YOUR FICTION SOMETIMES CONTAINS CODED MESSAGES—INTENDED FOR YOU.
June 1988
Why do we write?
Oh, you know all the usual reasons. First, the external ones. To make money. To win recognition. To gain respect. To escape from the rat race. To take up a freer and less confining life. To shake the dust of Ishpeming, Michigan, from our shoes and start hanging out with movie stars and international swindlers in Saint-Tropez.
Worthy ambitions, all of them. And each of them, to one degree or another, is part of what drives each and every one of us to the typewriter each morning. (Or to the word processor each evening. Or to the chisel and stone tablets every other Thursday. Whatever.)
And then, of course, there are the internal reasons to write, and while they may remain private, and occasionally secret even to ourselves, they are nonetheless compelling. We write, certainly, to prove to ourselves that we can do it. To demonstrate that our worst fears about ourselves are not true, that we are indeed good enough, that people really do want to hear what we have to say, that we are smart enough and decent enough to make it, that we deserve to succeed. That it won’t hurt other people if we express ourselves. That we won’t be destroyed if we let other people know who we are.
We write, too, to express ourselves, to take that which is unique within us and offer it up as a gift of self to the universe. We write to extend ourselves to others, to reach across the gap that seems to keep us separate. To heal that separation, to rejoice in the universality of our common humanity.
Profoundly idealistic motives, to be sure—and it may be difficult to believe that we’re doing all this when we sit down to bat out a chapter of Love’s Lustful Lechery or Harrigan #19: Eaten Alive by Wild Pigs. Doesn’t matter. It’s all the same trip, whatever our vehicle of the moment.
There is, I believe, a third sort of reason for writing. It is possible to see everything we write as a letter to ourselves, designed to convey to one portion of ourselves the lesson that another portion has already learned.
Sometimes these lessons are written in code. Sometimes, having written them, we neglect to read them.
What am I getting at?
Well, let me tell you about a friend of mine. He has written perhaps half a dozen novels over the past 20 years. His first novel had a lot of impact—excellent reviews, strong sales. His subsequent books never did quite as well, but they were sound fiction, got a decent reception from the critics, and had respectable if modest sales.
I got to know the fellow after he’d done all this writing, and I came to know him quite well before I ever got around to reading any of his work. When I finally did, I was struck at once by the extent to which his work was autobiographical. Each of his novels featured a different lead character, but all of the leads were the same, and each of them was him. In all true and honest fiction the viewpoint characters are aspects of their author, but that’s not what I mean. Each lead character was my friend, with his background, his views and attitudes, and his life experience. I had by this time heard him tell a nonfictional version of his life story on several occasions, and I recognized incidents and conversations and characters and situations when I encountered them again in his novels. He was not producing mere reportage in the guise of fiction, he had indeed crafted five or six genuine novels, but he had done so by taking big chunks of his life and slapping them down onto the pages. Everything was here, in one book or another—his family background, his relationships with his parents, his marriage, his struggles in his career, his spiritual life, his adventures with drink and drugs. Everything, transmuted slightly by the alchemic process that turns fact to fiction, but little different for the conversion.
I talked to him about the extent to which he had dealt with the events of his life by fashioning them into novels. And he corrected me.
“That’s what I used to think I was doing,” he said. “I saw myself as being enormously honest and daring, and I felt I was really dealing with things by writing about them. But lately I’ve been able to see that I was doing precisely the opposite. Writing wasn’t my way of dealing with experience. It was my way of not dealing with it.”
I asked him what he meant.
“Anything that ever happened to me,” he said, “I turned around and put it in a book. I didn’t have to figure it out. I didn’t have to take the time and trouble to understand it. I didn’t have to come to terms with it. I just took it and put it in a book and walled it off, and from that point on I didn’t have to deal with it. Because as far as I was concerned it was a closed chapter. I had dealt with it by writing about it and now I was done with it. I isolated myself from my own experience the first time around by numbing my emotional nerve endings with alcohol and drugs—another great way of dealing with things by not dealing with them—and I isolated myself again after the fact by sealing off my experiences in fiction. Other people could read about them, and maybe they could deal with them, but I was done. For me the war was over.”
You teach, they say, what you most need to learn.
And the teacher is usually his own worst student.
This is not to say that people become fourth-grade teachers out of a deep need to acquaint themselves with the mechanics of long division, or that such arithmetical dexterity tends to remain forever beyond their grasp.
Even on that level, though, there’s some truth in the principle. We are rarely terribly good at instructing others in that which comes effortlessly to us. In sports, there’s a saying to the effect that natural athletes are no damn good—no good, that is, as coaches. Because they didn’t have to learn how to swing a bat or perfect a swimming stroke or kick a football, because it came so naturally to them, they don’t know how to teach the knack to others. Few Hall of Famers ever had much success as baseball managers.
As a teacher of writing, I find myself least effective when it comes to areas of style and technique. These were the aspects of writing that came most readily to me, the areas in which I was a natural, and so it’s hard for me to tell anyone else how to do it. In those areas more concerned with the inner game of writing—overcoming fears and negative beliefs, sticking at it, dealing with rejection and apparent failure, accessing one’s intuition and freeing one’s imagination—I am a more successful teacher. Because these are things I have had to learn, and am still learning.
Every teacher is still learning; once the lesson is really and truly learned, the teacher is done teaching it. This helps somewhat to explain the evident contradiction between the teacher and the teaching. I know people who teach prosperity seminars whose own finances are periodically a mess. I know others who teach people how to manage their relationships yet have enormous difficulty maintaining relationships of their own. For all the books and columns I’ve written and all the seminars I’ve conducted, I certainly spend an unseemly amount of time trying to think of something to write, and start a disheartening number of books that I never trouble to finish. And the tabloids are forever overflowing with the examples of moral leaders whose own morality serves as an object lesson in how not to lead one’s life.
“Do as I say, not as I do.” Not because I’m a hypocrite, but because I have trouble learning my own lesson. We teach what we most need to learn, and we are indeed our own worst students.
The writer is a teacher, seeking to instruct himself at least as much as to impart his message to others. But this, of course, is not his primary conscious motive; if it were, he’d be writing a diary, or an extended letter to himself, instead of fashioning his lessons into the form of fiction. On a conscious level, he is striving to make a short or long story out of incidents and themes and characters that may appear to have come to him out of thin air.
So he creates a work of fiction. And, somewhere within it, he incorporates the lesson he wants to teach himself, often weaving it in so cleverly that it is quite invisible, looking for all the world like part of the design.
When I was a child (at a time which once seemed like only yesterday, but doesn’t anymore) advertisers on the kids’ radio programs offered premiums in exchange for a couple of box tops or labels from their products. Rings were a popular item, and every ring always had a secret compartment, where one could stow secret messages, preferably in code.
What does a ten-year-old need with a secret compartment for coded messages? Yet everyone wanted one of those rings, and would have wanted them less without their built-in hiding places.
Every work of fiction is a Captain Midnight ring, complete with secret compartment. Having tucked in the coded message, the writer forgets to read it. He may even forget where he left the ring. The message is sealed away, walled off like the experiences in my friend’s six novels.
And this, I think, helps explain why some writers are so wise in their novels and seem so incapable of applying that very wisdom in their personal lives. An example who comes at once to mind is John O’Hara. His novels and short stories, in addition to telling an extraordinary amount about the nature of human lives in America over the past century and a half, reveal an exceptional wisdom about the way people behave in relationships, about the manner in which grudge-holding and bitterness rot a relationship and erode the soul. Anyone reading O’Hara with insight and perception will learn a lot about how to live in the world and get along with people.
Do as he says, not as he did. All of this wisdom seems to have gone directly into O’Hara’s work, with precious little spilling over into his life. He was known as the master of the fancied slight, repeatedly taking offense where none was intended, nursing a grudge as passionately as anyone ever nursed a sick friend, refusing to speak to old friends and never even telling them why. The man wrote as brilliantly as anyone ever about the nuances of social behavior; he was, in many respects, a virtual social cripple.
A superb teacher. And his own worst student.
My own past work spills over with lessons, many of them unlearned. And so does yours, Gentle Reader, and so does every writer’s. But we all of us manage to learn a little of what we are trying to teach ourselves, and write more books, and learn a little more.
All of this comes to mind partly as a result of a book I wrote half a year ago. It is entitled Random Walk, and I have written about it already in these pages; it will be coming out in October, published by Tor Books, and I have no qualms about urging you to buy a copy the instant it appears.
The main story line of Random Walk concerns a group of people who quite literally walk out of their lives and commence crossing the continent on foot. There is something sanctified about their joint venture, and miraculous things happen to them. Walking, they begin a process of healing themselves and their planet, and they do this simply by letting go of everything and walking out of the known and safe and familiar and into whatever the unknowable future may hold.
Having written Random Walk, I then allowed myself to examine a longstanding fantasy. For some time Lynne and I had told ourselves that someday we would like to shuck everything and just live for a while without a fixed address, going where the wind blew us, trying on different parts of the country and seeing what fit, and indeed letting go of the known and stepping off into the unknown. The prospect seemed no less attractive for having written the book, and indeed it appeared that there might be more of a purpose to the act than pleasure and adventure, just as there was in the novel.
And it seemed to me that I had written the book in part to prepare myself for the life change, but that I ran the risk of having written the book as an alternative to taking the action. When we did decide finally to go ahead and do it, I made the decision resolved not to be the one person who would miss the point of what I had written.
And yet, and yet. The teacher is so often his own worst student. We began by listing our house for sale and giving away many of our possessions, and somewhere along the line we found ourselves taking the house off the market and letting much of what we owned stay in cupboards and on shelves. This seemed appropriate to us; there were sound economic arguments against selling the house, good logical reasons to hold onto things, and we assured ourselves that, having become thoroughly willing to strip ourselves of house and holdings, it might no longer be necessary to do so in actuality.
Perhaps.
In any event, by the time you read this we will have been on the road for a couple of months, with a commitment to ourselves to go on living nomadically for at least two years. We have not even got out the door as I write these lines, and yet we already feel a certain pull to temper and qualify our commitment. To let Random Walk’s lesson stay walled off in its pages. To avoid getting it.
So we’ll see what happens. Write for Your Life is out of business; we’ve let the book go out of print and closed the mail-order business, and what seminars we do will be a sometime thing if other people organize them for us. I will still be appearing monthly in this space—for a time that looked like something else that had to be sloughed off, but turns out to be something I want to keep. And letters to me c/o Writer’s Digest, no doubt including offers of hospitality should we turn up in your part of the country, will be forwarded to me in the ordinary course of things. I may be somewhat capricious about answering my mail, but when was I ever otherwise?
Big changes. That’s what happens when you let yourself read your own mail and become aware of the lessons you’re trying to teach yourself.
Look at your own fiction. Crack the code, read the messages. And let yourself get as much of the lesson as you’re ready for.