by Tom Bissell
—2003
WRITING ABOUT WRITING ABOUT WRITING
The first idea was not our own.
—Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction”
HOW-TO
To linger around the bookstore alcove dedicated to how-to-write books is to grow quickly acquainted with the many species of human expectation. One after another the aspirants come—the good-sport retiree who has decided to tell her life story, the young specter of manhood with scores to settle and truths to tell, the Cussler- and Patterson-overdosed executive aiming to blockbust his way to lakefront property and setting his alarm for ten—and shyly pull books off the packed shelves, level upon level of volumes promising to atomize the frustratingly numerous barriers between them and their dreams. Yet most of the people who frequent the how-to-write section will never become writers. It gives me no pleasure to make that observation, just as it gives me no pleasure to admit that I will never play swingman for the Indiana Pacers.
The question is whether these people will never become writers because they are not talented or because the books that congest the shelves of the how-to-write section are mostly useless. This sounds much sharper than I intend. Look around the how-to section. To your left: books on how to garden. To your right: computer programming. Down the way a bit more: How to Play Five-String Banjo. Most of the people who buy these books will not become professional gardeners or computer programmers or banjoists either. Would a successful computer programmer sneer at a person seeking to explore the pleasures of writing a few lines of code? Somehow one doubts it. Dreams, after all, are many, often mundane, and their private pursuit is the luxury of every dreamer.
But an even dustier (and probably unanswerable) question must first be posed: Can writing be taught? Both congratulation and flagellation tend to accrue upon the answers this question receives. Those who maintain that writing cannot be taught are in effect promoting the Priesthood Theory of Writing. In short, a few are called, most are not, and nothing anyone does can alter this fated process. Those who maintain that writing can be taught are, on the other hand, in grave danger of overestimating their ultimate value as teachers, though most of the writing teachers I know are squarely agnostic on the issue. My own view, if it matters: Of course writing can be taught. Every writer on the planet was taught, via some means, to write. Even those lacking the guildlike background of an MFA program or the master-apprentice experience of studying beneath an attentive teacher taught themselves to write—most likely by reading a lot of literature. To think about this question for more than a few moments quickly reduces it to the absurd. All human activity is taught. The only thing any human being is born to do is survive, and even in this we all need several years of initial guidance.
Harder to judge is the possibility of teaching a beginning writer how to be receptive to the very real emotional demands of creating literature. To write serious work is to reflexively grasp abstruse matters such as moral gravity, spiritual generosity, and the ability to know when one is boring the reader senseless, all of which are founded upon a distinct type of aptitude that has little apparent relation to more measurable forms of intelligence. Plenty of incredibly smart people cannot write to save their lives. Obviously, writerly intelligence is closely moored to the mature notion of intellect (unlike math or music, the adolescent prodigy is virtually unknown to literature) because writing is based on a gradual development of psychological perception, which takes time and experience. Writing can be taught, then, yes—but only to those who are teachable. Strong writers, especially, can be made, with sensitive guidance, even stronger. This is, in part, the service professional book editors provide. The problem is, truly fine writers have emerged from every cultural, sociological, and educational milieu imaginable. An even bigger problem is, at least for those who teach beginning writers, no one can predict who is teachable. Perhaps it is best, then, to teach them all.
ON BECOMING A NOVELIST
If any of this sounds familiar, it is because I am cribbing from John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, the book that did, in fact, teach me how to write. It is probably the most important book I have ever read—or rather the most important book ever read by the aspiring writer who became the person writing this sentence. Gardner, an erratically brilliant novelist, solid short-story writer, underappreciated critic, legendary creative-writing teacher, habitual animadvert, massive hypocrite, and awe-inspiring pain in the ass, died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 49 in 1982, having written more than thirty books; Novelist is one of the last he completed. With the exception of Grendel, his genre-shattering masterpiece, most of his books are, today out of print. (I should disclose here that, as a young editor at W. W Norton, I was behind Novelist’s restoration to print. I tried the same daring rescue op with some of his fiction. That mission failed.) Why is Novelist so good? “Either the reader [of this book] is a beginning novelist who wants to know whether the book is likely to be helpful,” Gardner writes in his preface, “or else the reader is a writing teacher hoping to figure out without too much wasted effort what kind of rip-off is being aimed this time at that favorite target of self-help fleecers.” Instantly we see the many virtues of Gardner’s approach: honesty, an up-front acknowledgment of the typical how-to-write book’s worth, and a forgiving awareness of human limitation: “More people fail at becoming businessmen than fail at becoming artists.” It was Gardner’s unfakeable gift to write advice that feels laser-beamed into the cortex of each individual reader. Me, one thinks with amazement while reading. He is talking to me. Or so I felt, reading Novelist for the first time at a writer’s workshop in Bennington, Vermont.
I was eighteen, had never been to a workshop before (and have, with a couple of exceptions, stayed away from them since), had never even been east before (I was then a community-college student in Michigan), and was surrounded, for the first time, by people crazy about writers and books. It was overwhelming, and after two days I wanted to go home. I did not have talent, was galactically outclassed by the Harvard students on their résumé-building summer vacations, and suddenly had no idea why I ever believed my deeply rural imagination would ever be capable of producing literary art. My teacher, sensing my distress, handed me On Becoming a Novelist, and by the end of the day I had nearly conked out my highliter. One paragraph in particular saved my literary life, as I was then struggling with the demands of telling “the truth” about the asses and idiots every young man imagines living all around him. I remember the passage so vividly I scarcely need to consult the source:One of the great temptations of young writers is to believe that all the people in the subdivision in which he grew up were fools and hypocrites in need of blasting or instruction. As he matures, the writer will come to realize, with luck, that the people he scorned had important virtues, that they had better heads and hearts than he knew. The desire to show people proper beliefs and attitudes is inimical to the noblest impulses of fiction.
Thunder! lightning! Read that again, please. These are the words of a fundamentally good man attempting to show the young writer one honest way in which to think, to see. (When I found out that the aesthetically conservative Gardner was actively loathed by many of his fellow writers—Joseph Heller called him “a pretentious young man”!—I loved him even more.) If I belabor the point with autobiography—and there will not be any more, or at least not very much—I do so to make a point. Most writers have thoughts about writing as an act, as a way of understanding oneself, or as a way of being, and they are often interesting. I have any number of thoughts about writing, all of which I find incomparably fascinating. How fascinating to others, though, might they be? A how-to-write book saved my life, then, but it did so existentially not instructively. Many of the best books about writing are only incidentally about writing. Instead, they are about how to live.
USER’S MANUAL
There are several types of how-to-write books. The first is the rigorous handbook-style guide that does not concern itself with creating interes
ting characters or crafting exciting scenes. Rather, it concentrates on how to write a decent sentence that means what one intends it to mean: a User’s Manual to the English language. The most famous is William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style. If one wishes to write New Yorker-style prose, this is the book to read. Of course, the New Yorker style is a fine style with which it is eminently worth getting acquainted, but it is not the only style. Nor is it, in every case, even the most preferable style. One truly interesting thing about the New Yorker style is that it can serve both as a hiding place for mediocrity and as the lacquered display table for masters rightfully confident in their powers. Used well, the New Yorker style is what one imagines the style of God might be, if there was any indication that God spoke English. Used poorly, the New Yorker style is all gutless understatement, decorous to a Fabergé extreme.
Composed of five parts (“Elementary Rules of Usage,” “Elementary Principles of Composition,” “A Few Matters of Form,” “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused,” and “An Approach to Style”), Elements is a handholding book, in the best sense. The first four parts are, as one might guess, almost ridiculously elementary, with brief and noticeably impatient advice as to how to punctuate (“A common error is to write it’s for its,” “do not use periods for commas”) and employ basic literary logic (“As a rule, begin each paragraph either with a sentence that suggests the topic or with a sentence that helps the transition”). The last part, “An Approach to Style,” opens with Strunk and White admitting, “Here we leave solid ground,” and that “no key unlocks the door.” It must surely rank among the most winning and incisive twenty pages on writing that have ever been published. “With some writers,” Elements tells us, “style not only reveals the spirit of the man but reveals his identity.... The beginner should approach style warily, realizing it is an expression of self, and should turn resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style.” In other words, when it comes to the most important stuff, kid, you are on your own.
Nevertheless, there is much within Elements to debate. Many have quibbled with Strunk and White’s assertion to “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” In fact, the passage in which this advice appears is actually an apologia for the much-maligned adverb. “Use adverbs well” seems to be the actual, hidden point of this initially restrictive diktat. “Avoid fancy words,” Strunk and White tell us, and, if the wearisome battles I have had with copy editors and family members is any indication, the entire planet now agrees. “Anglo-Saxon,” we are informed, “is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo-Saxon words.” Well, according to whom? The “fancy words” Strunk and White unveil as examples—beauteous, curvaceous, and discombobulate—are less fancy words than incredibly dumb words. One thing a “fancy words” embargo does is squelch and stifle a certain kind of young writer—the kind of young writer who happens to love and cherish unusual words, and who can, more significantly, divine the appropriateness of a dumb word and a word of high contextual potential. “Do not inject opinion,” Elements goes on. Dear Lord in heaven, why not? “We all have opinions about almost everything, and the temptation to toss them in is great.... [T]o air one’s views at an improper time may be in bad taste.” But good writing, like a good joke, is very rarely in good taste. It could be said—in fact, I will say it—that all a writer has, in the end, is his or her opinions. Hemingway believed that personal courage was the defining component of one’s life; that is of course an opinion, and his entire body of work is shot to the core with it. “Do not inject opinion” is itself an opinion! This is not advice for a young writer seeking a stately style. This is advice one receives in a Toastmasters public-speaking class.
I do not really believe that Strunk and White thought opinion had no place in writing, or believed “fancy words” were inherently ill-advised. The Elements of Style is not proscriptive, despite its many proscriptions. It is suggestive, and wisely so. It has made and will continue to make many people write better, and more clearly. So shouts out. But it seems unlikely to help anyone already on his or her way toward becoming an artist. If even this most ideal of books is read at the wrong time, it may actually damage (or at least discombobulate) the young artist.
GOLDEN PARACHUTE
What of the how-to-write books with more financially liberating titles? I speak, of course, of Daniel H. Jones’s How to Write a Best-seller While Keeping Your Day Job, Judith Appelbaum’s How to Get Happily Published, James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James N. Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel II, and so on. Quite a few of these Golden Parachutes are penned by people who have rarely written anything but how-to-write books. They are usually hack books for hacks. Most are fairly, and forgivably straightforward about this. The self-aware hack is, after all, a pardonable literary colleague, largely because he poses no threat to an actual artist.
Artist. That is a grand word, and you might think that most of the Golden Parachute how-tos care little about the artier aspects of writing: integrity, truth, vision, and the like. You would be wrong. Many care deeply about art, as they care about advances and careers and publicity. Such books nanny every facet of writing equally, giving us a portrait of the artist as a fragile Hummel figurine.
Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel is both a case in point and not. Maass, an established literary agent who, according to his biography, “is the author of fourteen pseudonymous novels,” does not at first blush appear to be the most sensitive minister to the literary soul. Take, for instance, some of his clients, such as the novelist Anne Perry, one of the two girls whose real-life matricidal crimes were the subject of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. Indeed, Perry provides the book’s foreword: “Put yourself on the page and all that you think and feel about life, but do it with discipline; do it with skill. Then the good agents and the good publishers will get your work into the hands of the good readers.” And then the good fairies and elves will approach your front door carrying bags of gold, and the leprechauns will come, and the gnomes, and the friendly talking monkeys will sing, oh sing! outside your window! Although Perry’s is some of the most insincere advice I have ever read, it is not even her preface’s silliest moment. That would be: “Good luck. There’s room for us all. They’ll just build bigger bookshops!”
Maass is much shrewder than all that. Writing the Breakout Novel is about just what it claims: breaking out. Intended mainly for the already published novelist marooned upon the Isles of Midlist, Breakout is largely a fiduciary affair, as breaking out has little to do with art and much to do with sweaty calculation. Maass acknowledges this, more or less. He also acknowledges that people in the publishing industry, most often, “do not have the foggiest idea” why some authors breakout and some do not. Authors who have broken out, Maass writes, “toss around wholesale numbers like baseball stats, and generally display the ease and confidence of someone who has made it big through long and dedicated effort.” Such writers are often called assholes. However, these assholes have learned something, namely “the methods [of] developing a feel for the breakout-level story” The breakout-level story is one “in which lightning seems to strike on every page,” written by authors who “run free of the pack.” Writing a breakout novel “is to delve deeper, think harder, revise more, and commit to creating characters and plot that surpass one’s previous accomplishments.” But! “I am not interested in punching out cookie-cutter best-sellers, so-called ‘blockbuster novels.”’ Rest assured, “A true breakout is not an imitation but a breakthrough to a more profound individual expression.”
Cynics would not be blamed for suspecting that Maass is sleeping in both bunks, as it were. But the fact is, agents are not the brainless dollar-zombies routinely imagined by lit-biz chatterboxes. Virtually all of them know the difference between a work of art and a work of commerce, Maass included. Here is a man who can, in the space of one page, except from and discuss the work of both Nicholas Sparks (“You h
ave probably noticed from these excerpts that the prose and dialogue in The Notebook is rudimentary”) and Colson Whitehead (“His fully developed premise meets all of my breakout criteria”). In his extremely good discussion of “Tension on Every Page” Maass holds up not, say, Robert Stone or Neal Stephenson, but John Grisham. Maass admits that “it is fashionable to put down [Grisham’s] writing: His prose is plain... his characters are cardboard cutouts. There is some truth to those charges, but one cannot deny that Grisham compels his readers to turn the pages.” I have read two Grisham novels, The Firm and A Time to Kill, and though my eyes rolled skyward several dozen times, I did, indeed, finish them both. In the case of The Firm, I could scarcely turn the pages fast enough. There is that to learn from Grisham, as Maass notes, “even in the absence of artistic prose.”
But can one learn how to keep readers turning pages? Can one learn some magical method of “Building a Cast” of supporting characters, as one of Maass’s subchapters is headed? “Needless to say” Maass writes, “the more complex you make your secondary characters, the more lifelike and involving your story will be.” One can almost hear the scribbly note-taking accompanying that insight. Maass is not wrong; it is needless to say. But seeking to provide writers with some surefire method of injecting complexity into secondary characters seems rather difficult. How would one do this, if not intuitively—if not naturally? Well, let us try. Say I have just created a secondary character named Jake. Jake works at a zoo. He is overweight, conscious of his body and has no girlfriend. Okay. Complexity now. He was once kicked in the face. By a zebra. That Jake, he hates zebras. This is pointless, of course. Characters, along with their hang-ups and complexities, appear in the mind of a writer and are honed or dispatched accordingly. It is as simple and dreadfully complicated as that. Writers who are able to summon up a lot of interesting secondary characters have one of two things going for them: they have had a lot of life experience and met many interesting people, or they are imaginative swamis.
