“Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix.”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
“We Call Upon the Author to Explain”

I thought about using a more purely literary quote for this essay—Elmore Leonard’s “Skip the boring parts”—but that’s an oversimplification, and I want to speak against oversimplification. (Besides, Nick Cave is a terrific writer with two novels under his belt, and his album notes look and read like chapbooks; he deserves to be quoted by writerly types more often.) Fiction writers are admonished to cut, cut, cut at least as many times as we are urged to write every day. And while it is generally sound advice, it is also terribly easy to misapply.

Thousands of pieces of fiction annually grow stronger by cutting, but those aren’t the ones I worry about. I’m concerned for those that have the life and soul torn out of them because the scissors of concision are wielded with no apparent purpose other than cutting for its own sake. A lot of this kind of cutting happens in response to critique from workshop leaders or peers who have seen other pieces improve through cutting, and who pass on the well-intentioned dictum without thinking, as if it applies to all pieces at all times.

Which is, of course, untrue. Six-line prose poems have turned into eight-page short stories. Novellas have bloomed into trilogies. Novels have gone from 280 pages to 320 pages and gotten better, not worse. Sometimes pieces get bigger not because they become bloated with needless words, but because they tell more story, and sometimes more is exactly what a work needs. In the interest of making a work “tighter” we often reach for the scissors because we’ve been instructed to cut, cut, cut. Telling more story in the same number of pages can also achieve the tightness we desire, perhaps to better effect. We tend to confuse brevity with tautness, though plenty of work—especially today, with the ubiquity of abstract, absurdist flash fiction—is guilty of having so little story that it can’t become taut no matter how stripped down it is.

In the worst-case scenario, premature cutting for its own sake doesn’t serve the tale, and it can even cause a tale to die before it has a chance to blossom. I don’t know how many works of fiction die annually from such premature cutting, but I do know that writers who teach or critique their fellow writers need to encourage the responsible use of scissors for a specific purpose. Scissors need to serve a controlling idea, and if that controlling idea is absent, then tightness is merely an attempt to write like somebody else (frequently Raymond Carver or, in the case of abstract, absurdist flash fiction, Donald Barthelme).

One way to look at the scissors question is through the figure of the narrator, which we can talk about regardless of whether a work is in first, second, or third person. I know that I’m in the minority in speaking of narrators when discussing third-person point of view, since some writers only acknowledge its existence in first person. But all tales have tellers, and these tellers vary from story to story and book to book; if they didn’t, all work by a particular writer would sound the same across the board, or be determined by the vagaries of mood and circumstance. If narrators don’t exist in third person POV, then how can we accommodate books that follow multiple characters in close third person, such as Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, or blend close third person with first person, such as Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street?

Narrators exist across the spectrum of fiction, and plenty of people use more than one narrator in a single work. These multiple narrative personae notice different things, and they represent the psyches of the characters they follow in different ways. They serve as periscopes looking into the author’s fictive world, and as the interface between the author and the reader. Narrators guide our attention, and they can change considerably as authors move from draft to draft. They are what changes first—a small loosening of diction, a hint of more or less desperation, an increased willingness to let characters suffer for their wrongs—when authors want to chart new pathways through their fictive worlds that are more elucidating, more suspenseful, more concrete than those in previous drafts.

Narrators, over time, tend to speak their truths more bravely and bring us more directly to the heart of things. As we work through the drafting process, changing lines here and there—and yes, skipping the boring parts—we’re actually arriving at more precise narrative personae that allow us to work with more confidence and render our characters more decisively. How often have you heard a fellow writer say, “I just found a new voice for this draft, and I love how vague and imprecise it is!”? The great joy of working through drafts in fiction is to see sharp focus emerge from blurriness, to hear innuendo-filled dialogue turn into direct personal challenge, to feel murmurs of understanding and desire become actions in the flesh.

This, not concision for its own sake, is what we should aspire to when we take out the scissors and cut our fiction. If we tweak our work only to make it appear more taut—though it never contains more story, and though its truths are never spoken more sharply—then we embrace concision as a mere stylistic ornament. Ultimately I agree with Nick Cave: there’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix, as long as we’re wise about how we use them—to serve the work, not some knee-jerk reaction to cut, cut, cut.

Maybe that project on your desk or bookshelf doesn’t need cutting after all. Maybe it needs more of a story to tell, or a bolder narrator to tell it.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at South Dakota State University.

“For the writing teacher, the habit of intellectual analysis may become crippling…. As the teacher sees more and more talented students, he may consciously or unconsciously begin to set himself increasingly difficult tasks, distancing himself from his best students’ work by tour-de-force showmanship, pyrotechnics, and subtlety beyond his students’ means.”

– John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

Such students can, and ought to, change those who teach them. It needn’t be a negative change as John Gardner describes above, in which the brilliant student becomes a nemesis. But such negativity does happen, because our best students tempt us into self-doubt. In the worst case scenario teachers can get paralyzed, both in the classroom and at the writing desk, by the worry that their students’ aesthetic instincts are simply better than their own. This fear may lead teachers into over-intellectualizing the creative process in an effort to give the brilliant student more challenges, which I believe is absolutely inimical to good instruction. And as Gardner warns, this jealous rot can eventually find its way into the writer/teacher’s own creative work.

Writers with a solid practice and sufficient maturity don’t need to worry about trying to outdo our best students. But such students can knock even the most grounded teachers off balance by challenging us, whether consciously or not, to be more articulate and more precise in our instruction. This requires risk and effort. It’s as dangerous to deny that brilliant students require special handling as it is to believe that all students are created equal. Pretending that talent doesn’t exist dishonors everyone in the workshop equally. Here are a few thoughts and observations on dealing with phenomenal students:

Don’t resort to merely teaching technique. The worst thing we can do with brilliant students is to offer them greater technical challenges—exploring a particular form for the sake of exercise, altering point of view for no good reason, etc. Writing isn’t Olympic diving, and there are no “degree of difficulty” points to be earned. Focusing on technique is a cop-out for the teacher; it tacitly embraces the creation of pretty surfaces at the expense of emotional truthfulness, and it gives students permission to indulge in cleverness and call it art.

There is no value whatsoever to false egalitarianism. Everyone in workshop will recognize the best work presented, and teachers need to avoid two poles: (1) not critiquing the piece at all; (2) taking the author to task on every single possible nit that can be picked. Tearing apart Student Z’s brilliant story for half an hour simply because one did the same to Student X’s glaringly unfinished work can smother a whole workshop. Fairness does not mean equal time for pointing out perceived errors.

Insightful praise for good work can be instructive for everyone. I would hate to count the number of teaching moments that get missed in creative writing classrooms because teachers, too invested in egalitarianism and unwilling to play favorites, won’t come out and recognize stellar student work. If it’s blazingly good, we should say so and talk about why. If part of what we do in workshops is train people to read like writers, is there any reason why the texts that help us read more intuitively can’t come from our own students?

Modeling the habits of the writer is more important than modeling structure or style. Gifted student writers will find their way to well-structured tales and compelling voices. But even the most talented may have little sense of how to manage and nurture their projects, how to balance their analytical and creative selves in revision, or how to write their way through (rather than around) the irresolvable knots that rise up in every earnest work of fiction. No matter how impressive pieces are in workshop, their authors must eventually bring them to fruition alone. It’s our responsibility to teach them about the ever-shifting sands that fiction (and its authors) face over the long haul of a project or a career.

Guide brilliant students toward the creative questions that won’t go away. We may not have our best students for long, but we can do them a great service by pushing them toward the thorny questions that will assert themselves with each new project, or even between phases of a single project. Am I revising for the sake of revising? What road does this work lead me down, and what other roads might it also lead me down? Process awareness is a tremendous talent in itself, and there’s no reason to withhold conversations about it from students who are otherwise ready.

Cultivate articulateness about the craft and broad literary citizenship. Brilliant students are more likely to be published and more likely to be teachers in the future; they will therefore need to be more articulate about the craft of fiction so that they can teach it, speak in interviews about it, and craft spectacular grant proposals involving it. We should challenge them not only to be workshop leaders, but also to think about the big picture of their writerly apprenticeship. We should encourage them to figure out where they fit in the republic of arts and letters, since they will probably—through publication, advanced degrees, etc.—need to address such questions more quickly than their fellows.

One last note on Gardner’s warning about brilliant students adversely affecting their teachers’ writing. People who are jealous and overly competitive by nature, and who view writing as a means of getting ahead rather than a process of understanding the self and the world, are likely to fall into that trap. But I don’t think most creative writing teachers are like that. Most of us, if our students turn out to be great writers, will feel overjoyed and privileged to have been among their teachers. If we don’t feel that way—well, then it’s probably time to get out of the business.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at South Dakota State University.

Cyril Connolly

”The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.”

—Cyril Connolly

I think about this quote all the time because it has been taped to my three most recent writing room walls, even though I have never read Cyril Connolly and had to look him up on Wikipedia to tell you anything about him. I learned that he attended Eton and Oxford, that his name was used in a Monty Python skit, and that the American TV series Criminal Minds quoted him as saying “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

My kind of guy, it sounds like. Connolly never penned a fictional masterpiece, and he wrote about this failure in a book called Enemies of Promise. I might not write a masterpiece either, though I intend to go down swinging; so I pay particular attention to Connolly’s words when I walk into my writing room, close the door, and put on my noise-reducing headphones just in case my kids get up before I finish my morning scribbling. (Connolly also wrote that “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram [i.e., baby carriage] in the hall,” but I’ll save that discussion for after my kids are grown.)

No other task is of any consequence—the words sting my face and rebuke me for daring to put things like my family ahead of my art. I occasionally argue back at the words on my wall, insisting that true parenting involves a commitment to posterity even deeper than the writer’s path requires. But when I close the door to my writing room, knowing that I’m not on kid duty, I try to make my time count so I can make Connolly’s words count. In the writing room, my children don’t compete with attempts to create a masterpiece; but emailing, applying for teaching jobs, and fantasy home shopping in places where I might teach do compete with those attempts. Even high-minded endeavors, like writing for Fiction Writers Review, can be seen as mere procrastination. Right now, as I write this essay with the quote staring down over my left shoulder at my computer screen, I feel like I’m betraying Connolly and sapping whatever energy it might take to write a masterpiece.

Maybe this aspect of my conscience—the always un-helpful one that berates me for all I have never accomplished—wants to dissuade me from writing at all so that it can support its own self-defeating agenda. Maybe it knows something I don’t, and wants to save me from wasting my time in the frivolous pursuit of masterpieces. Or it could be translating, in its own clumsy way, for the part of me that just might write a masterpiece someday and wants me to stop wasting precious computer time. Would Connolly tell me to stop writing about writing, even though he himself made his name as a critic? Would he tell me to neglect my own children in my pursuit of art?

This quote perplexes me, as does my relationship to it. For years I thought about it in terms of what I do in my writing room—the daily discipline, the daily rituals—because it seemed easier to honor those words in the tight context of the room rather than in the broader context of my life. But lately I’ve been thinking about the big implications of what Connolly says, particularly about my relationships to the novels I’ve written that sit on shelves, forlorn and unpublished and likely to stay that way because I failed them.

Yes, failed them. I didn’t do so by spending insufficient time on them, by taking care of my kids, or by writing essays about writing; instead I failed them by not treating them like masterpieces. This isn’t to say that they would have been masterpieces had I treated them as such—I doubt it, since both of them have their flaws—but I certainly didn’t believe in them enough to give them a fair shake at becoming masterpieces. I rewrote them both almost obsessively, so that by the time they entered the world of literary business (read: when they went to agents) I was so worn out from those rewrites that I didn’t have the stamina to hold my ground on agents’ editorial suggestions. I let both novels twist in the wind as I tried to get them into shape for a sale.

Making this subplot stronger and that one nonexistent. Axing character A and making character C a little darker, character D a little sunnier. I could do any kind of rewrites that my agents (one for each novel) requested, but I ultimately lost my grip on both manuscripts as I tried to turn them into books that might sell. With the first one, I even got revision notes from a book doctor (paid for by the big, famous agency) designed to make the book more of a psychological thriller. With the second one, my agent ask me to revisit the female protagonist to make her more sympathetic and provide her with a clearer personal redemption at novel’s end.

I did these things with unquestioning gusto, like a brown-nosing sycophant desperate to get a raise or a promotion. Yet I’m not sure I did them particularly well, since both novels died on the vine with all parties unsatisfied: the agents not loving them enough to give them their all, the author not loving them enough to fight for their identity, and the novels themselves—the ultimate losers in both situations—made lukewarm through my halfhearted attempts to please more than one master. Agent “breakups” followed, and in both cases I tried to make the novels my own again. This process didn’t work out any better because I didn’t really know my novels anymore. I had tried to dress them up, to make them into something they weren’t, and when that failed I changed the shapes of their bodies, the color and texture of their skins. It’s no wonder that, when I tried to make them my own again, they resisted.

The lessons in all of this for me are tough to swallow. Hardest to choke down is the knowledge that my books are not an easy sell, and that my relationship to the businesses of agenting and publishing may always be tricky. Ultimately there’s not so much I can do about that, since I can’t change people’s minds for long. But I can change my own mind, and this is where the lesson that I have to swallow (again and again, it seems) about my unpublished novels aligns with the Cyril Connolly quote that looks down from my writing room wall. I need to treat my books-in-waiting with more love and respect, and even if they aren’t masterpieces, I can at least make sure that I’m not the one who prevents them from being so. I’ve got to serve the book, and that means not letting myself get sucked into daydreams of pay dirt (or at least publication). It means not getting desperate, not being so quick to compromise, not letting myself get away from the true function of a writer: to write that masterpiece or die trying.

Whether people call our books masterpieces or not is out of our hands, but how we feel about those books is entirely up to us. The emotional hue of this Connolly quote has changed for me over time—encouraging, admonishing, snotty, guilt-inducing—but I hope that in writing this essay I can make it mean something more useful and tender. When I see it on my wall, I want it to help me love my books more, to protect then and nurture them as I would my children. I shouldn’t want to squash my novels’ dreams any more than I want to squash my children’s. Instead I should demand from myself that I show these books respect, giving them tough love when I must and leeway when I must.

It’s not much to ask, really. And if I look at Cyril Connolly’s words in the right light, it gets asked of me every time I sit down to write. No other task is of any consequence—so I must enter into my work with a full knowledge of what that work requires of me. It’s not just time, it’s not just discipline. It’s love and warmheartedness too.

If we writers don’t love our books, who will?

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

Wallace Stegner

“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.”

—Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

As the fall semester began, I found myself wanting to flash this quote in front of my creative writing students. It comes from an acknowledged master teacher, after all—one most students haven’t read, but whose name resounds through the coveted Stegner Fellowships at Stanford—and it sounds appropriately daunting for the beginning of a class.

Don’t fool yourself, it suggests. You have lots of work to do. More than you can imagine.

This feels right to tell an aspiring writer, because the craft certainly involves more work than anyone imagines upon entering into it. But I didn’t use this quote because I couldn’t explain what or who this apprenticeship was to. Is it to the craft itself? To some ideal (and idealized) reader? To language, truth, beauty? Stegner didn’t elaborate on this subject as I wish he had, but the word “apprenticeship” itself typically refers to a specific aspect of the relationship between a teacher (usually a series of teachers) and a student. We more often use the terms mentor and protégé in this context, but apprentice reveals something different and instructive about the student/teacher dynamic that those terms do not.

Two types of apprenticeship immediately come to my mind. The first is the kind one takes on within a trade, such as plumbing. Being a plumber’s apprentice, according to Plumbersnetwork.net, requires “4 to 5 years of education, with 144 of those hours yearly being classroom education and the rest hands-on experience.” Apprentice plumbers learn the practical techniques of the trade, such as how to determine the age and condition of a pipe, how to interpret building codes, and how to read blueprints. With the requisite training and experience, they can become journeymen; with still more (plus an exam) they can become master plumbers.

Apprentice plumbers also need to learn the intangibles of their trade. They learn what it takes to call themselves plumbers (how to run a business, how to interact with clients). It’s the same with apprentice writers. They learn, from masters and journeymen alike, the tricks of the trade (establishing voices, pruning sprawly plots) and how to behave (bonhomie with rivals, geniality at readings). They learn what it takes to call themselves writers: lots of self-discipline, thick skins when it comes to rejection, etc.

For some, this is as far as the training goes. But at a certain point, the tradesman model of apprenticeship exhausts itself. Nascent writers who want their apprenticeships to be about more than practical technique and professional behavior are rewarded with a refreshing truth: apprenticeship is also about learning an approach to the task of writing and an approach to one’s emotional material.

This brings me to another kind of apprentice: those who serve sorcerers. Two hundred-some years ago Goethe cemented the archetype of the sorcerer’s apprentice in the poem “Der Zauberlehrling”, made popular by Walt Disney in the 1940 film Fantasia. In this story the apprentice, lazy and looking for short cuts, tries to get a broom to clean the master’s quarters for him and ends up causing a flood that only the master can stop. We see a version of this same cautionary tale unfolding in the stories of Faust, in Frankenstein, 2001, etc.: don’t mess with what you can’t truly control. Sorcerer’s apprentices get in over their heads and cause trouble by dealing, though not yet prepared, with the forces of the master, and the masters must bail them out.

Superficially, this kind of master/apprentice relationship is unlikely to unfold in the literary world. It’s hard to imagine disaster befalling anyone from trying to mimic the prose style of Jhumpa Lahiri or Dave Eggers, nor would it be necessary for those authors to swoop in and save the day. This is because mastery in literature is not about style. Master writers (literally, those who have written a masterpiece) are analogous in the first apprenticeship model to the master plumber, who must pass an exam to earn the title. They pass the “masterpiece test” because they’re capable of channeling the emotional forces of the self; they go into the self and/or the collective genius (see “Trust Your Genius, Even if it Doesn’t Belong to You”) and they come out with art.

This process is not technical but alchemical; it is fundamentally dangerous to the self because it exposes the self to peril, while mere technique and professionalism do not. The sorcerer can hardly be seen as an innocuous, benevolent character because he works with (to borrow the title of a Philip Pullman trilogy) His Dark Materials. The model for Goethe’s Faust was quite likely an alchemist.

Foremost among the “dark materials” at work in writing is what emerges from poking around in the depths of the self, a process that ushers in literature and is a byproduct of creating it. These materials—the memories, self-conceptions, and lies that slumber inside us and probably ought to be left alone—cannot be approached directly, but can only be made manifest by the creation of art. If I could tell this story the easy way, author after author has said, I would never have needed to write it. The process of making literature requires a certain amount of sorcery, or at the very least alchemy, because it involves transforming deeply personal, non-shareable emotional experience into completely shareable aesthetic experience. (For a more thorough discussion, see “Peering into the Character/Self Vortex,” Part I and Part II).

If we extend the metaphor of the sorcerer’s apprentice model, the “danger” of writing involves improper use of that alchemical creative process—more specifically, entering into the alchemy without full respect for it, as Mickey Mouse does in Fantasia. We learn this respect from our mentors/masters. We figure out, from their example, how to deal with those dark materials in a constructive feedback loop we call creativity.

I’ve been lucky to have apprenticed myself to people who had respect for that alchemy. From filmmaker Ken Jacobs, I learned how important it was to let myself get lost in a work so that I might find its most natural contours. From Stan Brakhage, another filmmaker, I learned how to look at things in the world from the perspective of eternity. From novelist Robert Olen Butler, I learned how steadfast you have to be in order to earn the name of artist—like Odysseus tied to the mast. From novelist Steve Katz, I learned how the writing endeavor is a life-long one, and how a true voice always finds its form.

My writing resembles none of these mentors’ stylistically at all—two of them aren’t even writers—and that’s because I didn’t learn style from them. Style is nothing but window dressing. What we really learn from our masters is an approach to our materials and a respect for the creative process. That’s why we hang around with other artists. That’s why MFA programs exist. It’s an old, time-tested model; you sit at the feet of the teacher and learn how the teacher does things, makes things. The classical tai chi text “The Song of the Thirteen Postures” reads, in part:

To enter the door and be shown the way,
you must be orally taught.
Practice should be uninterrupted,
and technique is achieved by self study.

You must be orally taught because what you learn as an apprentice simultaneously transcends technique and resides beneath it. Technique is achieved by self study because by working diligently we find our best modes, our ways of using our tools to the fullest. We can learn from people we don’t resemble stylistically, and even those in entirely different art forms, because what we learn from our mentors is about the relationship between artists and their art. We learn to work with those materials of the self that we turn into art—using an alchemy we must ultimately devise on our own, learned though the examples of others who have devised alchemies on their own.

Plumbing, writing isn’t. Sorcery, writing isn’t. Maybe somewhere in-between.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

Ad Reinhart / photo by Robert Lax

“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”

– a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)

About twenty years ago an artist friend mentioned this quote to me in a moment of liberation. He’d been doing a lot of reviewing of art shows, getting his name out in the Colorado art community, writing a column (not unlike Quotes and Notes) for a local paper, etc. But he got tired of writing about other people’s work and having to evaluate their shows because it stole attention from his own work. He quoted Ad Reinhardt’s simple, one-line journal entry as he announced a personal moratorium on reviews, interviews, community-building efforts, and other such activities.

It was a declaration of independence, a separation of the self from the art-world machinery, and it struck me because I wanted to do the same thing. At the time I ran an art-house film series and was constantly “hanging other people’s work,” mostly by trying to get media attention for their movies. I longed for a life in the arts that didn’t require so much administration, that showcased my work instead of other people’s. After his announcement my friend had a terrifically fertile period in which he produced a lot of new work, but then he got lonely and a little bored and reached out to the community again—doing reviews, building communities, etc. When he did that, it seemed perfectly natural—a development rather than an about-face. It made me wonder if Ad Reinhardt ever went back to hanging other people’s art, and if so, how many times he reversed poles over the course of his career.

It also makes me wonder if Reinhardt would (or could) declare a permanent moratorium on “hanging other people’s art” in today’s world, facing a vastly different socio/creative landscape. New York in the mid-20th century bustled for artists like few places in history, but it seems quaint and provincial compared to the Internet-fueled, endlessly interwoven creative world of today. When Ad Reinhardt was an up-and-coming artist in the 1930s, he had a different game to play because his scene was predominantly local (though with global ramifications). Now we have global scenes, with people who’ve never met interacting across continents, and this has changed the nature of creative life and careers entirely.

So when I think about Reinhardt’s decision to stop hanging other people’s art, I simply can’t put it in today’s context. Can an artist of any stripe realistically build a career now without, in some way, doing a bit of that hanging? This question is especially apropos for writers, since the medium through which we increasingly publish (the Internet) is also the medium through which we build our communities. The landscape of our endeavors is, in this way at least, narrowing. The writer’s job description is fundamentally changing so that fewer and fewer of us will have the option Reinhardt described. We are no longer merely in the business of creating content, but in the business of sharing content (a.k.a. “hanging other people’s work”) as well, whether the “hanging” we do takes the form of doing reviews, writing blurbs, or simply flagging a friend’s book as TO BE READ on Goodreads. The idea that one can cocoon in the isolated creative life and then surface into the public one at will has largely been destroyed by the very same online communities that we build—including, for instance, the online community you belong to as you read this column in Fiction Writers Review.

I would love to say that I’ve found a balance between creating and hanging, but I haven’t and I don’t know if I ever will. Almost everyone I know who lives a literary life spends a fair amount of time bouncing between those two poles, usually focusing on one and doing the other in crammed, spare time. One month there isn’t enough time to work on the novel because of the reviews we’ve promised, the teaching we do, etc; the next month, there isn’t enough time to generate even a paragraph-long blog posting about a mentor’s latest book. When I think about my ideal job description as a writer, I picture a perfect, continuous balance between those poles. This balanced me will set aside enough time to delve into my characters without worrying about what time it is, and after he’s satisfied with that he’ll write a column like this one, do one of the reviews he’s promised, or write some queries about an editorial project. He’ll figure out the formula someday, find the perfect balance that will allow him to be productive in his writing room and still participate meaningfully in the literary community.

But this best-of-both-worlds scenario is almost guaranteed not to happen. Instead I’ll spend most of my writerly life feeling out of balance, like I’m leaning too far in one direction or another. I’ll cocoon until the pile of community-building work gets too big for me to ignore, then plunge into it so fully that I’ll forget where I was in whatever creative project I’d been pouring my energy into. Sometimes I kick myself for trying to find a balance at all, instead of finding some solace in the rhythm of these alternating currents in my life. Ultimately it may not be a balance that’s meant to be struck at all—not an ideal equilibrium point that one achieves and maintains, but a series of push-pulls, of sometimes jerky adjustments to one’s creative mojo. Maybe we’re not meant to be comfortable with this dual life at all, but meant to struggle with it and continuously find an always-new path through the two poles.

Or maybe it’s just me, being a stick in the mud about the Internet and pining—self-sabatogingly—for some imaginary “good old days” when I could do what Ad Reinhardt did and declare myself done with hanging other people’s work entirely. But nobody can get away with that anymore; it smacks of arrogance and selfishness, of a star system that places some artists above the fray and others directly in it (with the ones “stuck” in the fray struggling to prove themselves worthy of rising above it). I don’t think the writing community works that way anymore, if it ever did. As the Internet “flattens” the landscape, converging the ways we publish our work and the ways we hang other people’s, readers are going to assess us based on how we participate in the community. So are publishers and publicists, who seem hell-bent on quantifying our potential markets based on the size and demographic nature our platforms, as well as the number of “clicks” we can generate.

But more importantly, our fellow writers will assess us based on our level of participation and on whether we place ourselves above the fray or within it. Can anyone really afford to act above the fray anymore, save the most established writers out there? Yet as I say this, I have to face my own failings in this regard. I haven’t logged on to Goodreads in over a year, though I’ve read plenty of books in that time. (Having to assign “stars” to everything doesn’t help.) I haven’t taken the time to navigate Fictionaut, a dynamic online fiction community, and I haven’t become an online reviewer on Amazon. I fail to leave comments on almost all the literary blogs I read, fail to respond to (and sometimes even fail to notice) what people say about the things I’ve written.

What’s stopping me from doing all these things? I look around at writers who do a lot of “service work” by staying involved in online communities, and sometimes that work seems more like politicking—building up “clicks”—than community building.

Then a moment later it looks selfless, participatory, and part of the new model of the writer’s job description that we need to accept and embrace. It looks like people engaging in the kind of aesthetic discussions that Ad Reinhardt might have come to blows over during his heyday, and I feel like I’m missing out. I find myself envying people who to the community thing naturally and effortlessly, and I wonder how they have the time and energy to do it and still be creative.

So I ask you, readers of Fiction Writers Review. How do you strike your own balance between cocooning and surfacing, between creating work on your own and hanging the work of others? Tell me your secrets. I’ll read the blog posts. Teach me.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. In 2010-11 he will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA.

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.”– Simone de Beauvoir

The words slipped out of my mouth during an undergraduate nonfiction workshop. A previously unremarkable student had just produced one of those “get it right on the first try” pieces I’ve never been able to do myself: a four-page lyric essay about walking through her now-abandoned childhood home. Her fellow students in the circle had almost nothing to say; one corrected a couple of typos, another said it was terrific, and the rest stared at me.

“I think you’ve just got to trust genius on this one,” I said.

My students sat silently for a moment, trying to figure out whether I had just called the writer in question a genius, and in that silence I realized how true those words were. Sometimes we simply have to trust genius enough to know when it strikes and leave its handiwork alone, whether it comes in the first draft or the tenth. I wouldn’t call this student “a genius,” and she never again wrote work of comparable depth for my class. But she did tap into genius terrifically in that one piece, which got me thinking about the nature of that very weighted word and the misguided ways we use it.

James Joyce, by Joel Isaacson

Dictionaries offer many meanings of the word genius: a spirit of a given time or place (the genius of post-WWII Paris), an attendant spirit (usually in the plural, genii), an inclination or aptitude (a genius for administration), etc. Most typically, though, we think of it as some kind of extraordinary creative or mental force, and more often than not we use the word as a label to indicate someone who possesses that force. Mozart was a genius. Joyce was a genius. Picasso was a genius. By using the word this way, we actually restrict the power of that extraordinary creative or mental power by acting as if it resides within the individual upon whom we bestow the label.

In the creative world, the term makes hierarchies simple. So-and-so is proclaimed a genius, many other so-and-sos are not, and we give our attention and accolades to those who have earned the moniker. The same can be said for individual works; even if we as a culture are not willing to bestow the title of genius on a given artist, that person is still capable of making a work of genius from time to time. We bestow the label carefully, often using it in bandwagon fashion, only after others have done the same. (It’s quite uncomfortable to proclaim someone a genius and have no one second your motion.)

But this is such a limited way to use a wonderful word that many, many writers will experience in their lifetimes. You’ve probably experienced it, I’ve experienced it, and people we know have, too. It comes in flashes and then leaves, because you don’t possess genius—not even if you happen to be declared one. Instead genius inhabits you, enables you, fills you. I think the creative world would be better off by far—perhaps less selfish and competitive—if we embrace a concept of genius that envisions it as free-floating and collective, rather than bound up in the individual. Genius is something that strikes us, something we occasionally tap into unaware. We should be more concerned with this timeless, incomprehensible force that inhabits writers than with the accolades we use the genius word to bestow.

As writers, we should be keenly aware that our genius is collective because we share our language with others—we each have a word-hoard that others tap into every second of the day. Our sentences resemble prior sentences, our characters resemble prior characters, our plots resemble prior plots. Legendary geniuses and everyday writers alike draw from the same well, the same word-hoards given to us by our cultural histories. Many people are capable of dipping into that well, of drilling into the aquifers beneath, because the water within it belongs to everyone.

Following my own logic here, it should follow that anyone is capable of creating a work of genius. And I think that’s true. We never know when genius is going to strike, whether in ourselves or in others, and our experience of literature—both as consumers and producers—is far richer when we are receptive to genius and feel that it can strike at any moment. Genius can arrive when we pick up a pen, when we pick up a literary magazine, when we pick up a manuscript that no one else has read. This concept of genius can be a liberating thing, because there’s no pressure on us to be one; there’s only an invitation to participate in genius, as so many before us have done and will do in the future.

It’s a much better world, isn’t it, when the spirit of creative genius is something we can all dip ourselves into rather than something we scrape and claw to get?

But despite this “universal access” to genius—which I hope you’ll agree paints a more complete, flexible, and lively definition of the word than its staid, competitive, traditional use as a label—we still have to account for the fact that some people are… well, better writers than others. Some people can tap into that collective genius with more frequency, while others hit a gusher once and never see it again. We’ve all met (or perhaps we are) writers capable of absolute brilliance who can’t quite “get things together” enough to create a whole, integrated, recognizably strong work of literature. That’s because drilling into the collective genius is one thing, and bringing work back out of it is another.

The problem is that accessing the collective genius of our species (which requires humility, boldness, or both) is never in itself sufficient for making literature. It’s crucial to creative success, sure—and by success I mean not work that is noted critically or commercially, but work that has creative integrity—but one doesn’t create a lasting literary work without a sense of self-mastery and/or intense focus, which may be more difficult to achieve than forays into collective genius. The journey back and forth into genius is like the journey Orpheus makes to the underworld and back in Greek mythology. It’s much easier to go to the underworld in search of the prize we seek (either Eurydice or a literary masterpiece) than it is to haul that prize back up to the surface.

Orpheus and Eurydice

How to get that prize back up is what we try to learn through our own writing practice and our interaction with other writers, living and dead. I wish I could tell you what the secret is, but I can’t because (a) I’m not sure myself, and (b) every single work needs to be finessed out of the collective genius and into the light of day in its own unique fashion. I’d like to say that there’s a common denominator or two, some things that all great works share, but I’m not even certain of that. Humility in the face of one’s craft is a candidate, but many works of genius have been penned by exceptionally arrogant authors without a shred of humility in them. Great skill is another, but skillful writers are a dime a dozen; any hack can make the words pretty, so why connect creative genius with mere skill?

Orpheus and Eurydice. Painting from 1806 by C. G. Kratzenstein-Stub, 1793-1860. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

The more I think about it—and I think about it a lot, because I want my fiction to be the best it can be and want my efforts to be pure—the more I think that the common denominator among great literary works is their authors’ willingness to give things up in order to pull those works, whole and unfettered, out of the collective genius where they reside. What gets given up depends on the author and the book. It could be family, love, money, security, traditional fame—any number of external things. It could be sanity, past beliefs, health, hope, fear—any number of internal things. Maybe the great works we lionize are united by having authors who are willing to pay whatever price genius demands of them for the right to haul that work up from the collective underworld where it rests. And I suspect that those authors never know what the price is until they have already, without knowing the bill, paid it in full and given up some part of themselves that they will never see again.

If they knew the price, maybe they wouldn’t do it. That’s the difference between a deal with the devil and a deal with genius. When you deal with the devil, you know the price up front. When you deal with genius, you don’t. Maybe that’s why Orpheus didn’t manage to get Eurydice out of the underworld, after all. Maybe that’s why we have so few people who can truly bear the title of genius. They walk all the way out of the underworld before they look back, like Orpheus failed to do. They make a deal with the collective genius, and they don’t check the bill until the deed is done.

Quotes and Notes is a monthly craft essay series by Steven Wingate. Steven teaches at the University of Colorado. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008.

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’”– Edgar Allan Poe

When I was sixteen, my heroes were three: Jim Morrison of The Doors, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe—rebels all! Cooler than James Dean, prematurely dead from desperate, drugged out living, and word men to the bone. By the time I reached eighteen, two realizations changed the composition of this pantheon. I couldn’t get into hard drugs, which meant I’d never be Morrison. I couldn’t commit to calling myself as a poet, which meant I’d never be Baudelaire.

That left Mr. Poe, an opium-drenched (or so I thought then—most biographers doubt it) macabre romantic, as the sole object of my teenage aspirations. He was prodigious and uninhibited, and he wrote in a variegated American vernacular that gave free voice to whatever characters he could imagine. And Poe had an even stronger lure for my hyperactive, paranoid teenage mind: the “hypnagogic state” between sleep and waking, which he cultivated. I therefore duly cultivated hypnagogia myself, mining it almost exclusively as the source material of my teenage scribblings.

In the hypnagogic vision, all is permitted. It was better than drugs, I reasoned then, because it represented pure imagination without the opium haze of Baudelaire or the LSD haze of Morrison. My hypnagogic visions belonged to me alone, and I felt proud to have created them without chemical influence. So I followed Mr. Poe through the hypnagogic door to the best of my abilities, and used my visions to produce a ghastly stream of first-person fantasy anecdotes that I, through high school and my first year of college, confused with literature.

It took awhile to realize that this element of pure imagination, while necessary to the creation of literature, was not sufficient for it. Everything I wrote in the hypnagogic mode lacked an inner tension, but I couldn’t put my finger on the missing element. There to bail me out was Mr. Poe, who proved himself an astute and able mentor; as I reread him, he taught me that one needs more than a stream of images—regardless of how deep in the self they may spring—to tie a story together. Hearing a man tell his tale blow by blow does not create drama. But hearing that same man tell his tale when he believes that it carries a different meaning than we, as readers, see in it—aha! Then we have what Faulkner called the human heart in conflict with itself, expressed in the classic Poe conundrum of the unreliable narrator.

I had heard the term “unreliable narrator” in high school—heard of it as one hears of a literary technique or tool, like foreshadowing or the second-person voice. But a closer look at Poe’s 1835 story “Berenice,” one of my first favorites, convinced me that the unreliable narrator was not simply a clever authorial device, but a way to approach the very creation of literature. Through this story I wound my way to the first of the five simple writing lessons that I learned from Poe, and have continually relearned at the cost of endless rewrites, false starts, and abandonments.

Lesson #1: Dwell in the space of dissonance between who your characters are and who they tell the world they are, for this is the root of personal drama.

“Convinced myself, I seek not to convince,” the narrator of “Berenice” tells us early on in his story. This character, like many of Poe’s, is embroiled in a fundamental delusion; Poe does not announce that delusion, but allows us to gradually see the gaps in the narrator’s thinking that eventually convince us of his unreliability and madness. In most successful first person literature, we are unable to see the narrator’s delusion until we have gotten to know and trust that narrator. What’s the joy of hearing the tale of an insane person when we know, from the beginning, the precise contours of her insanity? What fun is it to hear that tale when she knows those contours as well? Would we not vastly rather hear the tale of a character who does not truly know herself? A character who—like most of us, if we’re honest—creates a seamless and continually-readjusting narrative of her own life that may bear no resemblance to the life that she actually lives? Writers who explore the dissonance between self and the narrative of self should credit Poe, who sailed into it and charted it for us.

Lesson #2: Get beyond the “write what you know” adage.

This hackneyed phrase is a dangerous teaspoonful of pabulum dispensed all too frequently to young writers. Poe’s “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), “Some Words with a Mummy,” and “The Power of Words” (both 1845) all feature characters whose relationships with the human realm are tenuous at best; writing stories based on them reflected Poe’s prodigious faith in his own muse. Writing “what we know” is a by-product of the fiction experience, not a prerequisite for it; we write, naturally and without choice in the matter, from our own experience (whether real or imaginary). To further limit ourselves by writing what we consciously know leads us into self-referential loops that deny us the greatest gift we have as writers: our imaginations. Instead of writing what we know, we ought to keep writing what we don’t know until, eventually, we begin to comprehend it. If we are unlucky or false to our muse, the result is gibberish; if we are assiduous, truthful to our muse, and lucky, then the process of our coming to understand our imagined worlds is mirrored in our writing. Rather than tell us to write “what we know,” I suspect that Poe would have told us to freely give flesh to anything we imagine, regardless of how we fear it or don’t know it when we begin writing. The words we use to discover it can then leave behind a map to help our readers discover it as well.

Lesson #3: Vary who you write about.

The high and the low in life both have their own equally poignant dramas. Roderick Usher (from “The Fall of the House of Usher”) and William Wilson probably represent Poe’s two most realized blue-bloods—too erudite for their own good, cultured to the point of insane sensitivity, and so mired in their lofty thoughts that the shapes and textures of the world have lost their meaning. Contrast them with the characters of “King Pest” and “Why the Little Frenchman Wears his Arm in a Sling,” neither of whom appear to have ever let a thought loft more than an inch beyond their skins. If we limit ourselves to a too-narrow character range, we limit ourselves to one kind of inquiry; but even when we know this, the temptation to settle into a certain kind of character often requires a conscious effort to resist. Writers who wish to give Mr. Poe his due would avoid this pitfall by plowing more than one valley of the human mind—even if self-imposed force is required to lift one’s plow from the earth and explore fresh ground.

Lesson #4: Write characters who are not only wrestling with moral dilemmas, but characters who have wrestled with these dilemmas and realized—alas, too late—that they have lost their match.

These characters, usually haunted by an event in the distant past, are rife in Poe’s work for good reason. They are more interesting to write because their moral dilemmas are cumulative, as is their reward for perseverance or (more likely in Poe) their comeuppance for continued moral failure. Once the wrestling match is over, then life gets more interesting: the characters must live with themselves, shaping their lives around their rage, fear, or shame the way a young tree grows around a spike or a dog learns to walk with three legs. People can live for decades after the most tragic or decisive moment of their lives, and in that gap of time—reflecting on the past, graced by it, stalked by it, trying to overcome it—their characters truly take shape. It is one thing as a writer to discover innocent characters whose lives are torn to shreds by circumstance; it is quite another to discover characters whose relationship to their own pasts continuously propels them into a fresh perils of their own devise.

Lesson #5: Make the imagined world your characters live in feel as alive as possible, not simply to replicate reality but to render the soul.

The classic example of this idea in Poe is the literal, physical house of Usher. In this tale Poe uses the phrase “the sentience of all vegetable things” to describe the living-ness of physical location; the lushly-described schoolhouse in “William Wilson” is another example. Here Poe taps into the physicality of the world—what the Senses perceive in Nature—that writers who give any nod at all to reality must not forget. Such aliveness is easy to see manifested on the page of a successful completed work, but harder to see when we are mired in a work that may or may not come to fruition. Seeing it as we write requires not just patience and attention to sensory detail, but a faith in this “sentience of all vegetable things”—a faith in the living-ness of one’s imagined world. Without this faith, no amount of sensory detail will resonate with an audience; for lack of it, even the most exquisitely-described setting or experience will fall flat on the page.

If we want our readers to experience the world as we describe it, we must hone our abilities to feel this world as alive and write it as alive. The thickness of the air of our setting, the texture of its walls, the dirt on its floor, the scent of its passers-by…. If we render our imagines worlds with enough faith in the aliveness of things, we give our readers a chance to feel that aliveness with us. This aliveness—which we feel when entranced in a hypnagogic state or enthralled by great literature—is where we dwell, and to reach it both readers and writers must reach through the veil of the soul to commune by touching what we cannot see.

This fifth lesson from Poe, the hardest to learn, has brought me to a new appreciation of the hero I so naively fell in love with. I swallowed the lure of hypnagogia even though I didn’t understand what it really meant, and it dragged me somewhere deeper than I suspected. It was a youthful mistake that just might last me my whole lifetime.

Image from Wikimedia Commons (by Vallotton)

Quotes and Notes is a monthly craft essay series by Steven Wingate. Steven teaches at the University of Colorado. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008.

Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian recently asked several contemporary authors for their own rules of writing. Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, and many others answered the call ((Here’s Part One; and here’s Part Two).

You may have noticed that at Fiction Writers Review, we take our rules with a pinch of skepticism. (Steven Wingate’s Quotes & Notes series has investigated some of the “rules” embodied in writing-related quotes.) But writing is a hard job, and we all long for the magic formula that will help us get it done. So it’s hard not to be swayed by firm, concrete advice like this:

Diana Athill: You don’t always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they’d be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it’s the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)

Margaret Atwood: You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

Roddy Doyle: Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.

Geoff Dyer: Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

Anne Enright: Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

Jonathan Franzen: Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page. [Ed. Note: Having heard Franzen expound on this at length, in person, I can tell you that he's not joking at all here.]

AL Kennedy: Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

Hilary Mantel: If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.

FWR readers, tell us: What are your “rules” for writing? What are the best writing do’s and don’ts you’ve encountered?

“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”– Flannery O’Connor

It’s hard to argue with your heroes, though it’s significantly easier after they’ve died. Flannery O’Connor—the first writer I wanted to be—refers in this quote to creative writing workshops, which were just becoming the new standard for writerly apprenticeship when she launched her career. But I don’t have the same issues as she had with the workshop paradigm as it’s now practiced, or with the proliferation of creative writing programs. Endless pages have been devoted to the “Can creative writing be taught?” debate and the “Why do we have so many programs?” debate, but it seems to me that (a) more writers and readers are good for the world, and (b) the literary community has ironed out many of the kinks in workshop style that gave them such a bad name fifty (or even twenty) years ago. The negative workshops of legend supposedly killed off creativity by making students kowtow to the aesthetic whims of taskmaster professors. The “master” either liked your work or didn’t, and you either emerged anointed or… well, stifled.

A stilted approximation, obviously. But tales of Draconian workshops scared quite a few people away from participating in them, including me on occasion. Some of my early workshops conformed closely to the negative stereotype, while others gave me a chance to try things that I’d never tried before. This was back in the eighties, before the explosion of MFA programs and the introduction of the creative writing Ph.D., and I think things are better now. In recent years I’ve participated in some great workshops. I don’t hear so many complaints about tyranny, though that’s perhaps (as O’Connor suggests) because the universities aren’t stifling enough writers. But it shouldn’t be the job of writing programs to stifle writers; all programs need to do is give people the tools they need to stifle themselves if they want to. The choice of snuffing out the candle of literary ambition should be left to no one else but the holder of that candle.

photo by mathplourde (flickr cc)

I don’t want to get too deep into the “workshop” and “program” debates, however, because they have been discussed ad infinitum by writers of all stripes—pompous, curmudgeonly, and level-headed. Instead I want to talk about another way that universities can potentially stifle writers: after they have completed their programs and gone into academic teaching. Since the rise of workshops, academia has become the de facto professional home for writers whose work is not commercial enough to afford them a living from book sales. Much as medieval European boys who liked reading more than fighting tended to join monasteries, writers in the past forty or so years who don’t pen best-sellers have tended to join academia. This is not a negative value judgment; if it were, I would have to condemn myself. This migration simply reflects the economic realities of our age. Big publishers, squeezed by bookstores and distributors, put out fewer works of literary fiction, and the small publishers who fill their shoes don’t pay much money. In this environment, university-based teaching jobs offer writers a steady income without fear of penury. It’s a pretty good deal, and it makes tons of sense.

The first major bloom of the creative writing programs came in the 1970s, when an increasing number of universities offered positions to writers who would then (in theory) not have to think so much about the economics of publishing, and could instead concentrate on writing alone. But creative writing programs are like any other organizations: they tend toward increasing bureaucratization and specificity over time, and that changes the balance for writers in academia. As programs become more solidified (some might say ossified), standards for employment naturally change, and programs want more qualifications than they did in the 70s. On the AWP Jobs List, more and more schools hiring fiction writers expect a Ph.D. and experience teaching literature. They also tend to want a more worked-out pedagogical framework for teaching fiction in the classroom. As a result, the field of creative writing becomes increasingly academicized over time. The jobs that writers took a generation ago to pay the bills have become very much full-time gigs that not only eat up individual writing time, but also can affect one’s creative activities by connecting them too tightly to academic promotions.

If you embrace writing in an academic setting, you’ll be heavily tempted to embrace academia at least as much as you embrace writing. And serving the master of academia can be just as dangerous as serving the master of the market—neither can ever be fully satisfied, and the servitude (once begun) tends to grow deeper with years. And what of the writing itself? Is there sufficient time to focus when you have a profession—and a professional reputation—to keep up? David Gessner discusses this phenomenon from the tenured professor’s perspective in his outstanding New York Times essay, “In Captivity”:

It’s fine for writing teachers to talk in self-help jargon about how their lives require “balance” and “shifting gears” between teaching and writing, but below that civil language lurks the uncomfortable fact that the creation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.

Not all writers in academe have tenure-track creative writing positions like Gessner’s; such jobs are harder and harder to come by as the academic economy gets streamlined. A lot of us (perhaps more, proportionally) teach critical thinking or composition or a grab bag of creative writing courses here and there, but we’re subject to the same concerns Gessner mentions—though without the glamorous career-carrot of full professorship. I have a job like that, and I can’t complain about it because I know that hundreds of writers would give the tips of their pinkies to take my place. For me, an academic job represents everything it was for those writers in the first major wave of migration to the universities: stability, freedom from anxiety, and a chance to write what I want to write. The negative of a non tenure-track gig, though it occasionaly makes me feel like a second-class citizen in the academic industry, pales in comparison to the positives. I understand why writers have migrated to academia, and I’ve made my deal with the devil of stability, for better and for worse.

Nonetheless, I fantasize about how it would feel to have a different kind of academic job—higher profile, higher paying, focused on fiction, etc. Every time I think of trying to change, I end up banging my head against (a) my dread of the exact feelings Gessner expresses, and (b) the increasing primacy of the Ph.D. as the degree of choice for teachers of fiction, which reduces my ability to climb the ladder (as it does for anyone with an MFA). Without a Ph.D., there are quite a few jobs that I can’t even apply for. In my better moments, I accept this fate; in my worst ones, I get sour gapes about it and feel like I’ve missed the boat with bad career decision-making.

“Why don’t you just get a Ph.D.?” suggests a friend who, like me, is always quietly on the lookout for a higher profile teaching gig. (He already has a Ph.D.) In some ways it makes sense—it would open the door to some tenure-track gigs that I can’t even sniff at now, and my income prospects fifteen years down the road would look brighter. In other ways, it would be a disaster. I’d be giving up a lot—years of writing time, a good and stable job, retirement, insurance for my family—just to get a job that might pay less than what I earn now. Is it worth the hassle? Am I dedicated enough to the academic life to serve that master any more than I already do?

Not everyone reading this essay and considering an academic career is going to run up against the same wall as I do. I’m an odd duck because I committed to fiction relatively late, and I’m pretty old for a writer with only one book out. Choices and circumstance may keep me in the same relationship to academia that I currently have, and (except on bad days) I can embrace that. But writers with MFAs who are who coming up now, if they want the security of teaching, will face those questions sooner and in more ferocious fashion than I’ve had to. As the teaching job market gets tighter, getting prepared to handle the nuts and bolts of a teaching career—or even just a teaching job—is increasingly necessary. Gone are the days of getting a respectable college gig simply because you’re a good writer and look comfortable in the classroom. Qualifications will only get more important, and the non tenure-track “middle class” of academia will get bigger as tenure is called into question all over the country. I recently had a conversation about this very topic with a fiction student who has excellent teaching credentials, but isn’t getting the kind of job she wants because she (like me) only has an MFA.

“Why don’t you just get a Ph.D.?” I asked, joining the chorus of those who had suggested the same thing to her. I felt terrible saying that because I believe in the MFA as a degree for teachers of fiction writing. Fiction is a body of practice, not a body of knowledge, but the increased academicization of creative writing makes it seem like a body of knowledge—a sad development, in my eyes. I’d like to feel gung-ho and hope that the situation will reverse itself, but institutions will do what they do best: get more specialized over time. The day-to-day realities of writers in academia will continue to challenge their creative time, and those of us with MFAs will need more specific strategies to gain (or keep) footholds in the industry.

One thing I know is that I’m not giving up the job I have, regardless of what my idol Flannery O’Connor says. They’re just too hard to come by, stifling or not. Gilded cages or not.

Extras

- For more about the history of creative writing programs in the United States, read Mark McGurl’s The Program Era; an excerpt is available on Harvard UP’s website. FWR’s Mary Stewart Atwell interviewed McGurl last year.

- If you’re shopping for Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories, or any of her books, consider ordering from your favorite indie bookstore.

“Always give your characters their best shot.”– Stuart M. Kaminsky

Stuart M. Kaminsky / photo by Jean-Luc Vallet

As a graduate student in screenwriting at Florida State University’s brand-new Film School (circa 1990), I regularly stalked the halls lurking after our MFA program director: the mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky, who just died this past October at the age of seventy-five. In two years of running into him “by chance” in this manner, I never knew Stuart to be anything but all business. The closest he came to letting his guard down was admitting that he liked to write while listening to the music of the Pointer Sisters, which apparently got him in the mood to pen novels such as the Edgar Award-winning A Cold Red Sunrise—part of a body of work that led the Mystery Writers of America to give him their Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement.

“Do you have two minutes?” I’d ask when I waylaid Stuart to ask what he thought of the work I’d given him for commentary. Then he’d look at his watch.

“Thirty seconds,” he’d respond. I had to ask him my question point blank, without beating around the bush, then be prepared for Stuart to do the same with his response. He liked to tell me that I had no discipline, either in my work habits or in the stories I created, and this surprised me because every writing teacher I’d encountered until then had praised me for me discipline. Stuart simply had higher standards for what discipline meant—especially story discipline, the ability to keep your words on the page focused on the core of your story. My time with him as mentor revolved around learning exactly that, particularly when it came to fleshing out character.

“Get to know me,”f he often remarked in my margins (quoting Jon Lovitz from Saturday Night Live), with a circle around a given character’s name. Stuart complained that although my characters had plenty of surface texture to them, I never let them act like real human beings on the page. They served functions in my narratives, and when I needed to change the narrative, I could simply tinker with the identity of my characters in order to make them fit the arc better. That made sense to me then—I was young and fantasized about making millions on screenplays. Why pay attention to real characters when they weren’t showing up in the movies around me?

It took a while for Stuart’s approach to sink in, with his “Get to know me” comments and his frequent suggestions to “Always give your characters their best shot.” I took his advice so much to heart that I stopped writing screenplays a few years after grad school and gravitated toward fiction instead, since it gave me more chances to learn about my characters on the page. Though there’s no way to tell exactly what Stuart meant by giving characters their best shot (and he’s not alive anymore to talk about it) I’d like to lay out here what it has meant to me.

When we talk about narrative characters, we mostly talk about objectives and description: what does the character want and what is the character like? Plenty of writing books discuss getting to know characters through the externals: what’s in their trunk, what’s in their medicine cabinet, which friend they would call from jail, etc. It becomes a personality inventory, a list of attributes. I suspect that most writers who have taken a beginning fiction class or worked their way through a how-to book have run into this kind of exercise. The idea is that if we know many, many details about a person, we’ll be able able to make him or her convincing for our audience.

Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti

And this may be true. Knowing that Eliza would like to be a pediatric endocrinologist and that she still wears a patch of her old security blanket on her favorite pajamas gives us some understanding of her. She becomes more real to us when we know that she’s still driving a 1976 Ford Maverick because it used to belong to her estranged brother—and still more real if she doesn’t know her own motivation for keeping it. We could add on and on to the external details of the character, trying to make that person real in the way that Pinocchio hopes to become so. Theoretically, we might be able to acquire enough details in a personality inventory for our readers to accept our characters as convincing.

But ultimately, as Stuart Kaminsky knew, this way of creating character doesn’t work because it’s the subtext of our characters’ lives that make them real. Using the “inventory” process to get to know them is fundamentally flawed because it makes us lazy. Robert Boswell, in the title chapter from his excellent book on the fiction craft, The Half-Known World, speaks eloquently against the “inventory” approach that asks such questions as “What is the birthday of the main character” and “What does your character do with his or her free time?” Boswell writes:

The listing of characteristics in advance of real narrative exploration tends to cut a character off at the knees. Such a character may be complicated, but he is rarely complex. Moreover, such characters tend to become narrower as the narrative progresses. A writer who has typed in the answers to the preceding questions may feel knowing, possessively fond, and calmly confident; but he may find it difficult to let the character break out of these imaginative restraints.

Giving characters their “best shot” means, more than anything, encountering those characters as fully developed human beings who can’t be understood—half-known, in Boswell’s terminology—precisely because they are not limited by their attributes. We can’t successfully “plant” the kind of multiple motivations, ambiguities, ambivalences, and revealing self-contradictions that drive our characters; they have to arise out of the situation the characters are in, and the only way we can explore that is on the page.

As writers, we know this. We’re taught this over and over again, but the temptation to make the shortcut is always there. And by shortcut, I don’t mean using a stereotype; I mean going halfway through the process of knowing our characters and being satisfied with letting their surface attributes stand in for their identities. This kind of shorthand happens all the time—for instance, the idea that all characters need “redeeming qualities.” We see this idea in TV and movies all the time, with assassins who donate money to pet shelters or teach the kid across the hallway how to read. This is merely a perversion of true character development, whether it happens with protagonists or bit characters.

“But this person only shows up for two pages,” I’ve heard writers say in workshops. “Does she really have to be developed?” The answer is yes, unless we want to fall into the habit of taking shortcuts. Most of the time when we take those shortcuts, we do it on the mistaken belief that making characters convincing for readers is sufficient. Readers come to fiction not merely to understand who characters are, but to participate in their full, complex, messy lives. When a character steps into our narratives, even for a moment, we owe ourselves and our readers the feeling of a full life entering into the story—of someone entering fully formed, bearing an agenda that is not determined by the course of our narrative or the needs of other characters.

Unfortunately, the person who gets cheated most when an author takes shortcuts and work from a character inventory is the author in question. If our characters don’t have a fully formed life beyond the narrative, our hands will be tied by the function of the character within that narrative and we’ll never be free to really know them. I’ve often wished that Stuart were around to circle a character’s name in my early draft fiction manuscripts and remind me—the way he did with my youthful screenplays—to get to know them better the hard way.

P.S.: Stuart would also tell me, whenever he saw me walking around the FSU Film School with my inevitable mug of coffee, “That stuff will kill you.” I’m proud to say that I’ve now been coffee-free for a full month now—a new record for me. Thanks for the many forms of sage advice, Stuart, and R.I.P.

Further Resources

- If you’re interested in purchasing a book by Stuart M. Kaminsky, remember your local indie bookseller.

- Read an excerpt from Robert Boswell’s latest story collection, The Heyday of Insensitive Bastards, also available at most indie bookstores.

- In this video for Fora TV, Joyce Carol Oates talks about the process of developing realistic characters, using examples from The Gravedigger’s Daughter. To see the full interview, click here–or watch an excerpt below: