Fiction, the Healing Process Continues

Part of the process of learning to write again is studying craft again. Or is it studying craft for the first time? I'm not sure how to qualify this, so I'll just tell the story. Because I'm teaching creative writing this quarter, and because I taught it last quarter, I've been reading books about writing fiction. The two text books for the class are Writing Fiction (7th ed) by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey French and Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose. Both wonderful books from which I am learning more than I can express, more than I can teach, more than I'll ever know I'm learning.

But here's what I mean by "studying craft for the first time": I never read Burroway's book before. Nor had I read Prose's. I've never read Writing down the Bones, Bird by Bird, Stephen King's On Writing, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner . . . the list goes on. I read most of Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern as an undergrad, and I've done a great job of forgetting a large portion of that text (I, of course, mean that in a good way), and I read an occasional craft essay by Carlos Fuentes, Andrea Barret, Rick Bass, Lord Byron, but by and large my ideas about craft came to me through reading Moby Dick, Satanic Verses, Darconville's Cat. I learned to write, largely, the same way I learned to play soccer . . . except I learned to play soccer by watching it on television, but you get the point.

Which might be part of what I love about Reading Like a Writer . . . Prose suggests that we attempt to unlearn what we know about reading, and, in a sense, learn to love reading again, learn to savor it. I've never been a fan of speed reading, never been a fan of skimming, never been a fan of reading the first and last paragraphs of a short story or just the last act. I have never read a Cliff's Notes or a Sparknotes: I've always wanted to, I've just never found the time for it. I've always read, as far as I can remember, every word. It's a slow process, and I'm a slow reader. My students always think I'm kidding when I describe how many minutes per page a book takes me. (For instance, Writing Fiction is a five-minute per page kind of book. Infinite Jest for another instance took close to 6000 minutes to read.) Francine Prose celebrates this kind of reading . . . in fact, more intensely: she suggests reading classic texts in a language you barely know. Now that's slow, savory, something I hope to do . . . someday.

I have often wished I could read faster. But never while I'm immersed in a great book. I never once, while reading Sometimes a Great Notion thought, "I can't wait til I'm done with this monster."

As for Writing Fiction, Burroway has gathered a best-of writers talking about writing. She continually quotes Dorothy Allison, Flannery O'Connor, Anton Chekhov, and maybe a hundred other disparate and talented writers. And this is what I mean about "studying the craft again:" This text reinforces a lot of the ideas about writing that I've learned from my amazing cast of mentors, my shockingly talented groups of peers, and from my own autodidactic pursuit of craft lessons.

Burroway quotes Octavia Butler: "Forget Inspiration. habit is more dependable. habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice." The most important element of any writing life, I believe, is a sustained, consistent effort. I like talking to folks who say that they're always writing, no matter what they're doing, even if they're sitting around smoking a joint or bad-mouthing Republicans or playing golf. I think that's fantastic, and I think it's largely true (that writers are always writing), but if a writer doesn't get on her ass every day and slap some keys, she isn't going to produce anything -- she'll lead the paradoxical life of a writer not writing. Let me preface this (after the fact) by saying I'm definitely wrong about this. Some folks can smoke a can of opium, sit in a bathtub for an hour, and write "Kubla Khan" any day of the week. Some folks can write in their sleep or while they're driving or while they're watching the Superbowl. I can't. I think most folks can't. And, even if they can, I think we're all better served by the sustained, consistent effort, by persistence in practice, by sitting on our asses and cranking out words.

Another hugely exciting experience I'm having in reading Writing Fiction is the writerly dialogue the work is opening up in my head. Burroway quotes John Gardner:

. . . the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: "Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks." Compare: "She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting . . ." Generally speaking--though no laws are absolute in fiction---vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.

Is this what it all comes down to? The distinction between "she noticed two snakes fighting" and "two snakes were fighting" feels like the least of details, like noticing a dusty shelf in a condemned building (while I approve of the metaphor, when I'm completely healed, I'll create an analogy with a positive connotation, rather than suggesting that good writing is like a condemned building . . . though, when I say it that way, I like it all the more). I mean is it that big of an issue? I actually asked myself that question as though I were asking John Gardner himself. And, as if John Gardner were speaking through me*, I thought, "It is not only that big of an issue. It's the only issue. A good story, a good piece of fiction is consciousness -- we are accessing another's consciousness. We are seeing through another's eyes (we are, in fact, using all of her senses, which is why sensuous detail is so stinking important), and registering another's thoughts." I for one have never looked at two snakes fighting and thought, "I turn, only to notice two snakes fighting among the rocks." No, I have never thought that at all. I might say that, but I'll be damned if I'm going to narrate the action in my head, I think to myself as I continue typing and consider what I have learned today.

Also, I say I haven't read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird or Stephen King's On Writing, but that's only half true. I started both books recently and both are helping me to rebuild my writing self. Thank you, fiction writers who have paved this road to recovery. I always imagined that I would read the books someday to help me improve my writing, to help me improve my teaching, to help me pass an exam or land a job, but I never would have guessed I'd be reading these texts as a way to help my psyche heal.




*Yep. I'm suggesting that I'm channeling, not only one of the best fiction writing books of all time, but also, a book I just acknowledged I've never read. It might make you feel better that earlier today on a different blog, I very clearly compared myself to Cool Hand Luke.

E-Community

There is some really good writerly advice out there in the electronic world, and I credit said world for part of my recovery as a writer. I have been looking through blogs of all sorts – there are thousands about the act, the art, and / or the craft of writing – many of which offer sweeping encouragements or banal platitudes; others offer writing exercises and experiments; some describe publishing processes or guides to landing an agent: I have found them all very helpful, each for their own specific reasons.

I suppose this blog is the closest I can come to thanking the world for continuing encouragement.

It is also nice to know that there are many many readers out there in the world: literary and genre, pulp and electronic, those who read for pleasure and those who read more like a form of worship – and, the best news of all, many folks who read in many or all or more ways than I listed.

Writing, as I tell every student in every writing class, is a community activity – even the most sacred, secret journal (in that it offers an outlet for feelings or perhaps a source of joy or solace) is a social act, because it affects the way in which we deal with the world.

Writing is a community activity and I am thankful to the internet for providing a limitless community of writers. (I do not mean “limitless” hyperbolicly – I simply do not believe an I could exhaust the online writing community.)

Heaven and Hell

Isaac Asimov said something to this effect: "If there is a heaven, it will be a place where I will having nothing to do but read and write novels."

Personally, I like to get out for a beer with friends from time to time, but when my writing is going well, everything else is just interference. I had a lot of life to take care of for most of my day, so I only had about two hours of productive writing time -- I would prefer eight, but that rarely happens, even on my most secluded of vacations. Once I sat down, I had a hard time getting to work. I opened up the files of my spy novel. I had to pry my way back into it. But writing is like this for me. Like a sport. I have to stretch out, warm up, loosen my subconscious.

When I did, I fell back into it, back into that old feeling of creation. Every day I ask myself, "Why write?" And I have a lot of answers that I cycle through. Some days I can't find an answer at all. But days like today, when I push past the not-wanting-to and the fear of not being able to and enter into the dream space, days like today, the answer is so clear and obvious that it doesn't have words.

Asimov's heaven sounds a little too much like Sartre's "Hell is other people," and I'm not quite willing to forsake the world entirely for the word, but days like today, I don't need much of anything else except for the story.

Beginning a Sustained, Consistent Writing

I was comparing writing woes with Jaswinder lately -- that we never seem to have enough time to just sit down and write, that we don't seem to get enough recognition, that recognition never seems to be as fulfilling as simply sitting down to write, but still a little recognition would be nice.

This came up during this past quarter while I was teaching a creative writing (fiction introduction) course. The main project for the course was to keep a journal. The idea behind the journal was to perform a sustained, consistent writing. Writers, I believe, should sit down everyday and crank out words, not hellbent on creating a new and equally beautiful Sometimes a Great Notion, but to exercise, much the same as a professional athlete would her body, one's unconscious.

Days after Jaswinder and I spoke about our writing woes, I opened some moving boxes my parents had dropped brought to me recently. I found my college journals, notebooks, and binders for English classes, biology and earth science, Calculus140, Polysci 197, Theatre 203, et al., as well as my personal journals, my drunken notebooks, binders full of laminated papertowels, cigarette packs torn into queer crucifixes and stapled to three-hole-punched cardboard.

It was at that moment that I realized the one thing that I was doing constantly, the thing I backed off during my MFA and the thing I abandoned altogether as a Ph.D. candidate . . . I realized that whatever else I was doing in my life, I was always, also, already writing. I wrote about the subjects for the classes, fictionalized physics, wrote off topic, created worlds in which I was the biology teacher and Dr. M_______ was madly in love with me. I wrote three-line plays and three-page haikus. I started and abandoned novels. I wrote awful things about myself and generous things about exgirlfriends.

At some point, that all fell away. I blame myself, certainly, and at some point, it seemed counterintuitive to begin journaling again. I was a master of fine arts. I was a Ph.D. candidate. I was an adult with children and a mortgage. I had more excuses than I had time to list them.

But I was convinced that I had to start over. I know it was the write decision. So I started running my pen across some pages. Lousy things happened. I wrote about the couch I was sitting on. I wrote about how tall my kids were and how lonely a person might get on a desert island. I wrote about waking up and realizing everything was all a dream. I wrote dreams. I wrote more about the couch, some about the television, a touch about the future of humanity. All boring stuff. All awfully written. All terribly embarrassing. I loved every word.