I twisted it yesterday afternoon coming home from Ben’s Meat Market near my home in Spuyten Duyvil, directly across from the northern tip of Manhattan Island, at the confluence of Hudson and Harlem Rivers in that part of New York City where Babe (Ruth) built a house for the Yankees in 1923.
Because it was filled with prepossessing yellow leaves as I stepped off the curb I didn’t see the pothole waiting there in ambush. My foot went one way, the rest of my body another, my two grocery bags a third, the three cans of chunk light tuna, two rolls of Scott’s bathroom tissue, one bottle of Newman’s Own Caesar dressing, a bag of supposedly triple-washed baby leaf spinach, and a dozen eggs (I’d planned a spinach salad for dinner) each defied gravity in its own way.
Meanwhile the lady in the Lincoln Navigator that had pulled up to a stoplight, seeing me there on all fours with tears in my eyes, rather than ask if I was okay, rolled up her tinted window and waited for the light to change before roaring off. For her I mulled over some ripe epithets, words that I was in too much shock and pain to utter then and that I won’t repeat here, lest you think me not a nice person.
Somehow I hobbled home, where I packed the foot in ice and kept it elevated and did what all the experts tell you to do to keep an injured ankle from inflating to the size of a grapefruit. It worked. It inflated to the size of a pomegranate. The next morning, today, I cancelled all my classes to come here.
Emergency rooms in New York being what they are, despite my having arrived here at ten to seven, it’s unlikely that my foot will be attended by anyone with a medical degree before noon. And so I went to the cafeteria, bought a coffee and have found this perfectly lovely spot outdoors in a grassy courtyard where a dozen tables float serenely under green shade umbrellas. I have propped my adjustable aluminum cane (borrowed from Miriam, my eighty year-old neighbor) against a chair and sit with my journal—a trusty companion in times of waiting—spread open and eager to hear from me.
I am thinking about stories in general, and about short stories in particular, about why people read and write them, and (more specifically) why they are so hard to write—even now, for me, when I’ve been doing it for a quarter of a century.
I don’t mean to imply that short stories are any harder to make than other art forms—than novels or plays or screenplays—or even to say that writing a short story is harder than playing the cello, operating a frozen yogurt concession, or swimming the Bering Straight. Almost anything you do, depending on your standards, can be infinitely easy or hard. A discipline is a discipline, after all, and therefore “hard” not, necessarily, because it is done without joy or pleasure, but because it takes effort and can be frustrating and requires and calls for a good deal of determination, devotion, and patience.
But (I ask myself) why should storytelling, of all things, be in any way, by any measure or means, “hard”? Why—when we tell stories all the time, when storytelling is as much a part of everyday human social intercourse as eating, joking or sex, natural functions accomplished (usually) without the benefit of MFA degrees or how-to books? Why, when most of us tell stories naturally enough in person, does telling them on paper not come just as naturally?
In fact for most of us it doesn’t come naturally at all. Here with me in my shoulder satchel I have a folder stuffed with draft stories, all written in earnest by students devoted to the craft of fiction writing, each of whom wants just as earnestly to become a professional—which is to say, a published—author: each of which fails completely if not miserably on the page.
Again I ask: why? Of the hundred of so stories that I typically read in a semester’s worth of fiction writing workshops, all but two of three will similarly fail. And that most “natural” of human pursuits, that of telling stories to each other, appears no more natural than piloting a stealth bomber, or starting an avocado farm on the moon.
Somehow, somewhere, between the place where stories germinate and bloom in the imagination and where they get put on paper, that natural process has been corrupted, subverted—you might even say perverted. Through a kind of reverse alchemy gold turns to lead, and a process natural and instinctive turns artificial and contrived.
Where does the breakdown occur? What causes its occurrence? What essential ingredient has broken down or been removed—or has some additive polluted the mixture? What’s missing?—or needs to be extricated, like venom, or a tumor?
***
In one of her stories a student of mine writes:
. . . But I never did reveal to her that my world by then had sped up at a lightning pace, caught in the dunes of life’s unspectacular and bewildering realities, my head already filled with myriad conflicting emotions, my heart frozen and thawed many times over.
When some people first set out to write stories (you’ll notice I said “write” and not “tell”)—and even when some have been writing for many years—they operate under a deadly misconception: they think that stories are about language, rather than about the things that language exists to evoke or convey.
Look at the sample above. What is being conveyed or evoked here? The short answer: not much beyond words, words that neither describe nor connote but that remain abstractions, as though pressed like dead leaves between the pages of a dictionary. Where is the world? Where are the people? Where is the story? While it’s essential to grasp that stories, along with the characters and everything else they hold, are made of language and nothing but language, it’s just as important to understand that, with rare exceptions (Ulysses comes to mind; so does Lolita) a story is never about language: anyway it’s never exclusively about language.
And yet the above passage gives us nothing else. It is, essentially, a piece of writing turned inward against itself—like the mythical Ouroboros, the snake that swallows its own tail. The subject of the passage, in so far as it has a subject, is the way in which the passage has been written. In other words it was written to call attention to itself and by extension to its author.
Did my student know she was doing this? Did she intend to draw attention to herself? Knowing her I can safely answer, No. In fact she is an extremely shy, almost pathologically self-effacing person. So how to explain what has happened here? How does a shy, self-effacing person end up creating the verbal equivalent of a Times Square billboard that says LOOK AT ME! in flashing neon?
The answer lies in the perverting machinations of self-consciousness, and the defensive measures we deploy to protect and preserve our spun-sugar egos, and which, when it comes to writing, anyway, are about as advantageous as throwing gasoline on a banked fire. On behalf of our praise-starved egos, that they may gorge themselves on the astonishment of our peers, we show off, or try to, and in so doing achieve that which we had hoped to avoid: making asses of ourselves.
All, or most, of this, happens unconsciously. Except for clowns and sitcom stars, no one really wants to make a fool of herself. But the ego has its own agenda, distinct from and often at odds with its host, who merely wants to be good and/or to do well. It is why egos can’t write, and why writers can’t or shouldn’t write with their egos.
But that is easier said than done. For the self-serving ego has many, many tricks up its sleeve. It is a saboteur, lying in wait—like a pothole covered in yellow leaves, just waiting to see you trip and fall.
Here are some ways by which we sabotage our stories.
1. Self-Consciousness.
Not long ago I watched a video of Marlon Brando being interviewed by Larry King. It was an old interview, obviously, done some years before Marlon died gasping and half-blind at age 80 in 2004. In the interest of full-disclosure I should say two things here: first, that Marlon was and will always be a hero of mine. Had my destiny been a tad less stingy, I’d have been an actor, like him, and as famous. Secondly, though I always thought him the greatest of male actors, it must be said that the same man who exuded musk in Streetcar, mumbled his way to a refused Oscar in The Godfather, and broke countless middle-aged men’s hearts in Last Tango, could be quite the asshole in person. Excepting Charles Manson and Norman Mailer, no other celebrity or public figure of any kind has gone to greater lengths to thumb his nose at his public.
The interview with King is typical, with Marlon up to his usual hostile-witness tactics, refusing straightforward answers to perfectly innocent, if banal, questions, especially with regard to acting—a profession he always disdained, or claimed to, even as he fattened himself silly on the fortunes it paid him.
When not kissing his host or wiping the sweat from Larry’s forehead, Marlon lofted his usual self-denigrating assertion that everyone’s an actor:
Everybody here in this room is an actor. You’re an actor and the best performances I’ve ever seen is when the director says cut and the director says that was great. That was wonderful. That was good. . . When you say how do you do, how are you, you look fine, you’re doing two things at once. You’re reading the person’s real intention. You’re trying to feel who he is and making an assessment and trying to ignore the mythology.
Perhaps because he was sweating so much under the camera lights, or possibly under the intense glare of Brando’s fame (and knowing Marlon’s penchant for turning his interviewers into piñatas), Larry King failed to challenge Marlon’s theory by pointing out that, while everyone may be an actor offstage, the moment you point a camera at most they become, well, lousy actors.
This is what happens to writers much of the time. Call it performance anxiety. And the greater our desire to be writers, to be seen and admired and judged as writers, the more vulnerable we are to it. The mere act of thinking of oneself as a writer and not, say, as a storyteller, or better still as someone who tells stories—or, even better: as someone with a story to tell—is an act of self-consciousness, and therefore an act of self-sabotage.
Attached to this notion of being “a writer” are a myriad of misunderstandings, misconceptions and self-deceptions all groomed to the ego’s gratification, but which are in league against those qualities that best equip us to do what (fiction) writers are meant to do: tell stories.
Roughly, and in no particular order, the misconceptions are as follows: that “a writer” is a romantic, exotic, quixotic individual, Don Quixote with a crow-quill pen in place of a jousting stick. Or, if not a white knight, he’s a dashing wit in a sparkling white linen suit, a boulevardier with a steno pad tucked in his breast pocket next to his cigarillo case (see: Twain, Wolfe—not Thomas, Tom). prefer something a little more macho? Try Teddy Roosevelt with a typewriter (Hemingway). Should my female readers feel left out, there are stereotypes for women writers, too: the suicidal modernist wading into a river with an overcoat stuffed with stones; the unbearably gifted young poetess with one foot in eternity and one head in an oven (except for Ayn Rand—who would have poured Virginia and Sylvia both into skyscraper foundations—and Emily Dickinson, embalmed like a fly in the amber of obscurity—the great women-author-genius stereotypes all seem to have done themselves in).
What gets lost or forgotten when we think of ourselves as writers is that first and foremost a storyteller must be a human being: not an extraordinary human being, necessarily, or an exemplary one, or even a particularly kind or intelligent human being. It is a person’s ordinariness, combined with his or her desire to tell stories about the lives of others who are essentially ordinary, that makes a writer good if not great. And it is this ordinariness that we shun or negate in embracing for ourselves the label “writer,” with its blinding twinkle and flash.
Imagine a cobbler so self-conscious in his “art” that he forgets that a shoe, however beautiful, must fit a person’s foot and allow him to walk in comfort. The conceited cobbler is a much a contradiction in terms as an egomaniacal monk. To the extent that a man puts his ego in charge of his actions (or executes his actions in service of his ego), his actions fail to serve any higher purpose. A writer who writes for the sake of his or her ego is a poor writer.
Or imagine of a real spy decked out in a white dinner tuxedo, like Sean Connery in Thunderball, with a scarlet carnation in his boutonniere and a Playboy bunny in each arm. How long do you suppose before his cover’s blown?
For storytellers here’s a more relevant question: when reading our stories, how far will our readers get before we blow our covers and let it be known to all the world that, alas, we’re not really here to tell stories: we’re here to be writers.
***
I was just interrupted by a fat man in a hospital robe who wandered over to my table to hit me up for a dollar that I didn’t give him. Undeterred, he sat down with me and told me his dream. Someday, he said, he wants to go to Harvard, get a business degree and make six hundred thousand dollars a year.
I suspect he is here for psychiatric purposes. Still I asked him why six hundred thousand a year: why not a million, or several million, or a tens of millions? My question seemed to confuse him—that or it struck him as impertinent.
We changed the subject, or rather we deflected it. We talked about education. I told him I was a teacher, and explained to him that most of my undergraduates (not my adult writing students) rarely availed themselves of my office hours, but that those who did invariably performed better and saw their grades improve. I said, “If you do go to college, Wilbur” (he said his name was Wilbur; I believed him) “don’t hesitate to ask your professors for help. That’s what they’re there for. And if you ask for help, they’ll be glad to give it to you.” I thought this advice worth at least as much as the dollar he had asked for.
I also suggested that he consider a less fabled university, one with a little less ivy clinging to its walls, a good state school, maybe. “There are lots of good ones to choose from,” I said. To which he admitted, rather shyly, that he’d never had much of whatever it took to “be a good student.”
“This time,” he promised both himself and me, “I’m gonna give it everything I got.” Here again I believed him.
I tell this “story” for several reasons. First, because it happened just as I say it did, in the midst of my ruminations about storytelling. But mainly to illustrate that the storyteller’s art and his or her job are one: they are to tell the truth. Whether it’s the factual truth or a made-up truth doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the truth.
And nothing is more humbling than the truth, or the task of telling it.
And every situation that life presents us with is an opportunity for story. Take this portly inpatient and his earnestly expressed desire to attend an ivy-league university and get filthy rich. Might he be the protagonist of a story, or its antagonist? Supposing our protagonist-narrator is a Professor of Behavioral Studies at Harvard and, out of guilt for not having given him a dollar, but also with an ulterior career motive, offers instead to become his tutor? What consequences might result from such a decision? What if he, our protagonist, uses Wilber as the unwitting subject of a test, one that goes awry?
A writer is someone who, like a bear or a rat sniffing for food, is always sniffing around for fictional opportunities. In Henry James’ words, he is one of the people “on whom nothing is wasted.”
2. “Talent” and “Genius.”
Among things that occasion and exacerbate self-consciousness are misunderstandings connected with these two words. Talent is passion seized early in life, and the fearlessness attendant to knowing, thinking, or believing that we are “meant to do” a thing. In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, the brute Stanley Kowalski says, “Luck is believing you’re lucky.” He could have said the same of talent, which, among other things, is believing that you’re talented.
Typically we believe that we’re talented because, at some point early in life, this “fact” was impressed upon us by someone whose opinion, for better or worse, we held high—usually a parent; often a teacher or some older person. The principle difference between those who can sing and those who can’t hold a tune is that the former were told that they could sing. Or anyway they weren’t told that they couldn’t.
Does this account for those with freakish talent? No, it doesn’t. But it accounts for all the rest. And “freakish talent” isn’t the subject here. Freakish talent gets its own whole book written by someone who knows a thing about it.
Talent lifts us out of self-consciousness and, depending on just how talented we believe we are, propels us up into the cloudless, fearless, heights. But like any catalyst, lubricant or impetus, to work talent needs to be applied to something. Namely it needs to be applied to industry, to practice, performance, to discipline. Like luck, it exists only to the extent that some goal or process is touched by it.
And like luck, talent can be fickle. If it’s easier for the young and inexperienced to be “talented,” it’s simply because their ability to believe in things like “talent” hasn’t yet been tainted by the vicissitudes, by things like rejection and criticism, by a million-and-one little voices whispering “no” in our ears.
Or by plain bad luck. I once believed that I could write songs. Therefore for a while I was a “talented” songwriter. Then a black Labrador named Gus mauled my left hand—the hand I used to fret my guitar, the instrument on which I wrote my songs. Overnight, it seems, I stopped believing that writing songs was something that I was “meant to do.” I stopping feeling “talented.” I accepted the musical verdict of an unfriendly black Lab. The dog ate my “talent.”
Time is as kind to talent as it is to dairy products. When people say, “Talent doesn’t last,” they don’t lie.
But perseverance lasts, and so does skill. While talent may be cruelly excised by mean dogs or diminish otherwise over time, skill accumulates. This explains why now, pushing ninety, John Updike is arguably as good or better a writer as he was at twenty-five. If he seems less “talented” now than then it’s because we’ve come to expect great things of him, even to take him for granted. And because in our culture the word “talented” is associated with flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked youth, not with gray old men.
Genius is something else altogether. Apart from scoring 140 or higher on your SATs (which measures a kind of genius, intellectual genius), artistic genius is knowing and working well within your limits. In training or in rehearsal, and in selecting works for study, good artists always stretch beyond those limits. But in creating their works for consumption they know exactly what those limits are and keep within them.
I don’t mean to imply that great artists don’t challenge themselves; not at all. I’m only saying that a great or even modestly successful artist knows the difference between practice and performance.
Amateurs, on the other hand, are always exceeding their limits, or trying to, and for the most part failing. They use techniques that they haven’t thoroughly digested or properly understood, let alone mastered, and fling freshly discovered words still reeking of thesaurus. In their anxiety to be “original” (a word that, to them, is synonymous with “artist”) like the Starship Enterprise they want to boldly go where no one has ever gone before—that’s where they think they’re going. In fact they’re bound for disaster, where showing off usually leads us.
To invite failure via experimentation isn’t a bad thing; in fact it’s a good thing, a necessary thing from time to time. Only know that when invited odds are failure will show up.
3. Lack of Familiarity with the Form
To those who wished to master poetry Alexander Pope had these three words of advice, “First, be correct.” [CHK] By this he meant master existing poetic forms: couplets, sestina, villanelle, sonnet, terza rima, and so on. For the fiction writer the forms are more prosaic. Chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences, punctuation.
The short story is itself a form to which principles apply. For a start it should have a beginning, a middle, and end. It promises certain things and it delivers on those promises. It has a theme or several possible themes, but usually one grand or inclusive theme that can be expressed in a word or a few words. It leaves us fully satisfied, but also surprised, wanting nothing more or less.
There are two ways to master form: through absorption and through imitation. By “absorption” I mean very simply by reading: by taking stories into our bloodstreams through our eyes and through our “ears”: not the physical ears through which normal sounds reach us, but the mind’s ears, the ones with which we “hear” the sounds that words make on paper. In some these mental ears are well developed and highly sensitive; in others they must be cultivated.
Those who read with an eye toward mastering form may look forward to never again enjoying reading entirely for its own sake, as pure entertainment. “How Nellie Lost her Knickers” no longer matters nearly as much to us as how Nellie’s creator goes about making us care whether or not she loses them or how. Reading for mastery means reading for technique. It means being aware of plot, scenes, paragraphs, sentences, words and punctuation—the very things that as ordinary or “civilian” readers we hope to surrender our awareness of when immersed in a story.
The professional (for lack of any better word) reader is both aware of the effect being achieved, and of how it’s being achieved. She’s aware of the ropes and pulleys and switches being manipulated behind the scenery, of the stage manager rushing to warn the actors of their cues. This needn’t detract from her amusement. On the contrary, she gets two performances for the price of one: the one on stage, and the one in the wings.
I’m always amazed by how many of my students, young and old, don’t read at all, let alone for form. This explains why, among other things, they don’t know how to format dialogue: they’ve rarely seen it formatted, and seeing it they haven’t noticed it; and noticing it they haven’t examined it, and examining it they haven’t studied it. To read with an eye for technique and form is to access the greatest writing instructors of all time: of any time, as a matter of fact. Want to study with Shakespeare? For a trip to the bookshelf he’s all yours. A free private seminar with Joyce, or Virginia Woolf? Just open up one of their books. And yet as available as these great teachers are to all of us it’s amazing how few students of fiction writing avail themselves of them.
Some students of mine (and please don’t get the idea that my students are all a bunch of dunces; most of them are accomplished, if not brilliant: I speak here mainly of my undergraduates, who indeed have much to learn) don’t even know what a paragraph is, let alone a paragraph break or, heaven forbid, an indent. It’s reached the point where I’ve considered campaigning for an official holiday, NATIONAL PARAGRAPH INDENT DAY, a day on which every good citizen takes a moment to reflect upon the humble beauty of that blank white space that heralds the inception of every paragraph—or that used to, anyway, once upon a time: before the Internet and email conspired to do away with such formalities altogether, since they don’t translate consistently or easily into HTML code: since before we surrendered our aesthetic principles to semi-literate computer geeks.
If on the other hand you simply can’t see the beauty of a genuine paragraph, or, for that matter, you can’t experience the thrill of a well-placed comma much as you do a sublime chord change in a piece of music or a sly shift in texture or color in a painting, then know that you haven’t yet developed your inner (visual) ear, that you don’t know how to hear with your eyes.
It’s okay to not know, as long as you know that you don’t know, meaning you’re willing and eager to learn.
What, exactly, do we mean when we say “form”? The shapes of things (of sentences, paragraphs, etc.), but also smaller things, the things that help to hone and qualify those shapes (commas, periods, indents). The handling of such things as syntax (the arrangement of words) and punctuation (the stresses and pauses between them), as well as the choice of the words themselves (the level of diction), result in what, overall, is sometimes called tone.
Beyond reading it, another way to master form (to “be correct”) is to imitate it. Yes, imitate—as in copy. In this age wherein so much emphasis is put on “originality” and “creativity” and “self-expression,” the very word “imitate” smacks of kowtowing to authority while surrendering one’s very soul. But imitation, as everybody knows, is the highest form of flattery or praise, meaning it’s a form of emulation. And emulation is a form of appreciation. And to appreciate something is to take it to heart, to absorb it into one’s soul. It’s a first step toward making something one’s own.
I know of one writing exercise, seldom used anymore, that has students take the first pages of a book or story by a favorite author and type (in this book I’ll be using the word “type” as a synonym for “keyboard,” “keyboard” being four letters and one syllable too many) them verbatim. By this means the student gets to “feel” the words as if he wrote them himself. This goes a step beyond hearing the words with our inner ears to actually feeling them with our fingers as we type, and even (possibly) breathing and moving our bodies to the rhythms of another author’s sentences. In this way we absorb those sentences even more thoroughly into our bloodstreams: they inhabit us. We are exercising our mental ears, playing the scales using a favorite author’s words.
Having imitated, we then emulate, setting our own stories (in our own words) to an exemplary author’s formal “music.” We write a story or a passage that sounds like or has the shape and feel of a Hemingway story, or one by Grace Paley, or John Cheever, or Chekhov. Given time we’re sure to outgrow the authors we emulate, to find that our contents no longer fit in their forms. Some call it rebellion. I prefer to think of it simply as moving on.
To imitate form is simply to borrow the glass into which you pour your own wine. One can’t imitate plot or duplicate a “type” of character or commit to paper a familiar string of words without sacrificing emotional sincerity and thus committing a cliché. To imitate content is to err thus. But one can imitate and even duplicate tone without doing so, since tone is not a matter of content, but of form.
The extent to which certain people will tend instinctively to imitate form and not content, and vice-versa, may well be in direct proportion to their talent. In fact, it may even determine it.
4. Bad Taste
Two things cause bad taste: lack of critical awareness and emotional frigidity. Usually, these two things go hand in hand. When I say “emotional frigidity,” I don’t mean to imply that those with bad taste have no feelings, only that their feelings are operating on automatic pilot. Instead of responding purely to the information provided to them by their senses, they respond more or less by rote, according to what they believe or have been told their responses should be. Thus, when it comes time to paint the bedroom or choose a wedding gift, they paint the bedroom some insipid pastel shade, a numbing beige or ivory or milky lavender, having read in some good housekeeping magazine that this is just the thing to do; and the wedding gift, meanwhile, has turned as if by magic into a (surprise!) sterling silverware set.
Not to say that there is anything intrinsically wrong with a beige bedroom, nor with silverware. But let’s be honest: these are not choices from the heart, nor are they the fruit of any aesthetic or artistic judgment. They are products rather of received wisdom, unchallenged and unearned, as “borrowed” as whatever the bride carried along with items old, new, and blue.
As writers—let alone as artists—we cannot afford to paint our bedrooms beige. We need to risk forming our own judgments and, possibly, violating the aesthetics of others. But in so doing at least we avoid the worst taste of all, that which rushes in to fill the void left by an insufficiently developed or atrophied set of sensibilities. I’m talking (again) about clichés: for when an artist fails to make genuine, specific choices—fails, in other words, to guard against the familiar and obvious, to keep them at bay by means of his imagination, what rushes in?
Cliché.
Cliché is to writers what a remote control is to a lazy couch potato. It is that which is most accessible through least effort. It’s why people order pizza from Dominoes when, it’s safe to say, there are finer pizzas to be had in this world. Ditto McDonald’s hamburgers (I wonder: will the corporate spear-chuckers at McDonald’s sue me, claiming their popularity due strictly to the superiority of their products? Doubt it.).
It—meaning bad taste and cliché both, for they’re essentially the same thing— is why, by and large, our bestsellers are so bad, or anyway they’re not so good: for sure they’re not the best books. They aren’t the best books because—again, by and large— they’ve been chosen by folks who, rather than exercise their own critical judgment and loosen their purse strings accordingly, have accepted received wisdom (whatever it’s shortcomings, received wisdom has this virtue: it’s convenient). And so they read what they read because, well, everyone else is reading it.
Many of the most popular things, especially those things that may be said to be trendy, are popular by default, meaning that the mass or conglomerate will has lacked the force to resist them. Jennifer Aniston—whose name and face may well and mercifully be forgotten by the time you read this—is hardly as lovely as Kim Bassinger, nor anywhere near as gifted an actress as Meryl Streep. And yet as I write this she’s equally if not more popular. Why? Because the same mass audience that gobbles up Big Macs and guzzles Diet Pepsi has made her so. To the mass audience her very mediocrity is cause for celebration: she is irresistible because there is nothing there to resist.
When one has never exercised one’s critical judgment; when one’s aesthetic sensibilities have been formed inside a vacuum of mindless consumerism; when one’s taste buds have been systematically scalded and sandpapered by hype and by the mob psychology engendered by it; when one can no longer distinguish the taste of water from that of wine, and yet—knowing the value of nothing but the cost of everything— still knows a bargain when one sees one . . . guess what gets drunk? Bad taste, in other words, is no taste at all. It is what happens when our sensibilities take the path of least resistance, succumbing to the combined forces of private inertia and public propaganda. It is bargain basement taste—since what you buy with it belongs, ultimately, in the basement.
How to tend our sensibilities and keep them from being sandpapered?
First, resist mass opinion. With all your heart and soul resist it. Resist it for your own artistic good, but also for the good of society as a whole. Society needs you; I need you. Distrust all forms of advertising. Resist all pre-packaged ideas and opinions as you would the claims of a carnival barker, the sermons of a soapbox preacher, or the prescriptions of a quack.
This may not always be fun. It will likely render you unpopular with those who, unlike yourself, have cheerily and unconditionally surrendered their best instincts. To some you will be labeled a “killjoy,” one of those people who can’t read a book, watch a movie or even eat a pizza without assailing his fellows with his vastly superior powers of critical judgment. To these difficulties several remedies suggest themselves: a) find a new set of friends who, like you, wish to strengthen or at least preserve their souls or b) keep your opinions to yourself while pretending to enjoy yourself or c) really do enjoy yourself, but with the understanding that you have willfully, temporarily suspended critical judgment in order to do so. Some might call this last technique “slumming,” and those who engage in it “snobs.” But if done well, that is, discreetly, odds are good that you’ll never be caught in the act.
And who’s to say? For all you know, all those critically challenged friends you find yourselves surrounded by? They’re slumming, too.
***
To sum up: sensibility aligns itself with the soul, identity with ego, thus:
IDENTITY= EGO
SENSIBILITY = SOUL
5. Lack of Basic Technical Skills.
It should go without saying that to write fiction one needs to be able to spell, punctuate, conjugate, identify the parts of a sentence (and know, for instance, whether or not a subject agrees with a verb), let alone how to evoke characters, build a scene or render dialogue.
It doesn’t. Many of my undergraduates (the same undergraduates who can’t tell a paragraph from a sprained ankle) can’t use a comma worth a damn; others don’t use them at all. To some a sentence is anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a period—and those are the ones with high standards. Others have been taught never to use a one-syllable word when a four-syllable word—preferably one whose meaning is obscure to them—will do. To be clear is to be dull; to be grammatical is to be square; to be direct is to be disingenuous. And anyway it’s too much of a bother.
The one rhetorical “asset” they do tend to value is the most dubious: a large vocabulary. Strange, how the same people who, in normal life, wouldn’t be caught dead using words and phrases like “conversed,” “purchased” and “continued to” commit to them with blind allegiance in their prose. The same words that, on the playground in third grade, would have won little Melville a shiner, he now, as an undergraduate, expects will earn him an “A” on his research paper.
And maybe he’s right; and maybe that’s just the problem. Somewhere along the line many if not most of us have been taught by miserable teachers always to use high formal diction in writing academic papers. That is because, presumably, our professors are so distinguished that, as do those invited to Stockholm to accept their Nobel Prizes, they must approach their benefactors in white tie and tails. They must, in other words, gussy themselves up to look important, whether they are or not. This is called Pomp, and too often it isn’t in keeping with Circumstance.
What good writers want from their students isn’t the verbal equivalent of soup and fish or any form of pomp or pretension. What they want is communication, is clarity, is the honest-to-god humble truth expressed as simply, as directly as possible. The best—not the biggest—words. The most elegant—not the most convoluted and labyrinthine—sentences.
The trouble is that for most people to write clearly and simply is more, not less, difficult than writing pretentiously, obscurely. If nothing else, pretension and obscurity can hide the fact that we have little if anything really to say.
They serve another fine purpose, too. They impress idiots. And in case you haven’t noticed there are a lot of idiots around, most of them with big fat PhD’s that they have earned by writing “academic” papers that you and I cannot read, much less understand. Should the humble likes of us begin to understand their drivel, it would spell doom not only for their careers, but for academia in general.
We wouldn’t want that, now, would we?
To be easily understood, we are taught, is the hallmark of shallowness.
By the time they enter my undergraduate classes already somehow my students have grasped this notion: they have learned the name of the game and the name of the game is Bullshit. And it is up to me to help them unlearn it: a task as challenging in its own way as picking fly crap out of a mound of black pepper with boxing gloves on.
Which is to say that sometimes to learn the basic skills we have to unlearn those that aren’t basic: we must unmaster the Art of Bullshit.
6. Discipline
In an age of convenience, discipline is a commodity as scarce as it is disparaged. We pay lip service to it; we pretend to hold it in high esteem, as we hold wood stoves and steamships in high esteem. But when it comes to heating our homes or traveling, we turn to more practical means, to electric stoves and passenger jets.
Quick and Easy: those are the bywords of the Age of Convenience. They are what advertisers promise us—the same advertisers who’ve convinced us not only that we’re entitled to “the good life,” but that it’s available, affordable, and easy to use.
Of all pursuits, writing may be among the least practical, the least affordable, the least “easy to use.” If it’s a way to get rich, it must be among the very hardest ways. Nor is writing, as pursuits go, likely to increase your popularity, decrease your waistline, or furnish the key to a happy-go-lucky existence. In fact it’s more likely to make you miserable while increasing your blood pressure and aggravating your sciatica. At the very least it will make you contemplative, if not introspective. And as Saul Bellow quipped, “The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life makes you want to kill yourself.” At both ends that’s an exaggeration. But if unqualified happiness is your goal then writing is no way to achieve it.
What writing gives you, or can give you, is satisfaction: the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve made something, a satisfaction not unlike the satisfaction of a cabinet worker who turns raw material into functional beauty, only instead of wood, glue, nails, stain and varnish you work with thoughts, dreams, imagination, experience.
And just as the cabinetmaker gets up every morning and goes to work in his or her workshop, the writer goes to his studio and works. The difference is that a cabinet maker’s raw materials are tactile and present: to access them he needs only to go to the lumberyard, or look on a shelf. When a writer goes to work, he isn’t always sure where the next thought or inspiration will come from, or if it will come at all. He sits down at his computer, or in front of a blank sheet of paper. Maybe he does research; maybe he writes a few letters to warm himself up. Maybe he sharpens pencils or goes about some other talismanic gesture. Maybe he meditates, or paces, or prays. Or maybe he just sits there and waits, pencil in hand, keyboard under his fingers, patient as Job. Or he drags himself to his task with grim determination, gritting his teeth, squeezing every dry cell in his brain, putting down sentence after sentence that he subsequently erases with as much bilious fury as went into their composition. One way or another, calmly or anxiously, slowly or quickly, gently or with violent passion, he gets down to work.
Most who sign up for writing workshops and other classes do so for one reason: they’re looking for discipline. They’re looking outside themselves for something that exists inside. The discipline of attending a class every Tuesday night after work is a different discipline than that of going alone into a studio, without audience, witnesses or comrades, and setting to work. The writer’s inward drive can’t be artificially aroused or induced. Teachers and workshop leaders may give assignments and set deadlines, and those deadlines may result in productivity, but they can’t replace a writer’s inner drive. Or they can, artificially, but take away the assignments and deadlines and the “inner drive” disappears, because it was never real to begin with.
The sort of discipline student writers seek is the self-generating kind, the kind that can’t find satisfaction without work—without the particular work of writing. When students ask for discipline (and they do) what they’re really asking for, hoping for, is to become the sort of person who, if she misses a day in the studio, turns miserable. That inward drive, if it exists at all, must be satisfied—just as the drive for sex or hunger must be satisfied if it exists. A writer is someone who writes, someone who needs not to have written but to be writing in order to feel alive and more or less content—or at least not miserable. Does writing make writers happy? No, not really. That is, it doesn’t change the writer’s essential nature, which is ruminative and therefore never quite satisfied or at peace. But it relieves their chronic dissatisfaction; it eases their unhappiness, which feels almost as good. Like the man who bangs himself repeatedly on the head with a hammer. Why? Because when he stops it feels good.
That’s as good a description of a writer’s discipline as any I’ve ever heard.
There’s another side to this matter of discipline that’s not quite so grim, in fact it’s not grim at all: in fact it’s blissful. I’m talking about concentration, about that very special place where the disciplined mind goes if only it is disciplined enough, meaning if only it is patient and willing to put up with enough discomfort and pain to reach its ultimate destination, that pinpoint in time where nothing else matters but the very little thing that one is trying to accomplish right now: the thought, the sentence, the word, the nuance, the rhythm, the shade, the color—whatever it is that the concentrated mind is as intent on as the seamstress is intent, at the moment when she must pass the thread through the eye of the needle, on the tip of that thread and the needle’s eye. Nothing else matters; nothing else exists. When the writer (or anyone else for that matter) achieves concentration, the rest of the world does a fine disappearing act. Past and future cease to exist. There are no goals beyond the present goal. For a painter, that goal may be a brushstroke, or achieving a certain shape, or color. For the writer again it may be choosing a single word. However much time it takes, the writer is willing to take that time. He’s willing because there’s no such thing as time. In its blissful concentrated state, the mind knows no minutes or hours or days. It lives in the eternal present where all anxieties connected to time—to the past and the future (and, if you think about it, all anxieties have to do either to the past or the future), no longer bear any weight or have any say. They bear no weight because they don’t exist.
This sense of timelessness (and it’s no mere sensation; when we’re not aware of time it might as well not exist) can be dangerous. Back when I was still a painter, when traveling in Europe I would do watercolors. I’d set myself up with my painting supplies and my little Italian folding leather stool (my beloved sediolino) and go to work on some outdoor scene, starting usually in the morning and finishing some time in the middle of the afternoon. I did this all the time. When working outdoors for obvious reasons it’s best to choose a location that won’t expose you to direct sunlight. For one thing, direct sunlight makes your colors dry too quickly. For another, you can get badly sunstroked. The problem, of course, is that the sun moves, and what was an ideal spot at ten in the morning has, by two o’clock, turned into a recipe for siriasis. From my blissful state of concentration I’d emerge into the dazzling sunlight, faint with hunger and thirst, my nose, cheeks and forearms roasted to an undiluted cadmium red. Bliss can do that to you. It doesn’t know any consequences—or it doesn’t know them until it’s too late.
But unless outfitted with a considerable skylight the writer in her studio needn’t worry about sunstroke. Phone calls may go unanswered. Trips to the bathroom may be put off to an extent unhealthy for the bladder. Matters of hygiene and grooming tend to be ignored. Coffee grows cold and scummy in cups. By writers such things are looked upon as the cost of victory. The pride of having achieved a good days’ work more than compensates for the disgrace of having spent that same day with one’s hair uncombed, one’s face unwashed, and one’s zipper down. You’ll look good tomorrow—or anyway in time to accept your National Book Award.
If discipline and the concentration it produces is heaven then by logical extension lack of concentration must be hell. For a writer that’s so. I believe that writers and artists (all creative people) live for concentration: for those moments when there is only the one moment and nothing else matters. One definition of pain: wanting to be where you’re not, to be doing what you’re not doing. When were not concentrating we’re in pain. The pain may be as mild as an itch, or a very dull ache, or it may feel as if you’re being branded with a white-hot iron. Either way it qualifies as pain. Others escape the pain of not leading ideal lives by keeping as busy as possible, by buying and selling, by building and trading, by dividing and conquering, by engaging in as many forms of professional and social commerce and intercourse they can squeeze into their daily planners. They make money, they raise families, they volunteer for charity organizations. They do lots of good, while also inflicting great damage on the environment and making a hell of a ruckus. When not adding to what they’ve already got by way of material odds and ends, they thrash about in an effort to to maintain their status-quo. They challenge the limits of the body (sports) and the mind (science, technology, the arts). They love breaking records, not realizing—or do they? —that what they’re breaking is an old civilization to make way for one that is presumably (but probably not) better.
The artist (read: writer) certainly plays her role in this ruckus. She doesn’t exist apart from it, not entirely. She may break records, and join charities, and fight for the future while clinging to the past like everyone else.
But when fully engaged in her work she feels none of that struggle: the material world is replaced by a world of instincts and ideas, of forms that may seem every bit as real to those of us who dream on paper as the forms of material, tangible things, but which in fact are purely conceptual, purely matters of spirit and mind, mental constructs—as impalpable as music or math. The world of concentration is painless because there are no things in it: only materials of the mind and soul; nothing with points or corners or edges, nothing with reference to the body, its vulnerabilities, deficits and needs. When we enter the divine realm of concentration the first thing we lose is the world, the second is our body. We become that which we presume we were before being born, and that which we hope to be again after we die. We become pure spirit, or as close to it as we can reasonably expect to become while still living and breathing.
In asking for discipline we’re really asking to be transformed out of the realm of the living: we’re asking for a pure heavenly slice of our own weightless souls.
7. In Summary
The writer is someone who writes, who makes a habit of writing but also of reading and thinking like a writer, whose character is formed to fit these habits.
Putting words on paper (or screen) is only a result of these habits, only a result of cultivating that character. And—by the way—only one of many results. There are others.
The fiction writer’s job is to convey experience, to do so in a spirit of generosity and by the grace of concentration, which leads to bliss, and which can be had only through discipline.
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