the cage and crouch in a corner. It is necessary for you to slip into several of our cages, because my obsessions are different from Mark's, are different from Elizabeth's, are
different from Virgil's—you need exposure to all of us. The nice thing about it is that we're a complementary group of writing teachers. If I were your only teacher, something would be missing for you. So it's really important for you to be exposed to all of us or many of us. Let a hundred flowers bloom, as Chairman Mao once said.
Also, please understand that you're in a terrific school, because the literature people in this English department actually love and appreciate literature. This is not always the case. There are graduate English programs in this country where no literature is taught at all—only secondary sources, books about the books, are taught—literally. There are a lot of wonderful literature teachers here at this university and almost none of the syndrome that I was describing to you. So it's good you are required to take literature courses. You're in a good place.
Now, let's talk about the workshop, how we'll run a workshop with the insights I've been trying to give you. I offer this to you as a model if you choose to teach with the same emphasis I have or even as a model for informal writing groups. All writing workshops have a built-in danger. If you are in the place in your creative development where you really need to get in touch with your unconscious—the point where my particular obsession is what you need the most—there are certain aspects of common pedagogy that need to be drastically adjusted. One of them is your pace of production. None of you will have an externally fixed quota of words placed upon you this semester. It's a kind of honor system. You need to start meditating every day, and if you're not writing you should at least be going into your trance to free-float, free-associate. At some point you will need to be writing, and then—I've already told you that you have to write every day.
A few weeks into the course you need to catch me and we'll set up a personal goal for you—where you feel you are in terms of your unconscious, what you think would be a reasonable production for the semester. The point of this class is to get you out of your heads, so I don't want to put you under strictures of production that will force you to start willing things into being. You do not have to workshop at all this semester, any given one of you. If on a particular week, no one has anything to workshop, that's OK. We'll come, we'll meet, we'll talk, meditate or whatever, and you'll go away.
If you have a novel to write, and the system I taught you last week is really tapping into your unconscious, then after most of the semester is spent dreamstorming and working up your possible scenes, we might want to make your goal just the first few pages of your novel, which you could give me at the end of the semester. Be very flexible in terms of your production goals.
The workshop is open to fragments, but they need to be the opening fragments of the work. I'm not going to be dogmatic about how a particular piece manifests from your unconscious. I have some suggestions, but there's some wiggle room there. As I indicated to you, my use of that system of predreaming changed with virtually every book. But I do think doing a fair amount of writing ahead of sequence is fraught with dangers. For inexperienced writers, it's usually a way of avoiding the hard stuff. So if you're going to bring a partial something in, let it be the beginning, and please make sure we all understand that's what it is when you hand it in.
We can effectively do probably four manuscripts a week, and if they're fragments, probably more. So, theoretically, we've got enough spots that everybody can submit twice. If one person wants to submit six pieces, that's fine, because I'm sure there are some who'll prefer not to workshop at all. I've never had a class where somebody who wanted to workshop didn't have the chance. If you put in a fragment early on, it's not as if you then go to the back of the line. If you don't workshop at all, then we'll have a one-on-one meeting at the end of term.
Another thing that will be different from other workshops is that you are not required to say anything about anybody else's work. You will have the opportunity to, but there is no requirement. I want to help prevent you from reading from your head. When you get your fellow student's manuscript, you must read it as a work of art. You probably
shouldn't have a pen in your hand. You certainly should not be asking yourself, "What am I going to say?" Not even if it's from a benign impulse—and it usually is. Certainly not, "I'm going to get this son of a bitch because he got me last week," and especially not, "Butler's my way into publishing and not only am I going to have a chance to impress him with my work, I'm going to impress everyone with my critical acumen and my eloquence about matters aesthetic." I am not impressed that way. It will not affect your grade. I don't give a damn if you ever write a brilliant book review. But if such things are in your consciousness, the chances of your reading a manuscript the way it's intended to be read are very slim. That's why when you read that work, the first time through especially, it's just as if it's been written by Leo Tolstoy or Flannery O'Connor. You read it as a work of art, and you go thrum thrum thrum, and then perhaps you hit a twang. The second time through you have a pen handy: thrum thrum thrum, twang; you mark the passage and you keep thrumming on or twanging on.
When you go back and examine the twang, I want you to focus not on the symptoms—that is, the technical aspects of it—but the cause. Think of cause in light of what I've been saying about process. If the evidence shows that this work absolutely comes from the unconscious and the character has manifest, felt yearning, only then can you begin to think in technical terms. I don't want to hear technical observations until these other things are right. My most common critique will be to show you in the text where I feel the yearning is absent; the indicators that the fiction came from your head.
I warn you that my most common recommendation will he: Put this away and never look at it again. Do not rewrite, do not edit, do not fiddle, do not work this over. It came from the wrong place. You see how you got into your head this time; next time go somewhere else. In your own criticism of each other, as well, I want you to focus on the root problems—yearning, moment-to-moment sensual experience—we've been talking about here. Then we can move on to matters of craft and technique that you'll get with brilliant insight elsewhere.
In our workshops, always cite text when you comment. This is the spot. And if you can't say what the matter is exactly, don't make something up. Just say, "You know, I don't know why this didn't work but it didn't work for me here," and we can examine it. Don't feel we've got to find technical solutions or think up reasons. That draws you into your head too, and I'd rather you say, "Fourth paragraph, twang," and that's your critical comment, and that will be useful.
Misty has asked about a problem beyond the workshop. She says she's got stories that she's worked on for two or three years. These stories were workshopped, and she got a lot of suggestions, and she did a lot of revising, and yet there's so much work to be done—there always seems to be work to be done—that she doesn't even feel she should send them out. What do you do? How do you know when to send a story out and when to give up on it? Well, any short story you've been working on for two or three years—this might not be true of a novel, of course—the odds are that the story came from your head to start with. You need to go back and look at it as if you were a reader coming to somebody else's work. If you are convinced that in spite of all the problems in that story, the work originated in your unconscious, and you feel there is manifest yearning in that character, then by all means you should revisit it. But just as you can have bad from-the-head writing, you can have bad from-the-head criticism, so I would urge you to go back to the very first draft you did and put aside anything anybody has said to you. Go back to the draft that is closest to your center. It may need work—even if we are in touch with our unconscious, parts of the story get willed in and some don't, so you still have to overcome all that—but the fact is that many, many workshops give wrongheaded criticism. You know, it's the blind leading the potentially sighted here. And ultimately, you will and should have only a very small number of people you trust to read your work.
So revisit your own work as if it were someone else's; do the best you
can with it, and when you've revisited it a few times, and the twangs are now essentially gone in your own artistic view, put it in an envelope and send it out. As soon as you put it out in the world, let it go; just let it go. You move on to the next thing kicking around in your unconscious; you go down there and wrestle it out of there. Just keep on doing that.
If somebody rejects the story, with whatever criticism— you're going to get bad criticism from literary magazines too, let's face it—you let it go. What is the editorial reader's frame of mind? They have fifty things on their desk today, and there are going to be fifty tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Do you think this puts them in a frame of mind where they are naked to each manuscript they open? Where they put aside the worldview they've held all their lives and open up to a new voice, a new vision of the world? Rarely. That's why a lot of bad stuff gets perpetuated, the bland stuff and the mediocre stuff. It's because often those screening readers—I'm talking about those first two people who see it—those readers, just by the very nature of what they do, are going to be if not consciously looking for, at least more open to, things familiar to them. So all of this works against the unique voice of the real artist. And this happens at the highest, most prestigious, slickest magazines—for any number of reasons that don't have to do with art.
