HAVE I BEEN TOO HARD on the students in the past? Am I being too nice to them now? All I know for sure is that if I show work to my agent and he says “it isn’t working” I lose interest in it. A long time ago, when I was just beginning to publish, my agent or editor would tell me I had to do certain things to make a piece of writing better and I would fiercely go back to work and change the parts they thought were “wrong.”
Having a salary and being a professor has changed how I react to that sort of criticism. Half the time I just go on writing the way I was writing without having any interest in changing or rewriting the piece. Is this the effect that teaching has on writers? Is this why so many of my most talented friends never published again after they began to teach?
I have written a book of stories, a novel, and a novella in the past year and I don’t want to rewrite any of them. I like them as they are. “The characters are just talking,” my agent tells me about these pieces of fiction but he has no suggestions as to how I could make the pieces more publishable. Maybe I just want to write dialogue. I know the characters I am writing about so well I don’t need to describe them or comment on their behavior or conversation so I just amuse myself by telling their stories in dialogue.
I like what I am doing with these stories. I am having a very good time being a writer with no audience. I am watching all of this happen with small interest. I have become too Zen to be a writer in the way I used to be a writer.
All of this is useful to me as a teacher, however. I have learned that criticism is poison to a writer. Now, what am I going to do to help these students learn to write stories they can publish without hurting their feelings and making it impossible for them to write at all? I will teach them how to kindly edit their fellow students’ work and maybe the lessons they learn by doing that will allow them to learn to look at their own work objectively. WRITING IS REWRITING I tell my students over and over again because when I believed that I published everything I wrote. Now I tell them that WRITING IS REWRITING but I no longer care to do it myself.
Perhaps I am telling myself stories to get myself ready for death. I will die in about thirty years if my genetic history is any indicator. Actually, I take such good care of myself that barring accidents I will probably live forty more years. So I don’t think I’m getting ready to die. I just think I am tired of showing my imagination to the world and want to keep it to myself.
Or perhaps I am getting lazy. I don’t think that’s true because I have never been lazy in any way but you never can tell what Zen meditation may be making happen to my mind and psyche. Maybe I have actually learned to live in the present. I have been trying to learn to do that for many years. It may have happened while I wasn’t watching.
I am happier than I have ever been in my life and more patient. HOORAY FOR EVERYTHING as a poet once wrote in the crazy 1970s when poets reigned supreme in the United States of America that I knew.
MARCH 2004