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

Dreams and Lies

I read a couple of years ago that sleep cleans out the brain in a very literal way, that fluid circulates measurably while we sleep and drains off, almost like the rinse cycle in a dishwasher. The NIH study used sleeping mice. Your tax dollars at work.

The researchers reported that the process clears away brain toxins, but I’m thinking it scrubs the brain of memories and thoughts and serves them up to us as dreams. How else to account for the dreams I’ve been having lately about being back in school? Or the dreams about my father and sister? Mysterious fluid has brought them alive again from the remoter parts of memory. Odd that I never dream of food, which is what consumes most of my waking attention. I wonder what the mice dreamt of.

I was moved to think about these things by Annamaria’s piece about novelists and pathological liars. Stories, after all, are made of dreams and lies.

I remember clearly the first lie I ever told. My kindergarten teacher, Sister Heinrich Himmler (or whatever her name was), sent me upstairs to see the nun who was the school principal, to confess some misdeed or other. When I got out of the classroom into the hall I noticed that there were pillars in the hall wider than I was. I could stand behind one of them for as long as it might take to go upstairs, be punished, and come back down again. Brilliant! I stood behind the pillar, counting to five hundred. Then I went back into the classroom.


“Well, Katie? Did you go and see Sister Misericordia?”

“Yes, Sister.” As children we believed that if you tell a lie, you can’t help laughing. And yet I found myself able to lie to this nun with a perfectly straight face. Not even the twitch of a lip. The ploy succeeded. I returned to my seat in triumph, a successful liar.

I don’t remember any negative consequences from that episode, even though the two nuns must have got together and compared notes at some point. “What did you say to Katie this morning, Sister?” “Katie who?” It was true that Sister Heinrich cordially detested me, a feeling I returned in double measure. But why wouldn’t she? I was a Protestant, the only one in the class. “If you're good, children, you'll all go to Heaven, except for Katie here, who is not of our faith.”

I was a stranger among aliens, and now I was a liar. An ideal position for a novelist. All I needed were experience and dreams. In my my school dreams nowadays I never dream of St. Patrick's, though, or of the nuns. My school dreams involve finding my way back to high school with my sister. Waiting for my father to drive us to school until we’re terribly late. Not knowing where my classroom is. Having no homework done.

The only dream I have of being a child in Woodbury is the one where I’m running through the back yards of Woodland Avenue pursued by faceless bad guys. Back then there were no bad guys pursuing little children, not like now. The worst thing that could happen to a kindergartener running through back yards was to step in dog dirt. I feel that there is some connection to make between writing novels and dog dirt, but I can’t quite formulate the thought. Night fluids must have scrubbed it out of my brain.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Of Novelists and Pathological Liars

Last month I posted about the possible connection between the brains of liars and the brains of novelists.  I am sure Freud would have a lot to say about my focus on the links between novel writing and lying, but frankly I don’t want to know what he would think.

Since I am in no position to perform actual scientific research on the subject, the best I can do is look for parallels and imagine what the connections might be.

If one looks up pathological lying, standard information on the subject gives one a lot to ponder.  First of all, though the condition commonly called pathological lying has been in the medical literature since 1891, it is not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  But that is not to say that it is does not exist.  Lots can be and is said on the subject.  The more I read about it, the more parallels I see with fiction writing.

Here are some of the things that novelists and pathological liars (P-Liars) have in common:

Ordinary liars, make up stories for self-protection or self-aggrandizement.  P-Liars will make up stories and tell them, even if there is no discernible benefit to them.  This is absolutely true of novelists.  Certainly most of us are not doing it for the money.  Or the celebrity.  Psychologists call this type of lying “internally motivated.”  No novelist I’ve ever met thinks of his or her stories in any other way.

P-Liars begin to show symptoms at around 16 years of age.  For a number of years now, I have been asking novelist on two continents at what age they began to write stories.  Only once has any of them given me an age over fifteen.  Many say they began as early as five.  I myself was nine.  Perhaps then, the compulsion to write novels is a form of early-onset pathological lying.

P-Liars have average or above average intelligence.  I would say most novelists are above average, but this conclusion may be the result of personal prejudice on my part.

The kinds of stories the two groups (?) make up have quite a few similarities.  P-Liars’ tales are almost always elaborate and long and are described in one report as “dazzling or fantastical, but never breach the limits of plausibility.”  Such stories are the professed goal of novelists.  And like novelists, P-Liars know and can admit that their stories are made up.  They fail lie detector tests.

People with other, more serious personality disorders may lie, but often they don’t know they’re making things up.  They also have traits not usually found in P-Liars or novelists—like a pathological fear of rejection.   No person with such a dread could possibly function as a novelist.  In fact, we practically revel in rejection.  Just ask; we will gladly describe our file of rejection letters.  We proudly keep them.  They are the proof that we are who we think we are.

Annamaria Alfieri   

Pick Up a Trollope*

I’m not on Facebook, I’m not Linked In and I’ve never been all aTwitter, but when it comes to 19th century novels, I’m on the cutting edge. It’s Anthony Trollope’s 200th anniversary and people are falling all over themselves to describe how wonderful his novels are. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote an article on “Why Trollope is Trending” and talked about how many “amateur readers” (I guess that’s me) share their enthusiasm for their favorite novels.

The Guardian had a feature in which famous Brits discussed why they loved Trollope and named their favorite novel. Antonia Fraser picks the first of the Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her? She was introduced to his novels during WW II when all of her relatives read his work because Trollope cheered them up.

I never faced WWII or the London Blitz but I have read Trollope to similar effect.

Many years ago there was a book club called The Reader’s Subscription. One of its offers to new subscribers was a free set of the six novels that make The Barsetshire Chronicles. This lovely set of books sat on my shelves for some years and gathered a film of dust.

Then one day a friend got me an interview for a new job. The interview didn’t go especially well. The people interviewing me spent more time talking to each other than they did to me. They announced that they wanted to see other people. Having heard this from any number of men I dated, I assumed that I and the interview team were quits.

I thought no more about this until my friend called to say I had gotten the job.

“I’m surprised,” I said. “They seemed unimpressed.”

She hesitated.

“What aren’t you telling me? I asked.

“Well, you weren’t anybody’s first choice, but nobody objected to you.”

So I had not been voted Most Likely to Succeed. I was either The Least Offensive or The Most Innocuous. At the job I held at the time, I was adored. My boss dressed in black on my last day.

I spent my first days on the new job traveling with someone I knew not at all. I returned to the office and found people to be generally indifferent.

When I got home from work one night, for some reason never very clear to me, I picked up The Warden, the first of the Barsetshire novels, and fell in love with that cathedral town and many of its inhabitants. The atmosphere at work was tense but the cathedral close was cozy.

The Barsetshire novels are not about religious practice and theology. They’re about family and getting ahead. Each clerical position comes with its own degree of status, housing and income and the clerical men in black spar and scheme to get the very best positions they can. That said, Septimus Harding, the gentle man who oversees the religious life of the twelve elderly men at Hirarm’s Hospital, is the best Christian I’ve come across. His right to so much money (800 pounds) for so little work is questioned by a young reformer and subsequently by The Jupiter (a fictional stand-in for The Times of London). Harding is convinced by what he reads in the paper that he is doing the twelve elderly men a disservice, so even though the legal case is dropped, he decides to leave his position and take two less remunerative church posts.

Mr. Harding is surrounded by much more ambitious clergymen and we see more of them in Barchester Towers. His son-in-law is the archdeacon and son of the current bishop. The son wants his father’s job but the bishop doesn’t die soon enough and a man inimical to the archdeacon’s interests becomes Prime Minister and makes Dr Proudie the bishop. Dr. Proudie comes with a strong minded wife (known as the she-bishop) and his own chaplain, the greasy, fawning, odious Obadiah Slope. (Can you tell I don’t like him?) The struggle among these people to attain power and wealth is hugely entertaining and one of the big questions is who will take over the position abandoned by Mr. Harding. Will Mr. Harding be offered the job of warden again or will it go to Mrs Proudie’s favorite, Mr. Quiverful, who must provide for a wife and 14 children?

While Dickens and his characters are better known (and don’t misunderstand me, I love Dickens as well) I would argue that Trollope’s characters are more subtly drawn. Dickens characters are either unspeakably evil (Fagin, Ralph Nickleby) or incredibly good (Little Nell, Little Dorrit).

Trollope gives his good people weaknesses (Septimus Harding spends a large amount of money self-publishing Harding’s Church Music) and can be sympathetic to his less likable characters. When Mrs. Proudie finally gets her comeuppance in The Last Chronicle of Barset, the reader feels sorry for her.

With regular doses of Trollope I was able to get through the rough patch that was the start of this new job. I went on to read many other Trollope novels, but when after 11 years I left this job to find another, I once again spent time with the people of Barsetshire. I have found them fascinating many times since.

© 2015 Stephanie Patterson

* I’m sure this joke grew stale quickly in the 19th century. Later in the twentieth century it was said that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan “liked to go to bed with a Trollope.”

Dillinger

Watching PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009) made me think about how different present day America is from the America of the 1930s, and how much it is the same. Depression-era America was a time of great suffering, of the rise of unions, of radical politics, of the centralization of government (including the creation of “federal” crimes and the establishment and growth of the FBI), of radio, of the movies, of FDR. Some of the powers that be tried to demonize immigrants as the cause of our economic malaise (sound familiar?), while others placed the blame on corporate greed. Some of those powers wrapped themselves in the flag even while they violated the values it symbolizes, and regularly claimed to have corresponded with God, who informed them that the ruin of America was found in all those Southern and Eastern European Catholic immigrants who were attacking both the American standard of living and American standards of morality. On the other side were the muckrakers and the reformers, and all those who made an effort to put people back to work.

Present day Recession-era America (now that we are in the age of advertising, of mass media, of euphemism and spin, the word Depression will never be used again, even if fully half the population were to become unemployed) is also subject to divisive and divided politics, and we even have the equivalent of Father Coughlin in Rush Limbaugh. Unions are now in eclipse, and people are told that good old American individualism is the path to financial success (even as the encroachments of both the government and big business make such success increasingly unlikely for the common man).

Seeing these parallels made me wonder why we don’t have the equivalents of a Jesse James or John Dillinger, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd, in modern day America. Where is our modern, our postmodern, Robin Hood? Why are there no such heroes today, no pirates, no bank robbers, no nothing? Maybe part of it is because it is now so much harder to rob banks. Surely if they were easier to rob the media would go nuts over the men who robbed them. They would become the kind of perversely inverted heroes the media loves to flog us with, such as O.J. Simpson and the BTK killer. And if a nationally known criminal managed to escape from jail, like Dillinger did twice in his short life (33 when he died), I imagine you might hear a little bit about it on the news. I guess we do have D.B. Cooper, who in 1971 parachuted out of a 727 he hijacked with $200,000 he had extorted and was never seen or heard from again, but that is about it. We also have computer hackers, but cyber-crime is too bloodless to be really compelling.

I am putting aside for the purposes of this essay the question of whether Dillinger did or did not really have sympathy for the common man, had some compassion for some of his fellow men or was just a common psychopath. In the movie he steals from banks, but claims to have never done so from the people themselves. He is beset on both sides by a corporatizing mob, which has become “The Syndicate,” and the incipient FBI, which performs phone taps and pursues him across state lines. I don’t know if the real Dillinger was so much a man against the machine, of if he had such scruples about when and where to be larcenous and to practice brutality: It’s the idea of the outlaw hero, the man outside the law who is more just than those who are function inside it, and the conditions that spawned a public need for such a hero, that are interesting.

Dillinger refuses to perform kidnappings in the movie (and was never charged with kidnapping in real life), and sees his lot in life as part of an “us” that consisted of the have-nots in a fight against the haves, whose representatives were cops, prison guards, bankers and politicians. The Dillinger in “Public Enemies” (played by Johnny Depp) tells the press that he had gotten ten years for stealing $50 and that it was fine with him, because he met a lot of great guys in prison. He is loyal to his “men’” even when it means risking his own life and, unlike Baby Face Nelson (played wonderfully by Stephen Graham, who soon after became Al Capone in BOARDWALK EMPIRE) , he never kills just for the hell of it (again in real life, Dillinger was only ever charged with one homicide, in spite of robbing twenty four banks and four police stations, which are apparently a good place to stock up on weapons).

Maybe our heroes can be found in stories like those told in THE GODFATHER or THE SOPRANOS, but those crooks are mobbed up, literally part of a mob, and are organized in a way that Dillinger never was. Even though he had accomplices, Dillinger was an independent operator. That is part of Depp’s charm in this movie. In an era where the common man was losing his farm to heartless bankers, the same bankers who had blundered with the depositors’ monies so badly that people had lost all their life’s savings, an era in which the government seemed to be in the hands of the same people in charge of the banks and where men who wanted to make an honest living couldn’t, Dillinger was the real American rugged individualist—stronger alone even than the men who gathered together to oppose him.

In the movie, we see Dillinger, charming, ultra-masculine, daring beyond belief, courtly, oddly shy, squared off against Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), who runs the manhunt for Dillinger at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover.

Purvis seems almost autistic in his lack of emotion, as tough as Dillinger, perhaps, but without the passion. You could say that it wasn’t Purvis but Dillinger’s passion for Billie Frechette that brought Dillinger down. Purvis knew Frechette was in Chicago and also knew Dillinger could not resist going to her. Still, the Purvis here detailed is frightening. He doesn’t seem to have anything in his life that can make him swerve from the path he is on. Purvis has no loyalty to his men, and no motivation that we can see for what he does beyond the thrill of the hunt. He shoots Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) in an apple orchard, making a stupendous shot from hundreds of yards away, and it seems to be the only time in the movie when he genuinely enjoys doing anything. The movie gives no back-story for Purvis, and this seems right. A man so obsessed with the hunt seems to need to only have been born that way. And we aren’t going to get either guy to go on too much about their childhoods, both being men of action and not words, although Dillinger does take the time and effort to charm his girl.

I couldn’t help but love Dillinger’s character. He is so tough, so unafraid of any man, or anything, including death. He falls in love with Frechette (Marie Cotillard) at first sight, going up to her with his hat in his hand, literally and figuratively, and then telling her that they are meant to be together with such conviction that she looks at him as if she realizes she has no choice but to be with him (not that she minds). And then, making him seem even more lovable, she asks him to dance and he says he doesn’t know how. She takes his hand and teaches him. The scenes with Frechette are great. He tells her she has no reason to feel like she is less than the snooty broads around them when they go to a fancy joint for breakfast, and you can see the pride he takes in himself, refusing to feel like he is somewhat less than anyone for having come up poor. When she tells him she is afraid he will die, he tells her he is tougher and smarter than all the guys after him put together. And you believe him.

The gun fights in the movie are great, and the whole 30s, noir, dustbowl farmer, hobo, fedora, overcoat, running board, floor model radio sensibility is just wonderful, spot on, at least to a person who wasn’t born until 1962.

The way the movie presents it, it is really The Syndicate that dooms Dillinger. And it is a business decision. Public enemies like Dillinger are giving Hoover the leverage he needs for federal laws against all kinds of crimes, and the Syndicate can’t buy people off on a national level (usually, anyway). The Syndicate doesn’t want a federal law enforcement agency that can pursue them across state lines (The FBI, which had its genesis in the 30s). They stop giving Dillinger safe haven, and stop helping him escape. One of the FBI guys is a mole the Syndicate has planted, and it is he who predicts where Dillinger will be (the Biograph Theater in East Chicago) on the night he ends up dead.

It’s a great scene, Dillinger watching a gangster movie with Clark Gable playing the gangster as Dillinger awaits his own fate as a gangster. The movies were a sign that the world was changing, mass culture on the rise, and it is the mass efforts of the Syndicate, FBI, and the local cops that bring Dillinger down.

I couldn’t help but think of Dillinger as a throwback to an earlier time, one who learned armed robbery as a kind of trade, finding in prison a kind of guild hall where you honed your skills. By the time he got out of prison (he served just under ten years, and started his rampage in 1931), Dillinger was in a new world. In those ten years, crime had organized, and was all about prostitution and gambling and loan sharking. He was an old timer at 30, robbing banks, which even then was going out of style. Whatever Dillinger really was, he appeals as a representative of the American ideal of the strong man who can make it on his own, whether he is pitted against the wilderness or the institutions less powerful men create to protect themselves from the strong. I couldn’t help but cheer for him.

© 2015 Mike Welch