Writing Class Confidential Part III

In classes where the teacher is an aggressively self-styled expert (and even some where she is not), the class members will savage each other in an attempt to gain her favor. It’s an unpleasant scene, to say the least. In others, the teacher becomes a kind of self-help guru, convincing people who can’t write that they can so they will come back and pay for more praise when the next class rolls around. The teacher becomes the object of hero worship. It’s grimy and greasy and uncomfortable to watch these dynamics. And yet, a good teacher can make you aware of what you are doing that works, so that you can keep trying to produce more of it, while she does the same for you with that which doesn’t. This advice can be invaluable, especially when you find you and she are on the same page about what good writing should be.

And still….the thing is, no matter what you write, someone is going to not like it. It’s that subjective. But it is not completely subjective either, and some writing really does suck. You have to learn when yours does, and when it doesn’t. Other people can help you learn to do that. Or not.

Finally, you need to be aware of as much of the art and craft of writing as you can. But you also need to do something original. When Hemingway did all of that minimalist stuff, it was new. At least somewhat new. He took what there was, and incorporated it into his work, but he transformed it enough so that it was unmistakably his. That is the trick, and it is a great one. If this intertextuality stuff is true, if everything a writer writes is part of a grand conversation he or she is having with other writers, you need to actually take part in the conversation (produce something that recognizes external standards enough so that it is comprehensible), but also say something a little unlike anything anyone else has said before.

That is what all this stuff about voice is. To be undeniably yourself, to create a persona that coheres, that grabs the reader’s attention and holds it until the end of the piece. That is not about being trendy, or politically correct, or even about being likeable. You can start learning it in writing class, but it is not something you are going to memorize, incorporate as a list of rules, unless the rule was something like this: Be interesting. You learn voice at the place where the rules leave off and the art begins. You learn it by reading and thinking about writing, by taking writing classes, but most of all by writing.

Language is less a garden than it is a jungle. It grows wild and fast, and no matter how hard you try to regulate its growth, its change, it nevertheless grows and changes. The meanings of words change, so that in the Middle Ages silly was a synonym for blessed, and now it means insipid and foolish—basically any movie with Jim Carrey in it. And grammar and syntax changes too—Shakespeare used double negatives all the time without being misunderstood, or excoriated by William Safire or Edwin Newman. Postpositive modifiers were once considered OK in English, and word order was less important because there were more inflections (endings on verbs and nouns and modifiers and pronouns that indicated their role in the sentence). And yet if you read Strunk and White’s ELEMENTS OF STYLE, or Fowler’s MODERN ENGLISH USAGE, you get the impression that there is in existence somewhere some perfect, Platonic form of language, some language so transparent it rivals the nature it describes in beauty and complexity, and that we traduce this marvelous instrument every time we open our barbaric mouths.

I think this is the impulse behind the part of style books that do things like try to freeze usage—to rail against irregardless, to hope that we can defeat the incorrect usage of hopefully, and not be nauseated by the improper deployment of nausea, etc. We want language to always mean what we want it to mean. But it never does. Language is just a convention—something we decide means what it means, and people change their minds, things evolve. This is good, in a way, as language needs to be flexible in order keep up with a rapidly changing world, but it is bad because no matter how hard we try to be understood, language is slippery. Trying to calcify it, to make it some monolith, is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

And yet I am not completely averse to trying to slow it down, especially on the page. The written word loses the immediacy of a living context, or an interlocutor, of the actual lived situations it tries to replicate, and so you have to come to some agreement on what things mean. It is not that usages of the words themselves are good or bad, but we make it so. As long as there is agreement, I am copacetic. And writing is often a vehicle we use to try and transport and convey difficult information, so Fowler has his place. And he can be fun. I love to go and look up things like the difference between continuous and continual, funereal, funerary, and funeral.

What irks me is capriciousness, rules for the sake of rules, and the insistence that you are not trying to decide on a convention for use, but are transmitting some natural law that came to you from up on high, directly to you from the Gods of Language. The difference between who and whom, to be hoped and hopefully, even continuously and continually (if you know the context)—all of these are strictly academic, and only have use as ammunition for pedants.

This is not to say that rules are not helpful in some ways, and the knowledge of them can guide us when our instinct fails us. A very tangled sentence can be explicated sometimes with the good old Elementary School technique of diagramming. And when a sentence of yours gets long and winding, wending its way towards God knows where, it can help to go back to things like rules of agreement to make sure you have made it clear who is doing what to whom, and what modifies what.

A lot of this is instinctive—a five year old has mastered rules for creating past tense, the difference between mass and count nouns, and they often can remember which verbs are strong ones (use an internal vowel change to signal past tense). This is pretty good. But with more complex writing, use the old Fowler’s, and the Strunk and White. You can make yourself clear to your reader, and your reader, especially if they are using the same references, can figure you out more easily than if you just kind of let it all hang out.

Which gets at a more basic question. What is writing for? What is language for? Many would say it is for the accurate transmission of ideas. But then what are academic and scientific and political and legal speech and writing for? They are often more about obscuring the truth, or the lack of knowledge of the speaker, than they are about anything else. But I am assuming that writers are concerned with making themselves understood. And I think Strunk and White give us some great advice along those lines. Prefer the abstract over the concrete, use parallel constructions, omit needless words, etc—all of these are great advice, although not an excuse for being simplistic—you can’t make something less complex than it really is, but at the same time you don’t have to describe it in any more complex a way than its nature allows. Of course, to do so you must understand that nature. What Strunk and White are doing mostly is asking us to take care with our listeners, especially since when they read our stuff, we won’t be there to answer their questions.

This is what style manuals can do—encourage us to be clear, to think more carefully. These are issues on a micro scale, and it certainly is important to address things on that level. But what about things like voice, and the use of metaphor, plotting, narrative tension, etc? Aristotle, in his POETICS, said great use of metaphor was the province of the genius. I agree. Aristotle went on to talk about dramatic unity, but he did so with the understanding that he was only trying to give structure , to provide some helpful tips, and that in great work genius would have to carry the rest of the load. And yet, even the genius can be helped by a little conscious analysis of the process in which he is engaged. And for us non-geniuses, it is maybe even more important to be aware of “rules” which will keep us from making stylistic mistakes a genius would avoid by instinct.

And still, I think the best idea, beyond all those silly writing exercises you will find in some writing how-to manuals, is to just read and write. And read what you have written. Pay careful attention to what works, and try to reproduce it. It is both a conscious and unconscious process, but I think each kind of process can influence the other. Try to let your muse inspire you, but also apply some rigorous editing after the muse has done what she can. It’s a question of both art and craft.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Illustration by Donna MacDonald
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Writing Class Confidential Part II

One old chestnut holds that a writer has to be an observer. Like a lot of old chestnuts, it’s true, at least some of the time. Many writers became observers on the playground, relegated to that status by geekiness and the fear of yet another humiliation or beating. They learned to imagine themselves into the childhood games of their peers, and kept on imagining the lives of others from those miserable days onward.

One thing you can do if you are a geek or loser is, or course, hang out with other geeks and losers. This is the basis for the game Dungeons and Dragons, group therapy, and writing classes (yes, my tongue is at least partly in my cheek at this point, so don’t savage me if you are a devotee if any of these). With the wisdom and compassion one would have to have learned from all that childhood angst and rejection (cue the music for Janis Ian’s “Seventeen,” please) you would think the people in these writing classes (called salons by the pretentious, the percentage of which is high among writers) would not turn out to be bullies themselves. You would be wrong (being a writer, I am of course observant enough to have noticed this, having the time and inclination to watch while sitting on the sideline of life with nothing better to do).

I’ve heard that the Iowa Writer’s Workshop is a protracted, internecine, fratricidal (patricidal, matricidal, you get the idea, even suicidal, eventually, for some) free-for-all wherein the last one left standing gets the phone number of the teacher’s agent. I believe it. The psychological warfare can be intense, and the ability to wage it is not the same thing as being able to write. Therefore, the writers who survive are the most narcissistic, vicious, and self-deluded. Not that this isn’t like life in general, but it seems a shame. Success in writing comes from many things, but the three most important are confidence, long and sustained effort, and luck. Connections also help, and self promotion (the flipside of bullying?), and writing in whatever style is trendy. Talent is still important, but not more important than these.

Not every writing class I have been in has been a kind of community theater production of Twelve Angry Men (and Women), but many of them were. You would have been better off taking time off from your writing to study Machiavelli and Sun Tzu than trying to perfect your craft. The realpolitik of these type classes can crush the confidence of someone insecure about their abilities (and if you are worth your salt as a writer, you need to doubt yourself enough to keep trying to improve, to learn).

The first class I took, many years ago, was a fiction workshop. It was a nightmare. One guy (he actually smoked a pipe and wore a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows) told me that I was trying to be Hemingway and doing a poor job of it. He never said why, and I can see that this was because he wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to think deeply enough into what I was writing to find out. He was the alpha dog and he didn’t want me pissing in the same grass he was. Another woman came right out of Central Casting as a crusty, musty and dusty old dowager who lectured continually (as opposed to continuously, she would have pointed out) on not ending sentences with prepositions, or splitting infinitives, of not starting a sentence with and or but, and of the dire necessity of putting a comma before the last element in a series. She spoke of these things as if they had been transmitted to the writing community on tablets that she herself had acquired from God (or Fowler).

I have always had a real animus towards these captious types who elevate guidelines that are supposed to promote clarity into a kind of dogma, and then use their knowledge to cudgel people who aren’t quite so persnickety. They imagine that writing well is a result of following all the rules, but those rules are just the beginning of writing, not its end.

Gratuitous negative criticism is something my present memoir writing teacher, Marion Roach Smith, doesn’t allow. She herself doesn’t engage in it. She encourages observation and critique that is based on the text and is designed to help you get better. And her analyses are invariably spot on. Not everyone in her classes has had the same ability as Marion. I am amazed at how often people can look at a text and come up with a reaction to it that has nothing to do with what is right in front of their noses. As if a text was a Rorschach test, they see whatever they need to see in it. But a text is not a Rorschach, and not every interpretation can be said to be valid. Moby Dick is not about Ishmael’s homosexual passion for QueeQueg, for Christ’s sake.

In memoir writing classes there is an additional emotional danger: people feel that your criticism is about both their writing and their life itself. The classes often devolve into a contest to see who can tell the story of the most abject misery, and the prize for being the most pitiful is the most praise, whether the person eliciting the pity can write their way out of a paper bag or not. And if people don’t show the proper pity and praise for these tales of woe, people feel slighted.

One of the most interesting archetypes I have found is the unreliable narrator. I remember one woman writer of this type vividly from a memoir class. An unreliable narrator in fiction can be great fun, as we have the author standing behind that narrator and gesturing ironically at him, through other characters or through the ironical things that happen to said narrator. In memoir, though, such a narrator is unsettling, to say the least. And I don’t mean unreliable in the sense of making stuff up, like James Frey. This woman’s perspective on her own life was so warped that it defied imagination. She unconsciously satirized herself. Again and again she would describe how her husband and two sons did things she judged to be loving, even though it was obvious to us that all three of them were just mean, nasty and cruel (whoops, I didn’t use that comma). They (and she) excused their behavior on religious and patriotic grounds, and in the name of love, but none of us were buying it. Unreliable. And her assessment of everyone else’s work was way off, too. I took eventually to her as a kind of inverse acid test—if she didn’t like something I had written, I knew it had to stay in.

Another archetype is the genius (cue Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years”: You’ve been telling me you’re a genius since you were seventeen/ in all the time I’ve known you, I still don’t know what you mean). This is the kind of writer who will tell you he or she has never been tutored in writing, but has been writing on his or her own for years. They don’t need a class, but figure they have a kind of literary noble obligation to come and help you out. When the class doesn’t genuflect on cue, these types pack up and leave.

And then there is the expert. This person is invariably a middling writer, one who has gotten a lot on the craft side of things cinched, but has no voice or originality. They offer you a kind of contract—allow them to be your Maxwell Perkins and you can be their F Scott Fitzgerald. They get pretty upset if you don’t sign off on that contract. In one of Marion’s classes, five of us spun off our own group. One of the women (the Expert) decided that another of the women was using too many adjectives (apparently the Expert had read Strunk and White and managed to misunderstand them both), and she said so. This wasn’t so bad, as we were dedicated to learning from each other, and truly didn’t want to hear only praise for our stuff (although we didn’t mind the praise when it came). When the acolyte didn’t agree with the ex cathedra proclamation of the Expert, however, and no one rallied to the Expert’s side (even if I had agreed with her, I wouldn’t have done any rallying, since like many writers I am a notorious coward) the Expert accused us all of coddling the woman who would not prostrate herself. It became clear that the group was not going to survive with both of these women in it, and so we jettisoned the more annoying of the two (yes, the Expert). If it was a class where we were not running the show ourselves, it would have been a real tension convention.

The expert will also tell you if your stuff is postmodern enough, self-conscious and self-referential enough, if it is going to offend anyone, if you have a right to write it, if it is au courant. They know what aporia is, and lacunae, and instantiation, and deferral, and absence, and they will deconstruct you until it feels like there are no words left on the pages you submitted. The expert will drop a lot of names, as if he or she was in daily contact with Joyce and Proust, Derrida and Foucault, et al. They are supremely aware of all the nuances of writing, but not of how silly they come off as critics of it.

Next time, the writing teacher, and the efficacy of style-, guide-, hand- and how-to-books.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Writing Class

Every English major thinks they have the Great American Novel buried somewhere deep within them. If only they had the time to dig it out! If only they followed their muses, were willing to live in an artist’s garret, to write away with the monastic dedication of the truly possessed, they could do it! These many artiste wannabees, artist-manqués, dab hands, ersatz and erstwhile geniuses, these would-be chroniclers of America in this brave new century believe that if only they were possessed with writing and only writing, were more interested in portraying society than living happily within it, if they were truly obsessed (and also alcoholic, depressed, violent, misanthropic, childish, churlish and needy in the way many writers apparently are?) with violating the sanctity of the blank page with their humble (OK, not so humble) words, they could catch the big brass ring and write the next MOBY DICK.

It’s comforting to think you could have done something, that you have an untapped reservoir of talent that you will someday dip into when you are done doing all those other things that are getting in your way, after you have met all your deadlines and fulfilled all your commitments, which of course you will never do (meet the commitments or write the novel). To imagine you could have been a writer, a contender, a star is more pleasant than doing the hard work it takes to be one only to find out you don’t have what it takes. I read somewhere that 90% of people think they are better than average drivers. I think 100% of the attendees of writing classes, either in MFA programs or in places like Skidmore’s Summer Writers’ Institute, think they could be great, if only they didn’t have to pick up the dry-cleaning, and the leaves in the damn yard would rake themselves.

Writing classes presently thrive, for both memoir and fiction. Some commentators see them as a kind of portal to self discovery, and even a means to mental health. I believe that about as much as I believe in Pyramid Power, but let’s leave that for later. Others see them as a sign we are becoming increasingly narcissistic, telling ordinary stories about mundane lives in prosaic ways, believing that the lives we chronicle or create are more interesting than they truly are. I will leave that question for cultural critics more learned than I. One thing these classes can do is make you feel like you are more dedicated to writing than perhaps you actually are. For another, they help perpetuate the above-mentioned delusions of grandeur. Still, I am pretty sure some people benefit from them. They are, after all, merely tools, and tools used properly can perform a function. And anyway, writing classes can be great fun, a place to meet like-minded souls, especially in those times of year when they don’t have new episodes of THE BLACKLIST or BETTER CALL SAUL on the boob tube.

At a time when it is harder and harder to make a living as a writer, to actually sell your writing to anyone, more and more people are ponying up the bucks to learn how to write. And although many of them will tell you they are doing so merely as a recreational activity, to joyously reactivate their long dormant literary muscles, most of them secretly harbor dreams of greatness. Including me, to tell the truth, even though I know most writers, even good ones, even if I am a good one (which of course is open to debate), will never be published, although some of them may become writing teachers. That is the weirdly incestuous thing about the present state of writing—it is easier to make a living off the dreams that other people have of being real writers than to be one yourself.

Are the people who pay for these courses (the ones who truly work hard and try to learn what is being “taught”) getting their money’s worth? Can writing be taught? Can instruction make a mediocre writer good, or a good one great? The prevailing wisdom about artistic endeavor is that effort is more important than talent, and that the truly virtuosic must spend 10,000 hours or more becoming virtuosos. While it is true that most people don’t have the drive to put in those hours, are those with the will to do so guaranteed elite status? If this is true, does it hold true regardless of the potential for verbal acuity nature blessed you with at birth? Putting aside for a moment the subjective nature of writing as an art, and the fact that even a great writer can remain unpublished, I just can’t imagine virtuosos can be made without first possessing virtuosic gifts. Some of writing is indeed perspiration, the application of your butt to the seat of your writing chair for long periods of time, and yet inspiration is part of the process too. Some people are never going to create a truly interesting metaphor or simile in all the many tedious pages they write. Their words are flightless birds. I wanted to be a great basketball player when I was a kid, and at some point had to face the facts—I did not have the size and athletic ability required, and I never would. The untutored six-foot-six guy that could dunk the ball behind his head had an advantage over me that no amount of training was ever going to erase.

But then there is more room for delusion in writing than in basketball, isn’t there? If the man I am guarding drops 40 on me, and blocks every shot I attempt, it is clear that I have been outgunned and outmanned. But writing greatness is not so clearly defined. The incoherent can claim to be too far ahead of the intellectual curve to be understood, and the mundane can put there boringness down to the short declarative style of a Hemingway, even as they fail to grasp that Hemingway managed to say more than was written on the page, while they are managing to say less.

Like me with basketball, it would appear there are some hopeless cases. Those with a kind of writing aphasia, who were born with the writing part of their brain missing, and who don’t know it. Because that is another way that writing is unique, and uniquely beguiling—we all use language and we all manage to say something interesting every now and then, like the broken clock that is right twice a day, so it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking we can produce deathless prose. But what of the person who has some facility with the language—not a prodigy, but a journeyman, not particularly well-read, but somewhat read, who doesn’t have a huge capacity for reflection and hard work, but rather has a somewhat better than average one? Can this person become better with instruction? Or will, as some people claim, writing class be the death of all possibility for true originality for this every man, every writer?

To put it simply—some things about writing are more easily taught then others. True originality and verbal invention are not teachable, writing class can make you more aware of things like problems with reasoning or structure, tense, missing links in a chain of argument, and it can make your work more accessible and coherent, but also more bland and ordinary, by taking all that is polarizing or controversial in it and smoothing it over or taking it out in order to please everyone in the class who has some kind of complaint with it. You can get better with help—not great, but better. But you can also get worse. Knowing who to listen to and who to ignore is essential in writing classes, which brings us back to a version of the original question—can knowing who to listen to be taught?

It breaks down along the lines of art and craft. Craft can be taught. Technique can be transmitted from one human being to another. Invention, originality, voice—these cannot. And one without the other makes for only half a writer. And the more important part is the talent—a writer with talent will eventually teach herself craft. There was an excellent movie called FINDING FORRESTER, starring Sean Connery as a JD Salinger type of misanthropic and reclusive writer. He takes a young black kid with great talent under his wing. The kid is bedeviled by a teacher at the preppy high school he gets into, and he asks Forrester, who knows the guy, what the man’s story is. Connery replies—he knows everything there is to know about writing and he still can’t do it.

Next week—my adventures in writing workshops, classes, symposia, and salons along with my thoughts on the efficacy of instruction manuals.

© 2015 Mike Welch