when to use first person and when not to, writing what you know, trusting your own images, and what makes characters believable or sympathetic, along with some minimal remarks on grammar and style.
I conclude this preface with something about “the basics” of creative writing—plot, character, setting, theme. Probably it’s an overstatement to say that none of them exists—but certainly none of them exists as a basic. They are, all of them, effects. (Yes, even character.) As such, they may be basic elements for the reader. But, like a building that soars a hundred stories into the sky and lifts the eyes of passersby to the clouds, each needs some solid (and often largely invisible) foundation work. For the architect or the writer, the building of the foundation is what’s basic. Certainly one can get so caught up in foundation building that one loses sight of those final effects. “Commercial” writers accuse “literary” writers of some form of this, repeatedly. But, if I may push the metaphor, the idea is to build an edifice that remains standing in the mind and does not collapse two hours after closing the book, magazine, or journal (more often, pieces of it coming loose and crumbling before the reader finishes the first chapter), so that its flimsy shell with gaping holes can only attract viewers during the season of its advertising campaign.
A reasonable concern—in many a worry; and in few a hope—is whether a creative writing teacher wishes to teach her or his students to write the way he or she writes. Emphatically that is not my enterprise. But the agenda here is no less personal. The thrust of these pieces is to teach writers to produce works I would enjoy reading. In the following introduction and even more in the pieces to come you will get a better sense of what I enjoy and what I don’t, and thus be able to make a call as to whether—for you—this book will likely be helpful.
* * *
Finally, my acknowledgments: a number of readers have read over this manuscript, in whole or in part, and made more or less extensive comments. For their time and intelligence I would like to thank, particularly, Vincent Czyz, Carl Freedman, Maura High, Kenneth James, Josh Lukin (who, along with Vincent Czyz and Maura High, must be singled out for particular thanks for the thoroughness of his critique), Joan Mellen, Pamela Morrison, Rick Polney, and Elayne Tobin. As well I must thank my students of five years, graduate and undergraduate, in the Temple University Creative Writing Program, along with thirty-five-odd years of students at the Clarion Workshop, both East Coast and West Coast chapters, who have used now one section, now another, as auxiliary reading during one or another workshop, and who have offered their comments, sometimes heated, always helpful. Needless to say, eccentricities, overstatements, and outright gaffes are mine.
—New York City
2005
* Since 1998, the journal has dropped the internal symbol, to become simply Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres.
An Introduction
Emblems of Talent
I
In July of 1967 I waited in a ground-floor room, yellow, with dark wainscoting and wide windows giving onto Pennsylvania greenery. First, four holding notebooks, followed by three in sneakers, two more with briefcases, another six in sandals and Bermudas, then another three laughing loudly at a joke whose punch line must have come just outside the double doors, followed by two more in the denim wraparound skirts that had first appeared that decade, then still another two with fools-cap legal pads, who looked as nervous as I felt, most with long hair except an older man and a middle-aged woman, both gray (and one woman, also in Bermudas and sandals with black hair helmet-short), some twenty-five students wandered in to sit on the couches circling the blue carpet. Behind a coffee table, I coughed, sat forward, said hello and introduced myself—and began to teach my first creative writing workshop. Repeatedly, in the thirty-five years since, I’ve been surprised how far and fast that July has fallen away.
For more than a decade (1988–99), at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now in a pale orange space—the well of a hall called Hasbrook—now on the stage of the Hurter auditorium above the university museum, I taught an introductory lecture course in the reading of science fiction, with, each term, ninety to a hundred-fifty students. Sometime during my first three lectures, I would step from behind the podium, look out over the space that, in the early 1960s, some architect had thought “the future” ought to look like, and ask for a show of hands from students interested in writing the kinds of stories we were reading. Perhaps five to ten people scattered throughout those hundred-plus would fail to raise a hand.
The rest were eager to write.
As well, for over half those years (usually in that same hall, but once in a cement cellar room with nozzles for Bunsen burners on the worn demonstration desk), to the semicircles on semicircles of students with their notebooks ranged around me, I delivered another lecture course on the reading of general short fiction. At the start of the term I would ask the same question to a similar number. Here, perhaps fifteen or twenty out of my hundred, my hundred-fifty students would admit to not wanting to be writers.
Among a notable sector of the country’s college students oriented toward the humanities, the desire to write is probably larger than the desire to excel at sports.
Over the thirty-five years since I began to teach creative writing (with almost as many years writing about and teaching literature), I have asked hundreds of students why each wanted to write. By far the most common answer was, “I don’t want to do what my parents do. I don’t think they’re happy in their work.” Readily I identify with those feelings. Neither of my parents finished college—not uncommon during the Depression of the 1930s. For different reasons, both might have been happier if they had. Both were energetic and creative. Too much of that creativity was drained off in anxieties. Most worries are a matter of telling oneself more or less upsetting stories of greater or lesser complexity about one’s own life. Turning that ability outward to entertain others, rather than inward to distress oneself, has to have some therapeutic value.
Even in a good university creative writing program, however, the number of graduates who go on to publish fiction regularly in any venue that might qualify as professional is below ten percent—often below five. Were we talking about medical school, law school, engineering, or any other sort of professional training, that would be an appalling statistic. Art schools fare better in turning out professional artists of one sort or another than creative writing programs do in turning out professional writers. But even with such distressing results, writing programs are currently one of the great growth areas of the modern university.
Though vast numbers of people want to write fiction, the educational machinery set in place to teach people how doesn’t work very well.
While this book puts forth no strategies for correcting the situation, it discusses some reasons why this is the case—and why it might be the case necessarily. As well, it deals with three other topics and the relations between them. One—which it shares with most books on writing—is, yes, the art of writing fiction. The other two are far less often discussed in classes and rarely figure in such “how-to” books. First, how is the world structured—specifically the socio-aesthetic world—in which the writer works? Having said that, I should add that this is not a book about selling, marketing, or promoting your manuscripts. Rather, it is a book about the writer’s world and how that world differs from the world of other people—as well as how that world is organized today differently from the way it was organized twenty-five, thirty-five, and seventy-five years ago, when most of the tales about writing that we still read today, the mythology of Pound (1885–1972), Joyce (1882–1941), Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1939), T. S. Eliot (1885–1960), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and the other high modernists, first sedimented. Second (and finally),
