to know than to gamble on its happening. When the writer doesn’t know, and can’t provide such information directly or indirectly, allowing the reader to sense the economic underpinning of the tale through the representation of work or otherwise, the fiction usually registers on the reader as thin or lacking in staying power.
The better news is that, regardless of guidelines people writing about it lay down—guidelines that I or my students have from time to time found useful—they are only guidelines. There are no rules. The truth is, fiction can be about anything. I don’t believe the best of it changes the world directly—though many people felt that works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) and Les Misérables (1869) were pretty effective in their day. (When President Lincoln was introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, he reputedly met her with the words, “So this is the little lady who made this big war!” And the popularity of Hugo’s novel is often counted as influencing many people to support late 19th century welfare reforms.) One of New York’s historical public catastrophes, resulting in twenty-three deaths and over a hundred wounded, the Astor Place Riots of 1849 were sparked by two rival productions of Macbeth, playing in New York on the same night, in theaters half a dozen blocks apart, one starring the American Edwin Forest and the other featuring the English-man William Macready. Again, art no longer functions in the society the way it once did: it functions in different ways. And it can help people understand how those who live and think in ways different from themselves can manage to make sense of the world. The pleasures from writing fiction—and even more, the pleasures from reading it—easily become addictions. Some of the guidelines above may, I believe, have something to do with why our society continues to organize itself so that such addictions are not only common and continuous but often flower in such wonderful ways, ways that manifest themselves in provocative and satisfying stories and novels across the range of genres, literary and paraliterary.
—Buffalo, Philadelphia,
Boulder, and New York
July 2000–April 2005
Partial List of Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin. “No More Masterpieces.” In The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Barzun, Jacques. Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Borges, Jorge Luis. This Craft of Verse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Carver, Raymond. “On Writing.” In Fires. New York; Vintage Books, 1983.
Egri, Lajos. The Art of Dramatic Writing. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1927.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. The Lord Chandos Letter. Translated by Russell Stockman. 1902. Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1986.
Lacan, Jacques. “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever.” In The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Science of Man. Edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.
Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” In In Front of Your Nose (1945–1950): The Collected Journalism, Essays, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 127–40. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: Selected Writing of Gertrude Stein. 1933. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
———. Lectures in America. 1935. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
_________
* At John Hopkins University, in October 1966, the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan discussed this all-important signification process in a paper entitled “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever” (reprinted in The Structuralist Controversy). This “inmixing,” this “intertrusion,” this “conjoining,” is what allows scenes, sentences, and even words to signify.
* More recently translated as In Search of Lost Time.
Part I SEVEN ESSAYS
Teaching/Writing
The young painter who has set about learning to paint “realistically” is often surprised that the eye must do the learning; the hand more or less takes care of itself. “But I can already see what’s there! Tell me what I’m supposed to do to set it down.”
Keep your hand still and look more closely.
As “realistic” painting does not exhaust art, neither does the comparatively high resolution of narrative storytelling exhaust fiction. But the young writer who has decided to utilize his or her experience of the world at this comparatively high resolution, for like reasons, is always surprised when he or she is told to go back and reexamine his or her experience.
“But I want to know how to write an exciting piece of action!”
Examine your reactions when you are excited; as well, when you are bored.
“But how do I create a vivid character?”
Look closely at what individualizes people; explore those moments when you are vividly aware of a personality. Explore the others when you cannot fathom a given person’s actions at all.
“No, no! You don’t get the point. Tell me about style!”
Listen to the words that come out of your mouth; look at the words you put on paper. Decide with each whether or not you want it there.
But it will always be a paradox to the young artist of whatever medium that the only element of the imagination that can be consciously and conscientiously trained is the ability to observe what is.
Teachers of narrative fiction fail or succeed according to the ingenuity with which they can present the above in as many ways as possible—a success or failure that, alas, has nothing to do with their own writing ability.
A teacher at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop,* you may live in the dormitory with the students, or room in a separate building. The students are energetic, dedicated, writing and revising throughout the six weeks. The solution to most literary problems is time and thought. But if someone can be there immediately to suggest where thought might be directed, so much the better. I chose to room in the student dorm. I had given occasional lectures and one-day seminars. Summers ago I had taught remedial reading to a volunteer class of adolescents at a community center. But Clarion for five days was my first formal teaching experience. A handful of the students were older than I. Several had sold stories and novels already.
The situation would intrigue any teacher of fiction.
A writer of fiction, I could not resist it.
The real worth of that summer, as with any intense, living experience, is in the texture of the experience itself.
I had set up exercises and discussion topics for the formal three-hour morning classes.
