Writing Books, Workshops,
& Feedback

166}CAN WRITING (ESPECIALLY
“CREATIVE” WRITING) BE TAUGHT?

I’ve been teaching for a dozen years and have written two books on the subject. Still, I wonder sometimes whether teaching writing is a waste of time. And worse: if my foolhardy attempts to teach writing create bad writers and worse writing.

Then I remember how much I’ve learned as a writer over the past thirty years. And if something can be learned it can be taught. Indeed, writing must be taught, because it must be learned. A born writer is as mythical a beast as the unicorn.

How do we learn? By trial and error, by imitation, by example, by osmosis, by prescription. We learn consciously and unconsciously, intellectually and instinctively. We learn through pain and through pleasure. We learn from our mistakes and from our triumphs. And we learn from the triumphs and mistakes of others.

The hardest lessons to learn are those that threaten our own self-preserving egos. The student who brings to class the conviction that he has already perfected his style and is just waiting to be discovered won’t learn much from me—or from anyone; Tolstoy couldn’t teach him anything.

Some say the only way to learn to write is to read. I agree. Teaching writing is, at best, a form of guided, annotated reading. We read the works of masters and we read the work of our peers, to say nothing of our own works, and we do so with an eye to craft and the technical issues raised and solved by craft.

What about inspiration? And intuition? Doesn’t so much emphasis on “craft” impair those elements?

It can. An obsession with craft must not sweep away inspiration. That’s why I tell my students that their first drafts are none of my business, nor the business of anyone else in the class; their first drafts are between them and their private muses. Similarly, I tend to give writing exercises only on demand, since they may circumscribe a writer’s first and best instincts and steer him away from authenticity.

True, teachers have been known to inspire their students. But the mechanics of inspiration are at best murky. What inspires one may discourage another.

The key to teaching any form of art is to achieve a balance between instinct and technique. The relationship between willpower and art has always been heavily debated, with intuitive writers like Kerouac and Whitman at one end of the argument and formalists like Eliot and Pound at the other. Of that relationship Lewis Hyde says:

There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active. The suspension is primary. It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition, or image. The material must begin to flow before it can begin to be worked, and not only is the will powerless to initiate that flow, but it actually seems to interfere, for artists have traditionally used devices—drugs, fasting, trances, sleep deprivation, dancing—to suspend the will so that something “other” will come forward. When the material finally appears, it is usually in a jumble, personally moving, perhaps, but not much use to anyone else—not, at any rate, a work of art. There are exceptions, but the initial formulation of a work is rarely satisfactory … like a person who must struggle to say what he means, the imagination stutters toward the clear articulation of its feeling. The will has the power to carry the material back to the imagination and contain it there while it is re-formed. [It provides] the energy and the direct attention called for by a dialogue with the imagination.

As the muscles are exercised on playing fields and in gymnasiums, the creative will is exercised in classrooms and writing workshops.

167}SLEEPING PILLS & LAXATIVES:
BOOKS ON WRITING

And what of books about writing—like this one? Can we really expect to learn anything from them?

Like sleeping pills and laxatives, books about writing work best for those who need them least.

By working “best,” what do I mean? I guess I mean they’re best enjoyed by those who don’t expect too much from them— those who don’t expect to be taught “how to” write and who have already evolved certain aesthetic opinions and principles. For experienced writers, books about writing are like walking into a study and finding another author there, and settling in for a few hours of cozy shoptalk. The conversation may be one-sided, but it doesn’t have to be: that’s what pens and margins are for. I personally love to read writing books, if only to disagree with them, or just to see where and how my ideas differ or coincide with others’.

I’m not alone. Many of my writer acquaintances, some very successful, love to read books about writing: They find them relaxing, comforting, and even, at times, inspiring and edifying. A few even admit that they’ve learned things from them.

And what about beginners? Are writing books good for them?

I think so. I think books on writing can spare novices a lot of time and misunderstanding. They can point toward examples that may help them in their choices, open up possibilities that they might not have seen or considered, encourage them to delve into literature they’ve overlooked.

At the very least a book like this can make you think more and more deeply about what you, as a writer, have done and are doing.

What books on writing give us is a little knowledge. To get the rest you need to read stories and novels, all kinds of stories and novels, and lots of them.

And of course you need to write. Start with 500 words a day. Aim for a million words. They don’t have to be the greatest words ever written, or great by any means, or even all that good. As long as you write sincerely, and keep writing.

Get through the first million words.

Then pat yourself on the back and write the next million.

But yes, except as a form of amusement, and to supplement the reading and writing by which you exercise your craft, books like this are mostly a waste of time.

168}TOUGH LOVE:
CONROY CUTS ME ONE

Like gymnasiums, workshops can be places of pain.

I speak from experience. Years ago, it was my privilege to participate in a workshop led by the late Frank Conroy, then director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, whose memoir Stop-Time was one of my ten favorite books.

By the time I studied with him, Conroy had been leading workshops for thirty years—possibly too long: He seemed a bit tired, a bit jaded. Yet his first critique of my work (each student had two turns at bat) was, if anything, generous: He had only praise for the novel chapter I submitted. I had been forewarned that, if I was any good at all, Conroy would “cut me a new asshole,” and so I wondered if I’d fallen short.

I didn’t have to wonder long. My next time up, Conroy did indeed cut me a supplementary orifice. He read the first sentences of my new chapter out loud until he arrived at the word preponderance. “At that point, I stopped reading,” Conroy said, and by way of illustration flung my manuscript over his shoulders. The pages fluttered to the floor like the wings of a freshly beheaded chicken.

I waited for the burlesque to end and for Conroy to say something more. But there was nothing more; he hadn’t read any more of that chapter. It was the harshest criticism I have ever gotten, yet it made the point: Don’t show off.

As writer Robert Stone said, speaking of his own apprenticeship: “I never learned anything as a writer that didn’t break my heart.”

169}GIVING WRITERS THE
BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

There have been times when, as a teacher, I’ve wondered if I should ignore my own responses and give a student the benefit of that doubt. Have I been guilty of not granting my students the authority of their own words?

With experience, you can distinguish between writing that generates its own authority and writing that doesn’t. And no: The difference is not obscured by poor grammar or mechanical difficulties (as demonstrated by a Chinese student of mine, whose English grammar was poor but whose stories shone with authority).

It’s up to our stories to seduce their readers, and not up to our readers to give us the benefit of anything. In the artificial environment of the writers’ workshop, classmates rarely surrender their authority to the writer. That’s as it should be, since in real life that authority is surrendered only when the work has been so well and deeply imagined that it no longer needs to satisfy any terms other than those it has established for itself.

We write for an ideal reader: intelligent, sensitive, discriminating; immune to hype, free of prejudices, whose only loyalty is to good writing, and whose taste in such matters is ironclad. When people urge us to “give the writer the benefit of the doubt,” they want to entrust him to a less-than-ideal reader, to someone less discerning, someone less demanding, someone more easily duped. We may as well throw his work out the window. Or just tell him it’s wonderful (which may amount to the same thing).

Love the writer; respect the writer; honor the writer. But when there’s a doubt, give the author its benefit by expressing your concerns, feelings, and criticisms, and let the author choose whether or not to reject them.

170}NO SOFT HITS FOR HARD WRITERS:
WORKSHOP WOES

A student writes me a note:

I was disappointed by the comments I got for my work. My piece was a first draft, yet no one bothered to ask what I was trying to do, or to consider that I might be up to something different from what they had in mind or are used to. My draft manuscript was returned to me marked up as if I were a complete novice, and not someone who has been writing for years.

I’m glad my student wrote this note to me; I wouldn’t have guessed his feelings. Responding to it, I said first that I hoped my own comments had registered with him, since I remembered having praised the work highly. Then I went on:

People in the class focused on the structural issue raised by your piece, the two sections not fulfilling each other, forming an incomplete and unsatisfying whole. You may need to accept that this may be true. It takes nothing away from your virtuosity as a writer, your solid gifts. Is the story perfect as written? You know it isn’t. Did the class appreciate what you were trying to do, the risks you took? Probably not; that’s asking too much of any workshop.

Typically, the most accomplished work gets or seems to get the toughest criticism. The playing field is not even: Every story sets up its own level of response and critique. The more accomplished the work, the higher the standards applied to it. It may well be that your work has run afoul of this formula. If you were thinking that, being a major-league hitter, it would be fun to slum with the minors, whack a few out of the ball park before their wondrous eyes, forget it. As a friend of mine once said (a propos tennis, not softball): You hit hard, I hit back harder. That’s how it works in life, that’s how it works in writing workshops. Few ‘soft hits’ for hard writers.

And why should you want them? I think the cruelest thing one writer can do to another is mislead them into thinking their work succeeds when it doesn’t, or is ready to submit when it isn’t.

One last thought re: people asking about your intentions. Those kinds of discussions are usually fruitless. I don’t want people asking authors what they were ‘trying’ to do, or authors having to answer. Doing so degrades writers and authors; it backs them into defensive corners. And anyway explanations as to intentions are irrelevant; the work must speak for itself.

Suggestion: Latch on to the one or two people in the group whose comments you find valuable. Ignore the others. Including, if necessary, me.

171}CARVED IN STONE:
REFUSAL TO REVISE

I’ve now read three pieces by one of my students and frankly I’m starting to worry. He may well be the most intelligent and imaginative student I’ve taught, and certainly he’s got talent and the energy to produce vast quantities of work.

But this won’t do. Though he’s added a sentence here and there, and expanded the material, he refuses to revise.

When I begin my fiction classes, I point out the two loves a person should have to be a writer: love of words and love of truth. Love of words: because to a writer they must be treated as gold, weighed and measured and never wasted. Love of truth: because lies are everywhere, emotional lies as well as factual lies, and only fiction can dare to tell us the truth about how we behave, how we live. To convince us, things have to feel just right, with each word carrying more than its own weight and no room for the gratuitous. (Even mediocre work requires a certain regard for the truth—that is, if it is mediocre and publishable.)

What this student has in spades is a love of knowledge and ideas. But those two loves can only serve a writer in conjunction with the other two.

Practically everyone has ideas. Some have both ideas and the energy to put them on paper. But only those who take the next step can rightly call themselves authors.

And the next step is to revise, to get down to the painstaking task of sculpting truth with words.

172}FROM INFRARED PROPAGANDA TO
ULTRAVIOLET SELF-INDULGENCE

In his workshop Frank Conroy spoke of the “reader/writer rainbow,” the continuum between private writing—writing as an act of pure self-expression—and public writing—writing done to influence others, i.e., propaganda. These two extremes form the infrared and ultraviolet of Conroy’s symbolic “rainbow.”

The author’s challenge, according to Conroy, is to achieve a balance between those extremes, so that our words communicate to the reader without either pandering or badgering. Public writing tells us what we ought to think and feel; private writing is the writer talking to herself. Near the center of the rainbow is the place where both extremes meet, where communication without didacticism is possible, where writer’s words and reader’s imagination engage in a healthy collaboration. And where, according to Conroy, all good writing happens.

In student stories, much of the writing falls on one end of the spectrum or the other, the private (ultraviolet), or the propagandistic (infrared). Things are vague, cryptic, or formless, or they are too directly stated or otherwise overdetermined. The reader is told too much, or too little.

To move them toward the center of the rainbow, to where writer and reader meet each other halfway, that’s the writing teacher’s main function.