On Becoming a Novelist (12 page)

It’s the same in all fields, of course. A young businessman in a society of people who can see only wickedness in business cannot easily remain a young businessman. We’re social animals. Few born and bred Republicans remain Republicans in a context where everyone they know and respect is a Democrat. I’ve said that stubbornness is important for writers. But stubbornness can carry one only so far. If you grow up in a happy family and move to a community of pessimists—for example, if you grow up on a fortunate and peaceful farm in Indiana and move to New York City—you can stubbornly hold out, but only because you have, in your memory, something real to hold out for. (The same is true in reverse. Born and bred in Manhattan, you cannot easily shift to the less cynical attitudes of rural Ohio.) I don’t mean to slight the complications. You may be by nature a pessimist, even though born to a happy family in Indiana. But in hostile circumstances—that is, in the exclusive company of optimists—you cannot easily make art of your pessimism, you can only be odd and miserable.

So the first value of a writers’ workshop is that it makes the young writer feel not only not abnormal but virtuous. In a writers’ community, nearly all the talk is about writing. Even if you don’t agree with most of what is said, you come to take for granted that no other talk is quite so important. Talk about writing, even in a mediocre community of writers, is exciting. It makes you forget that by your own standards, whatever they may be, you’re not very good yet. It fills you with nervous energy, makes you want to leave the party and go home and write. And it’s the sheer act of writing, more than anything else, that makes a writer.

On the other hand, the writer who avoids writers’ workshops (or some other solid community of writers) is probably in for trouble. One can be fooled by the legend of, say, Jack London, and imagine that the best way to become a writer is to be a seaman or lumberjack. Jack London lived in an age when writers were folk heroes, as they are not now, and an age when technique was not quite as important as it is now. Though a tragic and noble man, he was a relatively bad writer. He could have used a few good teachers. Hemingway once remarked that “the best way to become a writer is to go off and write.” But his own way of doing it was to go to Paris, where many of the great writers were, and to study with the greatest theorist of the time, and one of the shrewdest writers, Gertrude Stein. Joseph Conrad, though we tend to think of him as a solitary genius, worked in close community with Ford Maddox Ford, H. G. Wells, Henry James, and Stephen Crane, among others. Melville had Hawthorne and his circle. Great writers are almost always associated with a literary dynasty. It’s hard to find an exception. (Incredibly, even Malcolm Lowry was part of a group.) So for psychological reasons, if for no other, even a bad workshop may be better than none.

If a bad writers’ workshop is worth attending, a good one is more so. If I could, I would tell you what the good workshops are. Iowa, being the oldest and best known, always attracts good students and sometimes has fine teachers. Binghamton has a good program in fiction, which is why I teach there. I’ve already mentioned others I consider dependable—Columbia and Stanford; and the list might easily be expanded. But it’s hard to give sure advice. For one thing, workshops change from year to year, as skillful writing teachers come and go; and for another, what makes a good workshop for one writer may be a disaster for another. I myself am not very interested in so-called experimental writing, though I do it sometimes and have occasionally been moved or delighted by works of fiction by William Gass (who does not normally teach writing) or Max Apple (with whom one can study at Rice). When I find I have in one of my writing classes a student who has no interest in the more or less traditional kind of fiction I favor, I know that both the student and I are in trouble. Much as I want to help him, I am the wrong kind of doctor. On the other hand, John Barth, who heads the writing program at Johns Hopkins and has gathered around him an interesting group of writers who, like himself, favor the new and strange, can have a crippling effect on the young realist. What all this suggests, of course, is that the student should select his writing program on the basis of its teachers, hunting out those whose interests seem closest to his own.

One of the things that make a good writers’ workshop beneficial is that it has at least one or two brilliant students (also five or six solid, sensible ones, and then several who are either pretentious or ploddingly conventional). Even in the best writers’ workshop one is likely to learn more from one’s fellow students than from one’s teachers. A workshop perceived to be better than most attracts good students, and because they are at the apprentice stage, these people can be counted on for careful scrutiny of one’s work, for encouragement, and useful criticism. Teachers in the well-known workshops may or may not prove helpful. They tend to hire the more famous writers, but not all famous writers are good teachers. Moreover, the main commitment of famous writers is, as a rule, to their own work. However deeply they may care about their students, their main business is to work on a form that takes a great deal of time. Often their solution is to concentrate on the very best of their students and give the rest short shrift. There is no doubt, I think, that good teachers can be helpful to the young writer; but in practice it turns out that the student either encounters good writers who teach on the side and do not work as hard as they might at it, or good teachers who are not very good writers, so that what they teach is partly wrong, or good writers who cannot teach at all.

Whatever the quality of their teaching, famous writers do a good deal for writing programs. Perhaps the chief value of the famous writer is his presence, his contribution as a role model. Just by being around him day after day, the young writer learns how the famous man reads, and what he reads; how he perceives the world; how he relates to others and to his profession; even how he schedules his life. The famous writer’s presence is vivid proof that the young writer’s goal is not necessarily unreasonable. If the student is extraordinarily lucky, the famous writer may also be a good teacher: he not only knows what real art is but can explain it.

I must add that at some of the creative writing programs where I’ve visited or taught I’ve found excellent teachers who are not creative writers at all, really, though they may have published a story or two, or one novel years ago, or several mediocre novels. Some people can catch mistakes in student writing that they cannot see in their own, and some writers who have excellent minds write, by some quirk of personality, books unworthy of them. Sometimes the excellent writing teacher is a critic rather than a fiction writer; sometimes he is a person without literary credentials, perhaps a freshman English teacher who, drafted to teach a lower-level creative writing course, has proved to have a gift for it. How to find such teachers only luck or the grapevine can tell you. One can ask writers one admires where they would go if they were just starting out; or one can simply set out for a generally respected university and hope. The odds are good that one will find, in any major university, someone who can help.

One of the oddities of creative writing courses is that there exists no standard theory on how to teach creative writing. Many people ask—even some creative writing teachers—“Can writing really be taught?” No one asks that about painting or musical composition. Writing has been identified so strongly with “genius” or “inspiration” that people have tended to assume that the art cannot be passed on by such methods as the other arts have used. That perception may be partly right; the writing of fiction may be a less specific, detectable skill than painting or musicianship. But the reason for doubt that writing can be taught is also, I think, at least partly historical. From early times, schools of painting and music directly served religious and political functions in a way writing poetry or fiction did not. Since the church and city-state of Florence needed Giotto’s skills, Giotto taught his methods; his near contemporaries Dante and Boccaccio worked, respectively, at politics and the teaching of literature. In any case, within the past twenty or thirty years, with the rise of creative writing programs in the United States, a pedagogy for the art has begun to develop, and with every passing year the general level of teaching improves. There are those who deplore this fact, claiming it as the main reason for the dreary sameness of so much of our fiction and poetry; and no doubt there is something to be said for that view. But at least at the technical level, it seems to me, fiction has never been better off. Probably the truth is that in any age there are only so many writers of genius, and teaching a writer not to make mistakes—teaching him to avoid those forms of vagueness or clumsiness that impair the vivid and continuous dream—cannot make him a more interesting or original person than he is. Perhaps the one great danger that the student in a good creative writing course ought to guard against is the tendency of good technical theory to undermine individuality and the willingness to take risks.

A bad workshop in creative writing has one or more regular features. If the student notices several of them in the workshop he has chosen, he should drop the course.

In a bad workshop, the teacher allows or even encourages attack. It is common in writers’ workshops for the student to read a story (usually one he’s gone over beforehand with the teacher), then get comments from his teacher and classmates. In a good workshop, the teacher establishes a general atmosphere of helpfulness rather than competitiveness or viciousness. Classmates of the writer whose work has been read do not begin, if the workshop is well run, by stating how
they
would have written the story, or by expressing their blind prejudices on what is or is not seemly; in other words, they do not begin by making up some different story or demanding a different style. They try to understand and appreciate the story that has been written. They assume, even if they secretly doubt it, that the story was carefully and intelligently constructed and that its oddities have some justification. If they cannot understand why the story is as it is, they ask questions. A common fault poor teachers inculcate in students is the habit of too quickly deciding that what they have failed to understand makes no sense. It takes confidence and good will to say, “I didn’t understand so-and-so,” rather than, belligerently, “So-and-so makes no sense.” It is the nature of stupid people to hide their perplexity and attack what they cannot grasp. The wise admit their puzzlement (no prizes are given in heaven for fake infallibility), and when the problem material is explained they either laugh at themselves for failing to see it or they explain why they couldn’t reasonably be expected to understand, thus enabling the author to see why he didn’t get his point across.

Good workshop criticism, in other words, is like good criticism anywhere. When we read what is generally acknowledged to be a great work of art, we try to understand, if we have sense, why intelligent people, including the writer, have thought the work aesthetically satisfying. In a good fiction workshop one recognizes that even if a work seems bad at first glance, the writer sat writing and thinking about it for a fair amount of time and deserves a generous response. It is true, of course, that some of the fiction one hears read in a workshop is bad, and often there is no real question about its badness. The story is patently melodramatic, vague, pretentious, inadequately thought out, overloaded with detail, sentimental, uninterestingly vulgar. I myself think really bad fiction should never reach a reading in the workshop; it cannot teach much or sharpen students’ critical skills, and it is likely to embarrass the writer. If bad fiction does reach the workshop, it should be dealt with quickly and politely, its mistakes made clear so that neither that writer nor any other in the workshop is inclined to repeat them, and its virtues acknowledged. But in most fiction that reaches workshop reading, the badness is not so obvious. The business of the teacher and the writer’s classmates is to figure out (or if necessary ask) the purpose and meaning of the piece and only then to suggest carefully, thoughtfully, why the purpose and meaning did not come through.

A writer does not become better by being scorned. It is helpful if a class, as it listens to a writer’s story, makes careful notes of apparent mistakes or weaknesses and reads them to the writer after the story has been read, but it is helpful only if the class generally understands that anyone’s work could have similar shortcomings. If a class regularly attacks its members, and the teacher allows it, the course is counterproductive. The only final value of class criticism is that it teaches each member of the class to criticize and evaluate his own work and appreciate good fiction different from his own. Often class criticism can show the writer that he has at some specific point written misleadingly or has failed to evoke some important element of a scene—mistakes the writer could not catch himself because, knowing what he intended, he thinks his sentences say more than they do. He may imagine, for instance, that the bulge in his female character’s coat clearly indicates that she is carrying a gun, whereas a listener not privy to the writer’s mental image may imagine that the woman is pregnant. Seeing the effects of his mistakes makes the writer more careful, more wary of the trickery words are capable of. Or again, class criticism may make a writer aware of his unconscious prejudices, for instance his notion that fat people are easygoing, or that all hellfire fundamentalists are mean, or that all homosexuals try to seduce boys. The wide range of opinion a class affords increases the writer’s chance of getting a fair hearing—especially the writer whose style, goals, and attitudes differ radically from his teacher’s—and the focus of the whole class on the writer’s work increases the odds that most of his mistakes or ineffective strategies will be noticed. At its best, class criticism can help everyone involved, as long as that criticism is basically generous. Vicious criticism leads to writer’s block, both in the victim and in the attacker.