Dear S—,
Thank you for your letter.
I’ve read through the poems you sent and your story, “Dark Finale.” It’s rather unclear from your letter what sort of response you want. But since you’ve sent them, I must say, what first and most strongly strikes me about the pieces is that they are all from so long ago. When I teach creative writing, today I’m rather strict about not allowing students to submit old work at all. The only work we consider is what they are currently working on. The older the student, the stricter I am about this rule. But I’ll get back to the reasons for that at the end of this letter.
The sad truth is, S—, most people are not writers.
This has nothing to do with literacy—or intelligence, or general culture.
There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them—who are still not writers.
Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers—which is one reason why so much of it is so bad.
What marks the writer—and we are still not talking about good writers versus bad writers—is that he or she writes. You say “Dark Finale”—from 1973—is your last completed fiction. My take on the tale is that it’s not really a story at all: it’s an essay or sermon (Nate’s speech) embedded in an account of the prevalent black nationalistic ideas of the late sixties/early seventies. In short, it’s two position papers put together. My suspicion is that it helped you, back at the time you wrote it or just after, to straighten out a lot of thoughts you were having about the difficult and uneasy relation between “high” culture, “white” culture, and “black” culture. Since you’ve sent me the piece, I will tell you the thoughts it evokes: I think the best thing the writer of that story could now do is to let the story lie, and take whatever understanding you have reached through it (whatever it is: it doesn’t have to be the position either of your narrator or of Nate), and move on in the world to new situations where you can apply that knowledge. Because you once wrote that tale, if you are called on to explain yourself today, you’ll probably be much more articulate about it than if, twenty-three years ago, you had not written it.
The poems come off a little better, but they still veer now and again into pompousness and sentimentality. There is talent there. There is even more intelligence. But from the quality of what you have sent me—and the fact that the most recent (dated) piece is eleven years old—I would suggest that you are not a writer.
(Were you to tell me that you had thousands of pages of journals on store, in which you had been keeping a detailed and daily account of your life, then there might be reason for me to revise the above.)
Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They’re not good at relationships. Often they’re drunks. And writing—good writing—does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder—so that eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death (if we’re lucky, the two may happen at the same time: but they are still two, and their coincidence is rare), the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying—and often drives us mad. (In a letter to Allen Tate, the poet Hart Crane once described writing as “dancing on dynamite.”) So if you’re not a writer, consider yourself fortunate.
You say that there are things in you that you want deeply to communicate. Fine. Through a job or through volunteer work, you should put yourself in a position where you are around the people, young or old or both, who need to hear what you have to say. You should work with them, demonstrate what you have to show them, and tell them—when they need to hear it.
I suspect that’s what will give you the most satisfaction.
You also write that there are “not fully resolved” problems having to do with racism and attitudes toward sexuality in this society that still, today, impede you. Let me be blunt: I distrust such claims when people write to me using such phrases—and they often do. It’s not that such problems don’t exist. On the contrary. They are real and huge and oppressive conditions in this nation, and every black (not to mention gay) man and woman must deal with them, and deal with them from childhood on. Racism or homophobia may well have injured you or deflected you from where you tried to get to. How could it not have, if you are black and gay? But you should know it—know how they did it, and why. There should be nothing unresolved about them. To have a not fully resolved problem with racism or with homophobia strikes me about the same as having a not fully resolved problem with air or with gravity. These are total surrounds. We’ve known them too long and too well.
But let me get back to the writing. In brief, if you’d asked for my advice, it would be: Do it when it strikes you as something that will help you think through whatever you’re involved in. When you have finished, put it aside and get on with your life. (I’ve been writing poetry like that for years. But, though, yes, it has helped me to work a few things out, I wouldn’t dream of showing it to anyone. Certainly I wouldn’t think of publishing it! When people ask me do I write poetry, I simply say no. And if you now went and told someone that I was “really a poet,” then you’d be majorly misreading and misunderstanding what I am saying here. Which is to say: All civilized people write poetry from time to time. Both its reading and its writing are necessary to a civilized mind. But, in most cases, we should be civilized enough to keep it—at least the writing part—to ourselves.) Of course it’s possible I’m completely wrong in what I’ve been telling you. If that’s the case, you must also remember: Writers—real writers and real poets—are constantly being told by high-sounding authoritative figures (teachers, parents, good friends, other writers) that they are not real writers, that what they’re doing isn’t any good, that it’s silly, and that they should cut it out and do something socially useful. The real writer must learn to hear that again and again—and ignore it and go on in spite of it.
You of course are the only person who can tell whether what I’m saying is reasonable advice—or if it’s advice you should laugh at, ball up, and toss into the trash. But I have been as honest as I can.
I close with a couple of brief tales—the first of which I find distressing, and the second of which I think is quite wonderful.
First tale:
I’ve taught writing workshops all over the country for the last thirty years: in Seattle and New Orleans and Cambridge and Ann Arbor and Wisconsin and East Lansing and Cincinnati …
But about ten or twelve years ago I became aware of a phenomenon that has become more and more prevalent as time has gone on.
A new workshop will meet—and there will be two, or five, or seven older students. Often they’re extremely social and pleasant individuals, easy for me as a teacher to like and to feel a kind of instant friendship with. Frequently the stories that they have submitted ahead of time show some marked talent as well—which only inclines me to like them the more.
But, on the second or third day, when we are all, say, having lunch together, I’ll overhear snatches of conversation among them: “Yes, three years ago my story was workshopped by John Wideman. He had some very encouraging things to say about it … Anthony Burgess, back when he was teaching Creative Writing at Columbia in the late seventies, workshopped that story once and said some very nice things … You know, it’s funny, what Judy said about the climax this morning was just what Robertson Davies said about it when I handed it in twelve years ago when he was up at Wesleyan … When Edmund White read it, back at the Haverford Workshop—I think that was ’84—he didn’t like the way I handled the setting at all …”
Finally I asked: “When did you write that story we went over this morning?” With a big smile, the man or woman will tell me: “Oh, this is just about the last story I wrote. I did it back in 1977 …”
And I’ll realize that this person has been going from workshop to workshop, often for as much as twenty-five years, handing in the same tale—which, by now, he or she knows will get a fair amount of praise. The “student” hasn’t changed or rewritten a word of it, however, over that same time. The game is that of a gunslinger, collecting notches in the handle of his gun. This story has been workshopped by Ernest Gaines and John Yates and Marge Piercy and John Updike and Lorrie Moore … And they all said I had talent.
I’ve done workshops where I had more “students” of this sort than I had of working, producing writers (however talented or not).
These people are workshop junkies. They are incapable of reworking or improving the story, whatever you tell them about it. They want your praise. They’re very polite in listening to your criticism—often, they even take careful notes. Frequently they’re very good at critiquing other students’ stories. But that is the price they pay to get the praise that is the all-important commodity for them. But they’re not writers because they don’t write—and haven’t written for years; though they desperately yearn for the approval that sometimes comes with having written.
I think there’s something fundamentally wrong—and rather creepy—about what they’re doing. If they do have something inside them that they want to express—now, today, then and there—it never comes out. Because all they are doing is maneuvering themselves into position to receive pats on the head for work that, fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years ago, was not in any way accomplished but that simply showed they once skirted the possibility of pleasing through one verbal skill or another.
But this is the reason, as I said at the start of this letter, I try to exclude old work from the workshops I do. Most of the people who lean on these terribly old stories, by now, have convinced themselves that there is nothing wrong with what they’re doing. Perhaps there isn’t. But to me it seems that it can’t be very fulfilling. And it takes places in the workshop away from students who are working, growing, perhaps developing and who might move on to refine their talent—as these folks have completely given up on ever doing.
I tell you this tale because I believe you when you write that you do have something to say, something to communicate, something to contribute.
I would hate to see that urge stifled and the simple search for praise at any cost grow to take its place. But this is what, more and more frequently these days, I see among people who once wrote or who once wanted to be (or, alas, still want to be) writers.
Another anecdote, however, that you may find more salutary.
Second tale:
Margaret Walker wrote three hundred pages of her novel of black life during and after the civil war, Jubilee, when she was nineteen years old, in 1939. But she could not finish it, nor was she satisfied with what she’d actually done. Though she was doing research for it constantly after that, it was not until 1954, when she was taking a creative writing workshop with Norman Holmes Pearson, as a Ford Fellow at Yale, that she first realized what she had to do with it: and it was not till seven years after that, at Iowa in 1961, that she was able to sit down and, in Verlin Cassill’s fiction writing workshop, actually do it. Doing it required her to rethink and rewrite every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter of that original three hundred pages and, indeed, keep going:—after more than twenty years!
Jubilee is a lively book that speaks to many, many people.
I don’t know which of the two tales above speaks to you more. The one you need to hear may well be one I haven’t heard yet and thus can’t tell you. But when you find it, pay attention to it—and forget all others.
And please accept
All my best wishes,
(signed:) Samuel R. Delany