by Tom Bissell
In his bravely titled How to Write: Advice and Reflections, Richard Rhodes takes an opposite tack than that of his Olympian colleagues: “If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is.... You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell.... We need stories to live, all of us.” Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of, among other books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (a great work of nonfiction everyone should read) and Making Love (a queasy memoir of all the sex Rhodes has had that I do not advise reading), has written a decent, old-fashioned Olympus that honors writing and the writer equally. That does not mean he will brook any of the self-delaying measures to which writers routinely subject themselves:If you’re afraid of what other people will think of your efforts, don’t show them until you write your way beyond fear. If writing a book is impossible, write a chapter. If writing a chapter is impossible, write a page. If writing a page is impossible, write a paragraph. If writing a paragraph is impossible, write a sentence.
One is not likely to encounter any advice in a how-to book as commendably intolerant of writerly self-delusion as that. One will find in Rhodes, though, goodly helpings of advice that sound awfully close to the advice of Natalie Goldberg and Anne Lamott and any number of other Tea & Angels writers. To the stalled writer, Rhodes offers this encouragement: “Everyone knows how to do something: describe a process. How do you tie your shoe? How do you brush your teeth? How do you plant a bulb, drive a car, read a map?” Perhaps this K-8 tone can be traced to Rhodes’s early career as a Hallmark Card writer (about which he is unapologetic; he considers all types of writing, no matter how cheap, another tool in the writer’s box), but I do not believe it should be. Rather, many of these books sound so alike—from the atom-splitting concentration they bring to bear upon the minutiae of their authors’ lives to their nakedly desperate implorations simply to write anything—because the questions the beginning writer needs answered are so depressingly similar: How do you start? What do you write about? How do you know if you are any good? Often you feel that these accomplished and famous writers are merely talking to themselves, since, in many ways, they still are that tremblingly starting-out scribbler. The how-to-write genre begins to feel less like an effort to instruct and more like a rear-guard action to reinforce the garrisons of their authors’ own slaughtered confidence. Just about all how-to-write books have at least a little worth, and some, like Rhodes’s, have great worth. For instance, Rhodes’s discussion of the cardinal importance of “voice” in writing (“‘Natural’ is a hopeless word; it has always meant and continues to mean whatever the speaker wants to exclude from discussion”) is as good as anything one can hope to find on the topic. But what begins to rise up from these pages is the iodine and lotions of self-healing. You start to wonder if you are responding not to the how-to writer who is least crazy, but the how-to writer who is crazy in the same way you are crazy. You want to be healed, too.
On its face, Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is primarily about self-healing—written, as it was, in the wake of the nearly fatal accident King suffered while walking along a country road in the summer of 1999. (The man who ran King down, one Bryan Smith, was later found, in a very King-like twist, dead of undetermined causes in his trailer home.) Most of the how-to books I have elected to discuss in this essay are due to my familiarity with their authors’ less subsidiary work. In King’s case, I confess to having read everything from Carrie to The Tommyknockers. (The latter’s demonically murderous flying soda machine made me realize, with what I can only call the shock of unwanted maturity, that perhaps I had outgrown this sort of thing. It comes as no surprise in On Writing when we learn that King wrote The Tommyknockers with “cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding.”) In other words, I have read, by quick estimate, about 15,000 pages worth of Stephen King’s prose—and I do not regret one folio of it. Whether because of his success (“I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction”), his profligacy (“there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all”), or the simple likeability of his voice (“Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter”), there are not many living writers whose views on writing will be as enthusiastically received by hacks, would-be hacks, artists, would-be artists, and civilians alike. On King’s Olympus, God walks alongside man.
“This is a short book,” King explains in the second of his three forewords, “because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.” This is fairly representative of On Writing’s tone, though its anti-intellectualism is more akin to that of Abbie Hoffman than Rush Limbaugh. The approach results in some passages of wonderful bullshitlessness. For example, King’s strident belief that a work of prose is about brutally controlled paragraphs rather than artful, free-flowing sentences (“If your master’s thesis is no more organized than a high school essay titled ‘Why Shania Twain Turns Me On,’ you’re in big trouble”) seems that delightful thing: an insight that is both unexpected and true. His insistence that carefully placed fragments in a scene of action (King’s example: “Big Tony sat down, lit a cigarette, ran a hand through his hair”) nail down the writing, giving it a kind of vivid breather, is advice good enough to pay for. But King’s dirt-plain line of attack also results in some massively wrong-headed counsel. “Remember,” he writes, “that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word... but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.” It seems to me that only willfully obtuse people don’t realize that the mind very rarely says what it means to say in the heat of any given moment, writing included. One’s first word or thought is usually imprecise, muddy, and wrong. Writing is seeing, but revision is reflecting on what one has seen. And the first word that comes to one’s mind when one is writing about anything even remotely technical is all but guaranteed to be the wrong word. The same goes for characters whose professions or interests are unfamiliar to us: one has to go back and vivify those “dogs” and “trees” and “wiry-type things” that, in every first draft, exist lifelessly on the page. The many nuances of King’s advice will be teased out by more advanced beginners, but to the less skilled one fears it will seem that King is giving prose permission to go AWOL from the interesting. “No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person,” King writes. No one, perhaps, but an incredibly defensive dumb person. King is the farthest imaginable thing from dumb, and it is unappetizing to watch him pretend that he is.
But we quickly come back to the good King, St. Stephen:I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals... and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
“Life,” King writes elsewhere, “isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.” Of course, the world is filled with those who will sniff at the notion of making good writers out of competent writers, who will despair at the prospect of these empowered good writers writing their good novels and stories and filling the world with competent, interesting writing. That is, in part, what I believe angers so many writers about the how-to-write genre—and I would be fibbing greatly if I did not admit to regarding it with a certain amount of skepticism myself. Every writer’s road is hard, and lonely, and forever covered by night, and even the best how-to books splash the path with artificial spotlight and claim it is the sun.
Nevertheless, one wonders. Just when was it that “competent
” became such a terrible fate? Like “cute,” it is a word that has somehow culturally capsized and spilled its initial, positive meaning. And since when have merely good writers been deserving of barbed wire and gruel? I, for one, am glad of the world’s good novels. I am reading a good novel right now. I hope to write a good novel someday. (I have already written several bad ones. That does not really seem such terrible providence either, in the end.) Writers who fail are not pathetic; they are people who have attempted to do something incredibly difficult and found they cannot. Human longing exists in every person, along every frequency of accomplishment. It is the delusions endemic to bad writers and bad writing that need to be destroyed. Here are a few: Writing well will get you girls, or boys, or both. Writing well will make you happy. Fame and wealth are good writing’s expected rewards. Writing for a living is somehow nobler than what most people do. What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing—solid, honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing—is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal. Some of us will be great but, as King says, that will be an accident, and its determination is beyond our power, no matter how many books we read or write. Perhaps especially if those books are about writing.
A BEAGLE’S LAMENT
There is a final book about writing that I need to talk about. God help us, it is published by Writer’s Digest Books, so allow me to encourage anyone interested to steal it forthwith, preferably from the warehouses of Writer’s Digest Books. It is called Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life, and forms a handsome collection of Peanuts Snoopycentrism. Snoopy, of course, is a long-suffering writer, and some of Charles Schultz’s funniest strips have been devoted to his worthy beagle’s literary frustrations; they are gathered here, in their glorious entirety. My second favorite strip gives us Snoopy in full profile, bent over his typewriter, diligently typing. “Gentlemen,” he writes. “Enclosed is the manuscript of my new novel. I know you are going to like it.” And in the final panel: “In the meantime, please send me some money so I can live it up.” In my favorite strip, Snoopy gives Lucy van Pelt a draft titled ”A Sad Story” “This isn’t a sad story” Lucy complains. “This is a dumb story!” Snoopy takes back the draft and holds it close to his protuberant face. He thinks, “That’s what makes it so sad.”
That is what makes it so sad. That is also why we laugh. But it is a good laughter, a pure laughter, and not at all at Snoopy’s expense. It is the laughter of necessity, laughter rich with the hope that, eventually, all of our stories will be happier.
—2004
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
The Iraq War and Documentary Film
In the middle of Peter Davis’s Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds, a large, pale, scarily eyebrowless face suddenly annexes the screen. It’s the face of Colonel George S. Patton III as he describes his attendance at a memorial service in Vietnam for some fallen American soldiers. When he gazed upon the faces of the memorial’s attendees, Patton says, “I was just proud. My feeling for America just soared.... They looked determined and reverent at the same time. But still”—and here Colonel Patton’s abrupt, savage smile reveals a mouth packed with draft horse-sized choppers—“they’re a bloody good bunch of killers.”
It is a moment you have to see to fully appreciate, which is to say it is a moment you have to see to believe. And it is the sort of completely defenseless moment you often see only in documentary films. No Hollywood dramatization could do justice to Patton’s cheerful viciousness, and a print journalist would doubtless hoard Patton’s words for some skeweringly perfect ending. But Davis allows Colonel Patton and reverent killers to float through his film like stray pieces of the dreadful shipwreck that was American aspiration in Vietnam.
Hearts and Minds hit theaters in 1974. Columbia Pictures, Hearts and Minds’s original distributor, refused to release the film, and Walter Rostow, who had been national security adviser under President Johnson, sued to block its premiere. Warner Brothers eventually brought the picture out, and it won an Academy Award for best documentary—after which it was denounced by Frank Sinatra, the ceremony’s next presenter.
Davis made his documentary with three questions in mind: Why did we go to Vietnam? What did we do there? What did the doing in turn do to us? “I didn’t expect the film to answer these questions,” Davis admits on the commentary of the recent Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. “I expected it to address those questions.” Explanatory impotence is not unique to the documentary but in some ways is abetted by the form. Inimitably vivid yet brutally compressed, documentaries often treasure image over information, proffer complications instead of conclusions, and touch on rather than explore. When a documentary film such as Capturing the Friedmans or The Burden of Dreams charts the mysteries of human behavior, an inconclusive effect can be electrifying. When a documentary film takes on the considerable subject of war, inconclusiveness can frustrate, though one’s frustration is not necessarily with the film or its maker. Even Hearts and Minds acknowledges, in its closing scene, its limitations: “You were over there too,” one man angrily says to the filmmakers at a stateside parade, “with your damn cameras.”
The damn cameras have now been to Iraq and back. Few of the Iraq War documentaries offer such self—awareness, though, and most neglect to address the war as a result of choices that might have been made differently The most ambitious and in some ways the finest documentary about Iraq is probably Stephen Marshall’s Battleground. In showing us insurgents discussing their hatred of Americans while Humvees pass by, an Iraqi translator deludedly explaining that the invasion was due to the collapse of the American economy, a former anti-Saddam guerrilla reuniting with his mother after thirteen years of exile, and a U.S. soldier marveling at the fact that Iraqis wear blue jeans (“They could be anywhere in the United States”), Battleground provides a movingly human and admirably ambivalent portrait of the war. It is, however, more the exception than the rule. In the grunts’-eye-view offered by Occupation: Dreamland and Gunner Palace, the Iraq War functions as a savage reversal of American expectation. In Control Room, about Al Jazeera, which largely limits itself to Al Jazeera’s coverage of the conflict, the war is a rough beast sprinting towards Bethlehem. In The Dreams of Sparrows, a film made by Iraqis, the war is a fiery doorway into a hitherto unknown reality. But in all of these films the war just is. Matthew Arnold famously said that journalism was “literature in a hurry.” The analytic content of these Iraq documentaries sometimes feels like journalism in a hurry. These are partial maps drawn while still within the maze of war.
Traditionally the wartime documentary dealt with the just—ness of the cause, like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, made from 1942 to 1944. Such films, however artful or historically significant, are basically propaganda. The rise of the more questioning war documentary is a relatively recent development. Film provides audiences with a uniquely reactive vulnerability; a vivid description of a shrapnel wound can certainly be affecting, but a two-story-tall image of the same can move you to slam shut your tyrannized eyes. Thus it is not surprising that so many modern war documentaries look upon their subject with considerable jaundice. A time-tested way to turn against a war is to go have a look at it for oneself. “People want their steak,” one soldier says in Occupation: Dreamland, “but they don’t want to know how the cow got butchered.”
Any honest documentary film about war must address the question of human suffering, given that human suffering is war’s distillation. But whose suffering? In January 2004, we learn in Garret Scott and Ian Olds’s Occupation: Dreamland, the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne was living on the edge of Falluja in an abandoned Baathist resort officially called Forward Operating Base Volturno but popularly known as Dreamland. The 82nd’s modest mission: “Maintain order and suppress resistance.” The bloody Marine-led siege of Falluja in April 2004 would occur after the 82nd had been rotated out of Iraq. The film thus becomes a spooky exercise in prescience as well as an unlikely elegy, for the Falluja
of Occupation: Dreamland, having been reduced to a Stalingradian ruin during its assorted American assaults, no longer exists.
The primary focus of Occupation: Dreamland is a handful of infantry troopers who occupy a single crowded room papered with Maxim pin-ups and scattered with spittoons. In their modest billeting these young men flex and pose in their mirrors, watch Total Recall, don their flak vests and goggles while listening to Slayer, mockingly read aloud from letters of stateside support, and heatedly argue politics until their staff sergeant reminds them of the camera. These soldiers’ political diversity may—but should not—surprise many viewers. Last summer I spent a month in Iraq embedded with the Marines and found men and women of widely divergent opinions about the war. Some were thoughtful, others clerics of ignorance. Some believed the United States fought for liberty, others for oil. The soldiers in Occupation: Dreamland are equally afflicted and afflicting, and one quietly grieves for those soldiers given to more searching turns of mind: “I want some answers,” Pfc. Thomas Turner (an avowed Democrat) says early in the film. “I want some clarification of what we’re doing... I guess someone smarter than me knows what’s going on.”
