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ResourcesWEEK 3-4: Teacher Teaching Himself In September of 1952 a 19-year-old sophomore at DePauw University, with his fiancé Joan reading over his shoulder, browses through Katherine Mansfield's journal and realizes how to get more out of his own journal. His very first gesture is significant: he announces that he has "a doozy cold" and describes his runny nose in five distinct voices-terse, bombastic, despairing, resigned, and existential ("The red nose simply exists"). In the following days, as he records the prankish doings of friends in his dorm hall, the journal is vivid, to be sure, but as callow as any undergraduate journal has a right to be. The October 10 entry, however, is a long attack on the failure of verisimilitude in Defoe's Moll Flanders, and from this point on the journal-published now in a facsimile edition by The University of Rochester-holds to a steady purpose: it is the workshop in which John Gardner teaches himself the craft that will make him one of the great writer-teachers of his time. "My dear," croaks I, "do you not know me?" He turned pale, and started retching, like one thunderstruck in the belly, and not able to conquer his odorous vomiting, said no more but this, "Let us sit down!" and sitting down by a table he laid his elbow upon his plate of beans and potatoes, and hanging his chin off his hand, fixed his eyes on his nose as one stupid. I cried so vehemently, on the other hand, that it was a good while ere I could speak anymore; but after I had given some vent to my amourous passion (for 65 is not as old as you think) I stopped crying and let him go, saying, "My dear, do you not know me?" At which he puked some more and answered, "Glurgle," and said no more for a good while. The first point to note here is that before burlesquing the passage Gardner has copied it longhand into his journal. Though at the moment Gardner isn't appreciating the driving energy that makes Defoe's sentences hypnotic, by copying them-and then studying them well enough to parody them-he absorbs their rhythms, makes their possibilities permanently his own. It's this kind of alchemy Gardner will speak of in The Art of Fiction when he advises the young writer to get "the art of fiction, in all its complexity-the whole tradition and all its technical options-down through the wrinkles and tricky wiring of his brain into his blood." It's also worth mentioning that in the margin of this entry we see Gardner criticizing his own sophomoric excesses. With an arrow pointing toward the line in which Moll's first lover pukes and glurgles, he writes: "Like when Pope lets his disgust drown out his wit." (Critic Wllliam Lyon) Phelps says (Fielding) slowed down the progress of the novel by advocating digressions at the beginning of each book in a work. Me, I wish novelists would do it some more. Those digressions don't in the least tempt me to skip. They build suspense, and at the same time please me with their thoughtfulness. His books become one long (886 pages forTom Jones) essay. Never at any time does the author leave the stage. He becomes a sage with a $3 seat making clever comments as the play progresses. Reading Fielding is like going to a good play with someone who knows it well. Between the acts we have delicious commentary on the thing. It's great! I swear, if I can ever become a writer (and I can, because I like this sort of thing) I shall-when my fame is established-take up the style of Fielding. With this passage in mind we can imagine Gardner, more than a decade later, pulling his well-underlined college edition of Tom Jones off the shelf as he broods over a novel on the Beowulf theme; he spends a few minutes refreshing his pleasure in the book's mock-epic structure, and decides he can use the same epic division of parts in Grendel. A couple of years later he reaches again for his Fielding, and realizes that he just might get away with regularly suspending the flow of a novel's action while two characters engage in Socratic dialogues on a wide range of cultural and philosophical issues-and suddenly the structure of The Sunlight Dialogues snaps into place. Copyright © 1998 Thomas Gavin. From Lies! Lies! Lies!, published in April 1999 by University of Rochester Press/BOA Editions. Thomas Gavin's most recent novel, Breathing Water, won the Lillian Fairchild Award. WEEK 7--Douglas Unger--- Angles on Dialogue AWP Writer’s Chronicle February 2007 Dialogue in life is most often a transaction—a bartering of desires and intentions implied under the surface of literal communication. In fiction, these implications should be sharpened. Language in dialogue should be hyper-refined, made far more intense than everyday speech. As my writer friend Jim Heynen puts it, "The part of the story where a fiction writer should most feel that s/he is doing the work of a poet is not in description or narration but in dialogue." As the late great Raymond Carver used to say, "Good dialogue is angled toward a character's intentions." I'd add that dialogue in fiction, as in plays, is most interesting when an action is implied in every line. This level of intensity in fictive speech—action implied in every line—is extremely difficult to maintain. Information needs to get across, the facts expressed. Unpracticed writers often mistakenly feel that they have too much important business to communicate in speeches to set up characters and their situations, and this is especially so at the beginnings of stories. A burden of exposition can fill conversations with lists of facts and self-referential explanations that are about as interesting to read as an instruction manual for furniture assembly. Informational dialogue often strikes the ear as lacking in character as reading locations off a street map of one's own city. Still, expository or informational dialogue is necessary. The great writers impart factual information quickly, in a single line or two, or in a briefly narrated mini-story that sets up more angled exchanges between characters. Look at Hemingway's "The Old Man and The Sea" and how, in one question and answer exchange, the boy, wanting to go out fishing with the old man—bartering with him through argument—implies Santiago's expositional situation: "But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks." Or Fitzgerald's three-liner by Mr. Jones in "Winter Dreams" setting up Dexter Gordon's age and circumstances, the reader already aware through narration that Dexter is smitten by Mr. Jones's daughter: "You're not more than fourteen. Why the devil did you decide just this morning that you wanted to quit? You promised that next week you'd go over to the state tournament with me." Or Faulkner's expositional dialogue at the beginning of "Barn Burning," when the Justice of the Peace asks for proof of a crime. Look at how Mr. Harris delivers a one-paragraph mini-story establishing the sharecropper Snopes's propensity for arson. These lines are informational mainly, yet they are angled sharply toward character intentions. What's important in them aside from letting readers know a plot situation are the motivations implied underneath: the boy wanting to help the old man against his wishes, Mr. Jones wanting Dexter to keep caddying for him while unaware of Dexter's humiliation at such servility before his attractive daughter, and Mr. Harris seeking justice after the psychotic Snopes has burned down his barn. For other masterful examples of brief expositions in dialogue, look at Nadine Gordimer's "Home": "They've taken my mother. Robbie and Francie and my mother." Or the exotic lines from Gabriel Garcia Márquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" (translated by Gregory Rabassa) that imply a whole mythology: "‘He's an angel,' she told them. ‘He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.'" Or the pure neatness of the opening set-up that closes with a charged challenge in Mary Robison's "Coach": "‘I know I'm no Rembrandt,' Sherry said, ‘but I have so damn much fun trying, and this little studio—this room—we can afford. I could get out of your way by going there and get you and Daphne out of my way. No offense.'" Or look at the simple yet ingenious exposition in the one-liner of internal dialogue—a character bartering with himself—in Anton Chekhov's "Lady With A Dog" (translation by Ivy Litvinov): "‘If she's here without her husband, and without any friends,' thought Gurov, ‘it wouldn't be a bad idea to make her acquaintance.'" One of the best exercises I know of to get a feel for writing effective expositional dialogue is to graze through a short story anthology—or a shelf of classic novels—and read aloud just the opening lines spoken by characters. Disregard for the moment the framing narrative. Listen especially to how characters announce themselves. Select stories from a variety of historical periods and genres. Pause after reading out each utterance and imagine what the lines suggest about the story that follows. For example, read Dupin's classic opener in Poe's "The Purloined Letter": "‘If it is any point requiring reflection,' observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the wick, ‘we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark.'" Page to Marlow's weighty announcement in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": "‘And this also,' said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.'" And Tolstoy's ominous opener (I prefer the version translated by Louse and Aylmer Maude): "‘Gentlemen,' he said, ‘Ivan Ilych has died.'" Look at Little Bibi's question in Kate Chopin's "The Storm": "‘Mama'll be ‘friad, yes,' he suggested with blinking eyes." Flip to more contemporary voices, as in Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?": "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" Or Edna in Richard Ford's "Rock Springs": "Why not? My datebook's not that full." Close with a line as cutting-edge as the ‘topper' after the first paragraph in "Pastoralia," by George Saunders: "‘Jeez,' she says first thing this morning. ‘I'm so tired of roast goat I could scream.'" The point of this exercise is to become familiar with just how angled toward plot actions and intentions lines of dialogue can be, especially when the characters first announce themselves. Consider how carefully crafted the lines are to imply not only actions but also to set off more thematic, subterranean movements in our imaginations. In my opinion—keeping in mind that there are really no rules for writing fiction, that as soon as we come up with something that looks like a rule, a fine writer will come along who overthrows it with a brilliant invention—dialogue can be broken down essentially into four rough categories or types. There is an "open" type of dialogue—composed of contentless or flat lines, such as those spoken in the business of meeting and greeting, similar to the exchanges in an "open scene" exercise used in acting classes, and extremely illustrative of just how much apparently neutral spoken lines can vary with the situation and characters to which they are applied. The next kind I call "informational dialogue" or "first-level dialogue"—lines that communicate facts, circumstances, the set-up of a story or characters. There's a dialogue category I call "second-level" or "dialogue by omission," in which what is left unstated, unsaid, or unfinished in the line creates all kinds of interesting implied actions and intentions. Finally, there's a "third level" or "dialogue of opposites" in fictive speech, in which the apparent content of the lines—the significations of the language—are easily understood to be at odds with the actions or emotive conditions of characters. In my opinion, the quicker a story or novel can get to second-level or third-level dialogue between its characters, the more engaging it is to our imaginations, and the more lively and interesting the fiction is to read. Following are examples meant to be workshopped to show these four rough categories of dialogue. The first exercise is a typical "open scene"—each speaker identified by "A" and "B." It is meant to be a brief yet closed system of flat, almost contentless lines: Open Scene
A: Hi. B: Hello. A: Sorry I'm late. B: That's all right. A: I really am sorry. B: That's fine. A: Well, good-night. B: Good-night. In a workshop, pick two writers to play the roles—choose a male for A and a female to play B (though it can be a lot of fun, and in some ways more revealing, if A and B are performed by two writers of the same gender). Take the two players out of the room or off to the side (so the rest of the workshop won't know the roles assigned). Set them up to act out the following three situations: 1) A has made a date with B, but A has stood up B for five hours before arriving at the door, having lost track of time at a local bar with friends. 2) A is a son or daughter and B is a mother or father. A has to get past the worried parent waiting up and to the relative safety of a bedroom after staying out too late; A's lateness has been caused by a careless fender-bender with the family car, and A thinks it's best for family sanity and a good night's sleep not to mention the accident until morning (this can work better, can be more exemplary, if A and B switch off roles after exercise 1, A delivering B and B delivering A). 3) A is visiting an Intensive Care ward of a hospital, almost not making it there in time enough to say good-bye, forever, to dear friend, B, who is dying. Have writers A and B play out the open scene all three ways, one after the other, making entrances and exits as though on and off a stage. After the three versions, go around the workshop and ask each writer to speculate as to who the characters were in each variation and what came across as the story underneath. Even when played by writers with minimal acting skills, workshops can usually agree on fairly accurate readings of the characters and situations in each variation of the open scene. More clearly than studying the lines on a page, this acting out of the open scene shows how much dialogue depends on its angling toward the intentions of characters. This exercise should show also that so-called "open" dialogue is like an empty rhetorical space—in itself devoid of specific meaning or signification. In fiction, such dialogue—especially meeting-and-greeting exchanges and flat self-references—is essentially meaningless and unnecessary, since stories and novels don't offer writers the capacity to present actors performing the lines. More generally—here's another rule that can and will be overthrown by a writer of genius—open dialogue is inessential to a story unless it is unusually angled at the intentions of characters. Our conversations and our casual talk in daily life are, I believe, a lot more reliant on pauses and silences than most of us are probably aware. Informational or "first level" dialogue has been discussed at the beginning of this essay, with multiple examples of effective, economical first-level lines by masterful writers that carry much of a story's exposition. It's interesting to look at a counter-example, drawn not from fiction but rather from the genre of the old-style TV soap opera (there's a new style soap opera these days, as my good friend, William Wintersole, who recently retired from seventeen years as a contract actor for "The Young and The Restless" tells me, defending what can be achieved by a quality treatment of the soap opera as art). As an example of "informational" or "first level" dialogue, I've adapted the following exchange from an early 1980s episode of a another classic TV soap (changed here just enough not to step on anyone's copyright). What I usually do in workshop is to assign the roles of "Hugh" and "Joanna" to different writers than those who played the open scene in the previous exercise, and ask them to read it out loud: First-level Soap Opera Dialogue
HUGH You know how much I love you, Joanna. Ever since we met at the exhibition, I can't get my mind off of you. Then... JOANNA Don't. There's no need to explain. I've loved you, too, Hugh. But I have to think of the good years with Larry. They're still so much a part of me. Now with the operation... HUGH Don't make me wish for the surgeon's hands to slip with the knife, Joanna. Tell him. Tell Larry now. It's not right for us to go on leaving him in the dark. JOANNA You always push so hard for what you want. I'm not sure I like that in you. HUGH Pushing hard for what I want is how I got to be president of the Excelsior Corporation. And it's how I've made sure you fell in love. JOANNA Oh, Hugh, what are we going to do? Cut to the pet food commercial. What's obvious in this exchange, of course, is that it's laughably overwritten—a requirement of the Soap Opera as a form is overwriting, dictated by the episodic necessity of having to keep viewers who tune in and tune out during the run of a story sequence continually reintroduced to characters and situations. Still, it's a clear example of how characters can overexpress, and how they can seem artificial by telling each other too much about themselves and their motivations. All is apparent, all is revealed. There is little or no angle or intention left about the characters for the audience to imagine. This overwritten scene shows how informational dialogue carries the danger of making characters seem flat, or ridiculous. Highly romantic writing is filled with this kind of overwritten dialogue. Such overwriting is the most frequent weakness I find in early drafts of stories by developing writers. Also, as the writer Carol Bly often pointed out in student manuscripts—and in published books by less skilled writers—characters who supposedly know each other well continually naming each other in intimate speech can appear to suffer from bizarrely, even psychotically self-conscious ticks. Reading such a scene aloud in workshop can be a good first step toward a cure. This is not to say that informational dialogue doesn't have its place—it certainly does, as should be clear by the examples already cited that show how masterful writers use first-level dialogue in set-up lines in stories or in first lines by characters declaring themselves. The point is to use first-level or informational dialogue as sparingly and economically as possible. Overwriting in early drafts can often be cut and shaped into what I call "second-level" dialogue, or "dialogue by omission"—the technique of leaving portions of speeches unstated and even parts of sentences incomplete. This type of dialogue is intrinsically interesting for what it demands of a reader's imagination to fill in what is missing. Henry James was a master of this second level of implication in dialogue. A good example to act out in a workshop setting can be found toward the close of chapter XXI of The Turn of the Screw—the exchange between the Governess and Mrs. Grose. What's fascinating when characters speak throughout this novel—and in other dialogue in James's fiction—is that so much of it is set up so that perceptive readers understand that the characters are speaking about the same subject (usually concerning the manners and customs of other characters) but they have differing assumptions and implications. Because of James's highly allusive style, what is left unstated mainly informs readers about such cross-purposed misunderstandings, and many are the result of characters couched in the coded pretensions of upper crust decorum and propriety. In this scene, Mrs. Grose is informing the Governess that little Flora will be sent away for a time. This, according to Mrs. Grose, is in order to get Flora out of the stressful care of the Governess for the reason that the little girl has been behaving badly and is using shockingly foul language. Mrs. Grose clearly refers to this circumstance in her lines. The Governess, on the other hand, is desperate to be confirmed in her visions (possibly hysterical) of the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel, and to find out that Mrs. Grose also sees them, or knows the ghosts are meddling among the living, so as not to believe she has gone insane. The Governess is convinced the malevolent spirits are possessing the innocent children in her charge—Flora and Miles. In their intense exchange, because of what James leaves unstated in their second-level dialogue, the Governess comes to believe that Mrs. Grose also sees the ghosts (she very probably doesn't). The Governess is misinterpreting what is unfinished in the housemaid's lines. Or it's possible to read the exchange as the Governess believes. The emotive affect of The Turn of the Screw depends on how it ingeniously sustains its possibilities at the sharp edge of at least two plausible interpretations. In a workshop, ask two writers to read out the dialogue between Mrs. Grose and the Governess, skipping the first-person commentary and interlocutions. Start with Mrs. Grose's declaration: "I'll go—I'll go. I'll go this morning." And the Governess' reply: "If you should wish still to wait I engage she shouldn't see me." The exchange then follows: Mrs. Grose: No, no: It's the place itself. She must leave it. Your idea's the right one. I myself, Miss — Governess: Well? Mrs. Grose: I can't stay. Governess: You mean that, since yesterday, you have seen— ? Mrs. Grose: I've heard—! Governess: Heard? Mrs. Grose: From that child — horrors! There! On my honour, Miss, she says things — ! Governess: Oh thank God! Mrs. Grose: Thank God? Governess: It so justifies me! Mrs. Grose: It does that, Miss! Governess: She's so horrible? Mrs. Grose: Really shocking. Governess: And about me? Mrs. Grose: About you, Miss—since you must have it. It's beyond everything, for a young lady; and I can't think wherever she must have picked up— Governess: The appalling language she applies to me? I can then! Mrs. Grose: Well, perhaps I ought to also—since I've heard some of it before! Yet I can't bear it.... But I must go back. Governess: Ah if you can't bear it—! Mrs. Grose: How can I stay with her, you mean? Why just for that, to get her away. Far from this... far from them— Governess: She may be different? she may be free? Then in spite of yesterday, you believe— Mrs. Grose: In such doings?... I believe. Pay careful attention to James's technique of not finishing sentences, often omitting the referents. Note how quickly the dialogue snaps along because of the Governess cutting off and completing Mrs. Grose's thoughts—what is called in acting "stepping on the lines" of the other character—and quite possibly misinterpreting them. After reading this exchange out loud in workshop, ask around the room what is implied versus what is actually being said. Ask if, in confirming she believes "in such doings" at the end of the exchange, is the Governess truly vindicated in thinking that Mrs. Grose also sees the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel and that they are possessing the children? Or is it more likely that Mrs. Grose is trying to separate two naughty children from each other's baleful influence and at least get foul-mouthed little Flora straightened out? Ask the workshop to appraise the dramatic tension of the scene, how lively it is because of what is at stake for the characters (for the Governess, her sanity is at stake; for Mrs. Grose, her motherly wishes for a child's well-being). How much of this second-level exchange is left up to a reader's imagination? Leaving it up to a reader's imagination is a modernist principle, even more so in contemporary fiction—a bit like a current movement in architecture in which content follows form. One of the most effective examples of second-level dialogue is found in Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman—a novel written entirely in dialogue save for a gripping police report in its closing chapter. Puig's story of the developing relationship between Molina and Valentin—one a homosexual and the other a heterosexual, locked away together in a dingy prison cell for political reasons by the anonymous repressors of state terrorism—employs all types of dialogue: open scenes, first-level, second-level, third-level, stories within the story, exchanges of missed significance (when one character obviously isn't listening to the other and answers with a nonsequitur), as well as passages of direct Q & A as in the police interrogation. The novel builds to a tender love scene between the two men in Chapter 14, arguably one of the most explicitly sexual scenes in 20th-Century literature, yet with the erotic details brilliantly left out, there by implication only, achieved by ingenious omissions in the use of second-level dialogue. Much of this love-making scene is wordless, composed of actions entirely left up to a reader's imagination during pauses indicated simply by ellipsis, "—...." These pauses are extraordinarily full lines for any perceptive reader. In the fine translation from the Spanish by Thomas Colchie (available in a Vintage edition), turn to the love scene on pages 261 and 262. It's extremely entertaining to read this dialogue aloud in workshop at least two or three times, with writers of varying genders and/or sexual orientations—it's also an exercise which can be revealing of the differing social attitudes in a workshop toward homosexuality. Consider the following exchange: —Aren't you going to wait for when lights go out? —... —You're not cold taking your clothes off? As the scene is read aloud, pay attention to what is evoked by the ellipsis—the implied actions contained in the pauses—and note how omissions in what is said evoke erotic details. The effect of sensual fullness in the scene is astonishing, considering how minimal the dialogue is, save for the one key, most explicit line: —Better like last time, let me lift my legs. This way, over your shoulders. Some effective exercises to encourage developing the skills of second-level dialogue run as follows: 1) Write a dialogue that plays on the familiar trope of the girl telling the boy that she's pregnant, in which A is a girlfriend and B is a boyfriend. Write the scene implying that B is already happily expecting the news, but that A, unhappily, feels compelled to admit that the child may not be B's after all. Don't let either character directly mention pregnancy. 2) Write a dialogue about gift giving and guessing, for example, in which A is a mother and B is a son, and on the table is a wrapped gift. B is expecting that the box contains the pearl handled pocketknife he's been asking for; A is immensely pleased that she's picked out the expensive fountain pen that she always wanted as a gift herself when she was B's age. Carry the scene all the way through the unwrapping of the gift without making mention of either a pocket knife or a fountain pen. Try other variations on this same scene using different gifts: the wrong TV action figure, a deep sea fishing reel instead of a fly reel, basketball sneakers instead of trendy running shoes, etc., the point being to make sure the gifts are clearly signified in the emotive context of the deluded joy of the parent then contrasted to the veiled disappointment of the child, without directly mentioning the gift. 3) Write a dialogue in which prisoner A is being let out of a cell by either captor or warden B and led down a dark hallway. A believes this is a final journey to a certain execution; B lets A go on believing this, for a time, but before getting to the end of the hallway lets it be known that A is on the way to being set free. Write the scene until the moment when the door at the end of the hall is pulled open. Don't let either character speak of death or execution, and don't let either character speak directly of freedom. In all these exercises, try to shape the speeches of the two characters so that each picks up on a half-stated line or incomplete thought of the other. Experiment with the technique of one character "stepping on" the line of the other. Write exchanges in which the two characters finish each other's thoughts by misinterpreting the intentions of the other. Include in each of these scenes at least one full moment in which what a character intends to say is best expressed by not speaking. Experiment with different typographic devices on the page to indicate silence. Our conversations and our casual talk in daily life are, I believe, a lot more reliant on pauses and silences than most of us are probably aware. I'm told there's a small new field in the arena of theoretical Physics called Chaos Theory that's looking into the empty spaces or gaps between signals and the possibility of actually "reading" patterns of silence and absence. Writers have long been aware of the significance of the pause, and of the changing tonalities and meanings of the rhythmic arrangements of voices in dialogue, often using the gesture, the internalized thought, or the intruding image, in the interlocutions between quoted phrases to indicate shifts of emphasis in patterns of speech on the page. Many writers I know will simply feel out these rhythms, speaking lines out loud as they write and revise, changing locations of gestures and pauses in a passage of dialogue. Reading lines aloud, listening closely for pauses and silences, is one of the most essential techniques writers should practice, especially when a story or novel is in stages of revision. When a passage just doesn't sound right, when lines fall flat or seem too direct, another interesting technique to try is to turn a given line upside down—as it were—inverting its sense, so that a character who, for example, feels terrible about something, instead of stating so directly, insists, as in several stories by Hemingway, that s/he is feeling just fine. The directly accusatory form of this kind of assertion in life from one person to another is sarcasm. With less of an edge, the effect can be cynical or ironic, as when someone says on a stormy day, "My, what pleasant weather we're having," or, less directly, "What a great day for a picnic." If we think about it, we hear this kind of third-level statement—with a literal meaning directly opposite to what a speaker means to signify—quite frequently, as when someone comments on an acquaintance's or neighbor's list of domestic assaults and mayhem by saying, "Wow. What a great guy." Or when a driver intends an apology to a passenger just picked up at the airport after getting stuck in a traffic jam by saying, "Looks like we're taking the scenic route." We hear third-level dialogue all around us in our daily lives. As an example drawn from literature, consider how Hemingway closes his novel The Sun Also Rises with Jake Barnes's notoriously ironic, third-level line, "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?" There are less ironic, less cynical movements at work in contemporary fiction, which of course is in the process of discovering its own aesthetic to confront its moment in culture and history. This may indicate a fuller, more elaborate language in the exchanges of spoken lines by characters,… Ernest Hemingway, in my opinion, is the unrivaled master of third-level dialogue. No writer before or since could move his characters so effectively into a play of barbed opposites in their speeches to each other. Hemingway short stories seem to work at a special relationship toward dialogue in general—a few, such as the classic "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and "Cat In The Rain," use narrative as if impressionist setting for dialogued exchanges in which the most pointed moments of the stories are achieved. Good exercises in third-level dialogue can be made from numerous passages in Hemingway's fiction. Take "Hills Like White Elephants" and break down the quoted lines in the story into a scene for "The American" and "The Girl" and play it out in workshop. Look especially at the tension in the give and take between the characters in the exchange just following the first few spoken lines: "They look like white elephants," she said. "I've never seen one," the man drank his beer. "No, you wouldn't have." Listen to how quickly the voices begin to work at opposites, or third-levels, reaching a painful tension with The American's insistence that it's a "simple operation" and he's "known lots of people who were perfectly happy afterward." Hemingway indicates silence in reply by stating simply that The Girl doesn't say anything. The Girl achieves an ironic, even sarcastic inversion by the end of the story, when she insists: "I feel fine," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine." A similar illustration of third-level dialogue can be found in the closing chapter XIX of The Sun Also Rises, in the scene between Brett and Jake, when, yet again, Jake has been summoned to Brett's rescue, this time to support her after her torrid and scandalous love affair with the young bullfighter in Madrid. Make a dialogue out of pages 241 to 243, with one writer playing Brett and another playing Jake. Follow how often Brett keeps repeating variations on the line, "let's not talk about it." When, of course, what is moving Brett most in the conversation is her need to talk precisely about her love affair and its sordid end. Also follow Jake's seemingly flat, reactive lines, offering obligatory support, as in, "You ought to feel set up." Clearly, both characters are playing out self-conscious roles with one another. And both are tired of their role-playing. After writers in workshop act out this scene, discuss each line and ask questions: What is the emotion implied underneath? What is the significance that is opposite to the literal meaning of the quoted language? Which most accurately expresses your reading of the characters—the literal language? Or the playing at opposites to the spoken lines? Most workshops will soon agree that the most charged lines—the ones that best express the affect of the characters and our comprehension of their motivations—are the lines we read as third-level dialogue. Who knows but this might be also because of the aesthetics of the modernist story as expressing an essentially ironic stance toward the culture in which it is written. There are less ironic, less cynical movements at work in contemporary fiction, which of course is in the process of discovering its own aesthetic to confront its moment in culture and history. This may indicate a fuller, more elaborate language in the exchanges of spoken lines by characters, such as in the richly textured conversations in Claire Messud's The Hunters, or the labyrinthine confessions in Michael Cunningham's The Hours, to cite two masterful, recent examples. Still, the technique of shaping dialogue to work at odds to the literal significance of the spoken lines still holds. Third-level dialogue isn't always so extremely a play at opposites between literal significance and character intentions—speeches can be shaped with narrower angles of complexity and depth and still create third-level tensions. A good example to study is the verbal feuding between Ralph and his wife, Marian, in Raymond Carver's "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?": ... Then she said, "I have a nice breakfast on the stove for you, darling, when you're through with your bath. Ralph?" "Just be quiet, please," he said. Or look at the virtuoso third-level exchanges of "missed" understandings—when two characters can be thought of as speaking past one another, as does the hopeful academic job candidate, Mary, to her supposed friend on the faculty interview committee, Louise, in Tobias Wolff's "In The Garden of the North American Martyrs": "You are very beautiful," Mary said, "and you know how to present yourself." Louise stood and paced the room. "That son of a bitch," she said. ...."Let's suppose someone said I have no sense of humor. Would you agree or disagree?" In almost every story by Anton Chekhov a third-level exchange in which characters talk past one another—a literary intensification of the distressful truth about human nature that people in conversation quite often don't really listen to what another person is saying. One classic mini-example of this can be found in "The Lady With The Dog," when Gurov, desirous to talk about his infatuation and affair, is coming out of the club with one of his card-playing partners (translation by Ivy Litvinov): One evening, leaving the Medical Club with one of his card-partners, a government official, he could not refrain from remarking: "If you only knew what a charming woman I met in Yalta!" The official got into his sleigh, and just before driving off, turned and called out: "Dmitry Dmitrich! "Yes." "You were quite right, you know—the sturgeon was just a leetle off. Here are a few exercises that should provide some practice in writing third-level dialogue: 1) Write a scene in which two friends, A and B, are walking way out in the country and having to bear up against any kind of extreme weather—heavy rain, intense heat, an ice storm, etc. It was A's idea to take the walk in the first place. B is out of sorts, and complains to A about the weather and what B is suffering by expressing to A exactly the opposite of what he observes and feels. 2) Write a scene in which A and B are passionate lovers. While making love, they express their intense pleasure by playfully turning around their admissions to each other about what they are feeling. 3) A is a financial manager for B, and A and B have believed themselves to be friends for a long time. A has just lost most of B's money through a foolish investment. A is confessing the loss to B by describing all the other possible factors in the catastrophic financial loss but his own actions; B responds with statements about the irrelevance of money and by speaking at opposites to his and his family's obvious needs. 4) Write a scene in which a husband, A, has just come home for dinner to his wife, B, who is still cooking in the kitchen. A is full of relief and wonder at the fact that he has just barely missed being killed in a harrowing multi-car pile-up on the freeway. B responds by talking only of the details of the food she is cooking, what the kids did that day, and/or other statements about her work day and professional life. 5) Write a scene in which a young soldier, A, has just returned from a war. B is the soldier's lover, and A is pushed somehow by B to talk about the war. A then talks about anything but the war, or only does at an extreme angle—with the language of music, with the language of sports, the language of foreign travel, language drawn from books. One of the writer's tasks in creating dialogue is to set down in an interesting and lively way what must be the differences between written and spoken languages. We learn how by reading the masters and the best of our contemporaries. We should also listen closely to the people around us for the most unusual and estranging conversations drawn from life. As should be clear by now, characters simply talking—or let's say "talk" in its familiar sense in daily life—has little to do with the painstaking artistic task of writing good dialogue, which is, in my opinion, the most difficult part of a story or novel to write well. Breaking fictive dialogue down into analytical categories for group discussion is admittedly an oversimplification, and patently fallacious, since we can discover in the books and stories we love as many different styles and varying nuances of dialogue on the page as the inventive authors who wrote out the lines. The linguistics of Ferdinand de Sassure asserts a crucial difference between langue and parole—between written and spoken languages—and from Sassure we can mine a useful description of the way language works relative to meaning, as somewhat like a rapid river with opposing currents, one current moving over the other, and dialogue relative to a character's intentions and motivations seems to me to work this way most effectively in good fiction. One of the writer's tasks in creating dialogue is to set down in an interesting and lively way what must be the differences between written and spoken languages. We learn how by reading the masters and the best of our contemporaries. We should also listen closely to the people around us for the most unusual and estranging conversations drawn from life. In writing fiction—in making art—we should strive to invent new conversations that challenge the conventions, and we should keep pushing at the edges of the form.
Douglas Unger is the author of four novels, including Leaving the Land, a finalist for the Pulitzer and Robert F. Kennedy awards. His most recent books are Voices from Silence, a year's end selection of the Washington Post Book World; and Looking for War and Other Stories, a new collection of short fiction. He is the co-founder and former director of the MFA in Creative Writing International program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches. WEEK 10-David Kalish, Taking Tips From Hemingway Writer’s Chronicle February 2008 After spending two days at the Hemingway Collection in Boston and examining scores of his manuscripts and letters, I have emerged with a renewed sense of wonder at the precision and intricacy of the author’s language. And yet I discovered that he was as human as the rest of us. If Hemingway’s prose is lean, it’s because he took out the flab. If his words touch us, it’s because he repeatedly revised his paragraphs. His language may feel untouchable, but touch it he did—through dozens of drafts for work that took months and even years to revise, through friendly and not-so-friendly criticisms he both accepted and dismissed. We can feel reassured and instructed by Hemingway’s art. Having closely examined his drafts, I’ve gleaned some rules for revision: Hemingway’s Seven Fundamental Rules For Writing A Masterpiece 1. Write with the intention of deleting what you write. Hemingway went through thirty-six possible endings for A Farewell to Arms. He deleted the first fifteen pages of The Sun Also Rises at the suggestion of mentor F. Scott Fitzgerald. He discarded the opening to “The Killers,” his famously spare short story. To what end? Hemingway is renowned for creating unsolved mysteries in the text that add to a sense that the narrator, or storyteller, knows more than the reader. He essentially took out much of the background information, leaving us with a set of hints, allusions, and unfinished ideas. Hemingway gives his “missing information an insistent presence,” as Doug Bauer said in a lecture at Bennington College, creating “an essential thread in the narrative weave.” “The Killers” is a good example. The story starts with a pair of hired killers barging into a diner, mocking the small town, and intimidating the staff. They strive to put everyone in their place as they play a power game, trying to locate a boxer they’re hired to kill. But here’s how Hemingway originally started the story: It was very cold that winter and Little Traverse Bay was frozen across from Petoskey to Harbor Springs. Nick turned the corner around the cigar store with the wind blowing snow into his eyes. He stopped and looking down the street saw the ice smooth inside the breakwater and piled high and white outside with the sun on it and way across the bay the hills beyond Harbor Springs were high snow covered with dark pine trees. The wind blew the snow off the drifts in a steady sifting against his face but he stood and looked at the frozen bay in the sunlight and watched the sun on the high hills on the other side.1 Hemingway’s attempts to set the scene didn’t end there. He continued with another two pages of introductory color. He went on with superfluous action such as Nick walking into the luncheonette and greeting the owner, who then offers him a shot of whiskey, upon which Nick declares, “Swell.” He ends up having a few. But Hemingway’s final version leaves out Nick, the protagonist, until the story requires him. The author ultimately decided to start the story on page three of his early draft: “The door of Henry’s lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter. ‘What’s yours,’ George asked them. ‘I don’t know,’ one of the men said. ‘What do you want to eat, Al?’” Hemingway made smaller deletions to pages further on. After the killers exit the diner searching for the doomed boxer and George unties Nick and Sam the cook, Hemingway got rid of secondary banter. He deleted Nick saying he’s hungry, and George asking Sam to make a couple of ham and egg sandwiches. George confesses, “I sweat a lot while it was going on.” In rejecting these sentences, Hemingway evidently decided that the story doesn’t need to restate what is implicit: everyone’s shaken up. He pushes the action forward, depriving his characters of time to decompress. In the final version, George, upon loosing the bonds, immediately urges Nick to tell the doomed boxer that the killers are coming. And Nick does it. He’s forced to jump from the frying pan into the fire, to use a cliché, with no time for ham and eggs in the interim. The implicit narrator comes alive not just in Hemingway’s deletions, but in additions as well. Consider these before-and-after passages, in which Nick, having just informed the boxer about the killers, exits the Hirsch’s rooming house. The early version: “Well Good Night,” Nick said. “Good Night,” said the woman.2 And the final: “Well, good-night, Mrs. Hirsch,” Nick said. “I’m not Mrs. Hirsch,” the woman said. “She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I’m Mrs. Bell.” “Well, good-night, Mrs. Bell,” Nick said. “Good-night,” the woman said.3 Here, and elsewhere in the story, Hemingway adds to a sense of a world in which nothing is quite right—killers are a nearly identical pair of burlesque characters dressed the same; the time on the wall clock is wrong; “Henry’s,” the diner, evidently is owned by George. Paradoxically, these misnomers feel right for a world into which we are parachuted, lacking knowledge of where we are. Set loose in this darkened land, we can feel, not merely observe, the protagonist’s passage from ignorance to knowledge of a life in which evil seems to persevere, good guys are punished, and silence is perversely rewarded. 2. Let body language speak for itself, to convey emotions too extreme for dialogue. “I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.” That’s how Hemingway wrapped up his seven-paragraph speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He easily could have been talking about his desire, in his own fiction, for as little conversation as possible. In progressive drafts, Hemingway deleted sections of dialogue to let body language speak for itself—often to convey a sense of sadness, anger, or alienation too extreme to express in words. In an early draft of “The Undefeated,” for example, Manuel, a washed-up matador, pleads for money from the fight manager for an assistant. The manager grows so alienated that, after Hemingway’s deletions (denoted by parentheses), he doesn’t even respond to Manuel: Retana said nothing but looked at Manuel across the big desk. (“None of that Retana,” Manuel went on. “What’s sixty dunos anyway?” “It’s a lot of money nowadays,” Retana said from far-off.) “You know I’ve got to have one good pic,” Manuel said. Retana said nothing but looked at Manuel from a long way off. “It isn’t right,” Manuel said.4 In another example, Hemingway pushed the language in the second paragraph to more closely echo Manuel’s confused state after a bullfight injury: Then he heard a noise far off. That was the crowd. Somebody would kill his other bull. They had cut away all his shirt. The Doctor smiled at him. There was Retana. “Hello you dirty bastard,” Manuel said. He could not hear his voice.5 Manuel sounds too clear-headed here; Hemingway jiggered the prose to make him too bewildered to even express his hatred for Retana: “Hello, Retana!” Manuel said. He could not hear his voice.6 3. Start with titles that resonate, pointing the reader to meanings and allusions embedded in the story. Hemingway once bragged that he created up to one hundred titles for each of his stories and novels, but the most extensive effort I could find in his collected papers is for A Farewell to Arms, for which he scrawled on slips of paper thirty-six potential titles, including the final one. The rejections include: Nothing Better For A Man, Time of War, One Thing is Certain, Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow, The World’s Room, and One Event Happeneth to Them All. If Hemingway were alive, one wonders if he might be embarrassed by some of these efforts, but all in all they instruct us that the process of creating titles is trial and error. Hemingway’s final choice embraces the war-themed novel’s tone of loss and disillusionment. Literally, Farewell to Arms means saying goodbye to the cause of war and the grip of love. In the book, a young American ambulance driver deserts the Italian army during World War I. He falls in love with an English nurse’s aide who ends up giving birth to a stillborn child and dies of a hemorrhage. The entire novel is infused with a sense that the noble causes of love and war are lost causes. 4. “Micro-Edit” your paragraphs and sentences to create the most powerful language possible. Hemingway was a relentless self-editor. In The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer-winning short novel, he rewrote hundreds if not thousands of paragraphs. One word could make the difference. In this example, Hemingway substitutes a “writerly” adverb with one, denoted in bold, which sounds more natural to the sea-faring narrator … The sun rose thinly (delicately) from the sea…7 …and next, he makes a description of shark-processing more physical: Those who had caught sharks had taken them to the shark factory …where they were hoisted on a block and tackle, their livers removed, their fins cut off and their hides skinned out (removed) and their flesh cut into strips for salting.8 The book resonates with the echoing of language that Hemingway made famous. By adding “beyond all people in the world” to this next paragraph, he creates a sort of transcendent mantra, embracing the theme of man vs. nature: His choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond all snares and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to find him beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are joined together and have been since noon. And no one to help either one of us.9 In this example, Hemingway’s additions echo the stubborn last gasp of an old man struggling to pull his nemesis up from the sea: Pull, hands, he thought. Hold up, legs. Last for me, head. Last for me. You never went. This time I’ll pull him over.10 Another of Hemingway’s rules was to end paragraphs with an unforgettable image. Here, the old man recalls arm-wrestling a “great negro,” foreshadowing his trial with the marlin. Instead of ending the passage with “and watched…,” Hemingway intensified the sense of terror with an even more stirring image: …Blood came out from under the fingernails of both his and the negro’s hands and they looked each other in the eye and at their hands and forearms and the bettors went in and out of the room and sat on high chairs against the wall and watched. The walls were painted bright blue and were of wood and the lamps threw their shadows against them. The negro’s shadow was huge and it moved on the wall as the breeze moved the lamps.11
In the final example, Hemingway must have realized that his bed metaphor weakened the paragraph. After all, would a sleepy, defeated old man have the energy to dwell on an analogy? So the author deleted the last four sentences:
The wind is our friend, anyway, he thought. Then he added, sometimes. And the great sea with our friends and our enemies. And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. (Why did I ever love bed when I had her? You did, he thought. But then you loved too many beds. But beds were all the same and the sea is a greater whore than all.)12
In “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway pared the language to make the story’s final sentences resonate. The protagonist’s girlfriend is about to leave for an operation, evidently an abortion. Hemingway replaced the boyfriend’s anguished ramblings with a flatly observed thought—one that portrays his mind as deadened, and portends the girlfriend’s cynical closing remark:
He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. (There must be some actual world. There must be some place you could touch where people were calm and reasonable. Once it had all been as simple as this bar). He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. “Do you feel better?” he asked. “I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”13 5. Write about what you know best, and go beyond it. Hemingway finds his corner of the universe unswervingly interesting, and, very often, we do too. In the 1920s, Hemingway joined a group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which grew into the theme for his first important work, The Sun Also Rises. A Farewell to Arms drew on his experiences as a war-injured ambulance driver. Hemingway used his adventures as a sportsman to describe fishing, bull-fighting, and big game hunting. His work as a reporter during the Spanish civil war became background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway’s own life became one of closely observed conflicts—man vs. nature, and man vs. man—and the themes he developed in his books reflect this experience: simple people set against the harsh ways of society, who through their clashes either lose faith or unexpectedly gain hope. Hemingway’s writing feels so original because it derives from his insistent effort to reflect, with honesty, the world as he experienced it and believed existed. In his nonfiction epic, Death in the Afternoon, he admits he had to work hard to steer away from a journalistic way of writing, where with one trick or another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day. The real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it.14 It’s not just what people did—how they fished, taunted bulls, shot game, and sipped anis—that draws Hemingway’s attention, and ours. Anything remotely associated is thrown into the mix. Only curmudgeonly readers would object in The Sun Also Rises to learning how good bullfighters keep their bodies “straight and pure and natural in line,” while others “twisted themselves like corkscrews.” 6. Find critics you trust, and pay them heed. But trust thyself more. “…I think that parts of Sun Also are careless and ineffectual,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Hemingway in June 1926 after reading a late draft of The Sun Also Rises. “I find in you the same tendency to envelop or …to embalm in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke that’s casually appealed to you, that I find in myself in trying to preserve a piece of ‘fine writing.’ Your first chapter contains about 10 such things and it gives a feeling of condescending casualness.” Fitzgerald went on for ten pages, attacking what he viewed as serious flaws in Hemingway’s first major work. He cited dozens of instances of language he considered overwritten, snobbish and immoral. He called an anecdote “cheap as hell” and urged Hemingway to “cut the inessentials” in an essential character. “When so many people can write well and the competition is so heavy I can’t imagine how you could have done these first 20 pps. so casually. You can’t play with people’s attention—a good man who has the power of arresting attention at will must be especially careful.” Hemingway—at the time just getting his feet wet in the big-time publishing world—wrote back to his friend and mentor that he’d taken the advice to heart. I cut The Sun to start with Cohn—cut all that first part, made a number of minor cuts and did quite a lot of rewriting and tightening up. Cut and in the proof it read like a good book. Christ knows I want to write them a hell of a lot better but it seemed to move along and to be pretty sound and solid. I hope to hell you like it and I think maybe you will.15 In fact, much of what Hemingway discarded reads like an author’s notes to himself. It was as if he’d scrawled reminders to keep the narrator from straying into self-pity and sentimentality, and ended up deleting those notes so as not to contradict their meaning. Here’s the book’s original opening, just a small sample of what Hemingway discarded at Fitzgerald’s urging: This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story. As everyone knows, Paris is a very romantic place. Spring in Paris is a very happy and romantic time. Autumn in Paris, although very beautiful, might give a note of sadness or melancholy that we shall try to keep out of this story.16 And a passage from the discarded page seven: I did not want to tell this story in the first person but I find that I must. I wanted to stay well outside of the story so that I would not be touched by it in any way and handle all the people in it with that irony and pity that are so essential to good writing.17 And from later in the book (discarded sentences set off by parentheses): The Ledoux-Kid Francis fight was the night of the twentieth of June. It was a good fight. (Bill and I will remember it a long time. One good fight does not wipe out another. I wrote a description of the fight but I cut it out. I was not part of the story. I am trying to hold this pretty tight down to the story.)18 How times changed. Three years later, Fitzgerald again previewed a late draft of a Hemingway novel, but the author was far less compliant. In his eight-page letter responding to A Farewell to Arms, Fitzgerald came down even harder this time. Of one section, he wrote, “Here you’re only listening to yourself, to your own mind beating out facily a sort of sense that isn’t really interesting, Ernest, nor really much except a sort of literary exercise—it seems to me that this ought to be thoroughly cut, even rewritten.” Fitzgerald accused Hemingway of creating a comedy out of tragedy in a paragraph describing how the Italians had lost 150,000 men in a battle; the author relentlessly repeats “cooked,” a British term for lost, or done in. Of the protagonist’s girlfriend, Fitzgerald says: “Catherine is too glib, talks too much physically.” And he suggests that Hemingway re-do the book’s ending. Hemingway’s reaction? At this point in his career, he felt flush with the run-away popularity of The Sun Also Rises and was losing respect for Fitzgerald (then struggling, after the success of The Great Gatsby, to write what would become Tender is the Night). Though Hemingway tried three-dozen endings for the book, his final choice wasn’t Fitzgerald’s. His jot to himself at the bottom of Fitzgerald’s letter says it all: “Kiss my ass—EH.” 7. Just tell the truth. To echo as purely as possible the themes in your life—to reflect with honesty the world as you see it so that your character shows through your work: these are the rules that Hemingway lived by. As writers reading Hemingway, we can draw comfort and instruction from his example. “Do not worry,” the master told himself in his memoir, A Moveable Feast, when he was stuck on a word (yes, even Hemingway suffered from writer’s block). “You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write that one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
David Kalish lives in upstate New York. He earned his MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College
NOTES 1 Hemingway Manuscripts. Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. 2 Ibid. 3 Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” in The Short Stories (New York: Scribner, 2003), 288. 4 Hemingway Manuscripts. Hemingway, “The Undefeated” in The Short Stories, 238. 5 Hemingway Manuscripts. 6 “The Undefeated” in The Short Stories, 265. 7 Hemingway Manuscripts. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner, 1980), 28. 8 Ibid., 14. 9 Ibid., 43. 10 Ibid., 69. 11 Ibid., 56. 12 Ibid., 88. 13 Hemingway Manuscripts. “Hills Like White Elephants” in The Short Stories, 277-278. 14 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1999), 12. 15 Matthew J. Bruccoli, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (Columbia, S.C.: Manly Inc., 1999), 72. 16 Hemingway Manuscripts. 17 Ibid. 18 Hemingway Manuscripts. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1954), 81.
WEEK 11--Ron Tanner-- Rules & Reality in Fiction AWP Writer’s Chronicle May/Summer 1997 "Children are the best reminders of how arbitrary our beliefs are. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things entirely differently." -Terry Eagleton A student organizer, a protester, a would-be radical in my youth, I've always had a problem with authority. Nothing gave me greater satisfaction than breaking the rules, especially silly rules, like the acceptable way to hold a dinner fork or fold a napkin, or that a man must wear a necktie to look respectable for a job interview or that a woman must wear a skirt. There were, however, some rules I never questioned. I wanted more than anything to write fiction, and so, when my college professors told me the dos and don'ts of Good Writing, I listened. I became a convert, a zealous defender of my teachers' rules. It didn't occur to me that most of these rules made no more sense than a dress code and, in fact, were just as arbitrary. All I knew was that by observing these codes of writerly conduct, I would gain mastery of my work and win the admiration of my readers. To write literary fiction, the stuff that really mattered, stuff that was so high-minded and artistic it doomed the writer to a life of self-righteous destitution-to write this way, I learned, was to observe three primary rules: (1) show, don't tell; (2) describe people and surroundings with great attention to concrete detail; and (3) don't disrupt the narrative with authorial commentary or opinion. Such rules, I was told, would enable me to create something as lifelike as possible. The attention to detail, for instance, is supposed to remind readers of the temporal clutter in which they live: the overweight tabby drowsing on the window sill, the stack of unread New Yorkers heaped beside the couch, the single blackening banana atop the Oz-green Granny Smiths in the fruit bowl. And the drama of "showing," of playing things out in quasi-real time, augmented by the absence of authorial intrusion, is supposed to make the narrative as immediate and bracing as life itself: the story simply seems to happen, to unfurl freely, because there is no one in the way-the puppeteer/stage manager is invisible, as we see in this example of Updike's Rabbit Angstrom playing a game of pick-up basketball: ...he sights squinting through the blue cloud of weed smoke, ...wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread pale hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in air itself. The moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. Updike's writing is very reportorial, a product of the so-called objective eye, because the narrator calls attention not to his own efforts but, rather, to the action he observes. Of course, this isn't objective at all since the narrator is obviously interpreting data for us, judging actions to be nervous or patient, a sound to be "ladylike," describing a ball that "seems to ride up" a certain way. And he's being very selective, noting the large lunules of Angstrom's fingernails instead of the sweat on his brow, say, or the set of his mouth. Thanks to a well-seated tradition of the so-called objective style, championed by such journalistic fiction writers as Samuel Clemens and Ernest Hemingway, this kind of realism has come to seem a very natural thing, the One Way of serious style in literary fiction. I was taught to disdain writers who couldn't pull it off, those who indulged in sentimentality or fantasy or homily-the romance-writers, the pulp-promoters, the formula-hacks. No one epitomizes the hack's aesthetic better nowadays than Robert Waller, whose writing, in light of the rules for literary fiction, often seems parodic, if not downright ludicrous. First, Waller tells us too much and shows us too little. Of Robert Kincaid's relations to his lover Jessica in The Bridges of Madison County, Waller writes, "He was an animal. A graceful, hard, male animal, who did nothing overtly to dominate her yet dominated her completely, in the exact way she wanted that to happen at this moment." Later he adds that their relationship "was spiritual, but it wasn't trite." In a writing workshop, Waller would receive, you can be sure, a number of requests for elaboration. No doubt most of us would like to see how Mr. Kincaid "dominated her completely, in the exact way she wanted." This would show us something of their relationship, something of their personalities. How was their love "spiritual"? And why does "trite" come to Waller's mind when he mentions spiritual? Is Waller thinking of the neo-Platonic spirituality of the Petrarchan tradition, the kind of you're-heaven-on-earth sentiment that's been overdone in love poems? Second, Waller seems unconcerned with accurate or artful prose. For example, as Kincaid's lover Jessica recalls how Kincaid "ran his tongue along her neck, licking her as some fine leopard might do in long grass out on the veldt," I'm wondering: As some fine leopard might lick its mate? Lick itself? Or lick Jessica? Third, Waller has his characters mouth things no reasonably thoughtful person-no real person-would say (or say seriously). The stone-faced, enigmatic Robert Kincaid, for instance, pronounces at one point, "The curse of modern times is the preponderance of male hormones in places where they can do long-term damage." Sounds like toxic chemicals buried in the back yard. And: Kincaid "said he was at the terminus of a branch of evolution and that it was a dead end." The missing link? Obviously non-literary fiction, when held to literary standards, is an easy target. But it seems hardly fair to mock a hen because it's not a rooster or a pig because it's not a lapdog. It is on the basis of unbalanced comparison that we create a comedy of manners. Like the pauper who pretends to be a prince, non-literary writers, when they enter the hall of high-brow literary fiction, betray their ignorance, using a knife when a fork is needed, bowing to their inferiors when clearly their inferiors should bow to them, saying please when they should say thank you. In their efforts to write something good, they seem wholly unnatural. "Natural," of course, is a misnomer when applied to fiction, since all fiction is most unnatural, an elaborate artifice in which readers willingly suspend their disbelief for a time and consider the world of a novel or a story the "real" world or, at least, something close to what they know as real. As Wayne Booth pointed out so long ago: "One of the most obviously artificial devices of the storyteller is the trick of going beneath the surface of the action to obtain a reliable view of a character's mind and heart," something none of us in the "real" world can do. To believe, then, that one way of writing, one handful of standards, is superior to or more natural than another is to make a potentially dangerous assumption-dangerous insofar as we risk being tyrannized by an æsthetic which may not serve our best interests. It's like espousing an adamant nationalism; at worst, like living as the Ugly American, someone incapable of travel to another country because everything reminds him of what he's missing. A classic instance of misunderstanding between a writer of one style and another of a very different style is Mark Twain's ironic dressing-down of James Fenimore Cooper's fiction, which Twain found abominably ill-made and outlandish. Wrote Twain: If Cooper had any real knowledge of Nature's ways of doing things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. For instance: one of his acute Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago, I think), has lost the trail of a person he is tracking through the forest. Apparently that trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor I could ever have guessed out the way to find it. It was very different with Chicago. Chicago was not stumped for long. He turned a running stream out of its course, and there, in the slush in its old bed, were the person's moccasin-tracks. The current did not wash them away, as it would have done in all other like cases-no, even the eternal laws of Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader (see rule 2 above). Twain concluded that "the inaccuracy of the details" in Cooper's writing "comes of Cooper's inadequacy as an observer." Obviously Twain didn't think his complaint-that Cooper's fiction was too fictitious-odd. Nor did he think it unreasonable to impose the standards of late-nineteenth-century realism (specifically the demand for journalistic factuality) on an early nineteenth-century Romantic. No doubt his critique of a long-dead writer made Twain feel good about what he himself was doing-and maybe this is what every generation feels obliged to do: kill its father in the name of independence. In the bigger scheme of understanding fiction, however, Twain missed the point. Some years after earning my BA, I marched into a graduate writing workshop, bristling with my armory of rules, and, lo, I discovered that I too had missed the point: during one memorable session, I heard a fellow writer say to me, with scarcely veiled disdain, "You have no idea what I'm trying to do." I sensed that she was right. And I began to apprehend that I had never received an adequate explanation as to why my teachers believed their techniques were the best. They pointed to tradition, I recall. They said such things as Tom Wolfe asserted recently, that the "introduction of realism into literature in the eighteenth century by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett was like the introduction of electricity into engineering. It was not just another device." Device, Wolfe should know, comes from the Middle English devis, meaning "intention" or "will." Nothing could be more willful than serious fiction-writers' insistence on "realism." With the intention of rendering the world as faithfully as possible, they have designed, not discovered, a style of writing which seems to do this-which is where the rules come in. The great problem of teaching creative writing is that teaching tends to reduce art to technique and, as a result, a teacher's suggestions may sound like injunctions: do it this way or else. The question students must ask is, Why are we doing it this way? Early in the intermediate fiction-writing course I teach, we review the decorum of writing dialogue. To be realistic, to sound convincing, I tell my students, it can't be like the dialogue we really engage in, all that verbiage, those phatic ums and ahs, that babble. It has to be pared down, the essentials; there's a rhythm, an ebb and flow. Sure, some respected fiction writers go naturalistic with dialogue-look at William Gaddis in JR or James Joyce in Ulysses-but the mainstream folk observe the rules. And these rules constitute the trick (another word for "device") that somehow makes the writing sound natural. Begin with the basics, I tell my students: each speaker gets a new paragraph; use quotation marks to indicate the speaking; dialogue tags indicate who says what, but don't overuse them. Punctuation points go inside the quotation marks. Here's where I pause, chalk in hand, a sample piece of dialogue on the board before me. Rules. Where do they come from? There are rules in any game, of course. These rules, the technicalities, come down to us from editors and, more specifically, typesetters who strove for some consistency in the look of the page. Consistency helps avoid confusion. Glance at a British text and you will see different rules: dashes instead of quotation marks. It could have been a smiley face. Here I draw a smiley face in the place of quotation marks and receive much laughter. How odd the students think this is. But it's not odd, I insist, it is simply conventional, something we've grown accustomed to over the years: quotation marks, a pair of starched apostrophes, to indicate the spoken word. Hispanic literature puts inverted question marks before every question (which always made a lot of sense to me). ¿Why don't we? It's all arbitrary. Just like the way we greet one another: "Hi, how you doin'?" It could have been as the Mandarin Chinese put it: "Chi fan ye mei iou?"-Have you eaten? The theory that informs this lesson comes to us from structuralism and linguistics. It's theory worth knowing insofar as it allows us to understand that nothing is writ in stone, that, in fact, the stone itself is conventional, an agreed-upon medium. The notion of agreement is key because it presupposes consensus or, at least, negotiation, something many students don't feel they're allowed to do since it seems the Teacher knows all. Obviously we don't have to like alien æsthetics to appreciate them. I don't like, for instance, the feminist aesthetic of nineteenth-century America, articulated in such novels as Susanne Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, and Harriet Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. With its tractarian dogma, its use of stereotypes (angels and devils), and its emotionalism (sentimentality), this stuff has little relation to the literature I know and love, but I can see that, within the realm of codes it privileges, the art of these writers is quite effective, quite accomplished, quite "natural." I appreciate it especially in contrast to the institutionally-sanctioned literary (mostly male) realism of the day, in whose face it flies-women's fiction of the nineteenth century is often flagrantly insubordinate, if not revolutionary. While my students have no trouble accepting the notion of convention as it applies to technique like dialogue form, they do have trouble applying this more broadly to the concept of story-that stories themselves are nothing more than games we play. This sounds to them all wrong because they have been taught to revere fiction as a vessel of Truth. You don't play games with Truth. To say something is a game, however, is not to say that we can't take it seriously. It is to say only that this thing we call literature is of human design, of value to a particular population for particular social and cultural reasons-which is to say, again, that your Literature may not be my Literature, that, given a another set of circumstances, both of us might have seen things differently. This is why my students are so upset with metafiction, which we begin reading mid-way through the semester. Initially, they hate it, its writers are so intrusive, their style so disturbing, so unlike anything these students have been allowed: Vonnegut-as-author stepping into his novel to state, "The bartender took several anxious looks in my direction... I did not worry about his asking me to leave the establishment. I had created him, after all. I gave him a name... I awarded him the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Soldier's Medal..."; Coover-as-author proclaiming in a short story, "I have brought two sisters to this invented island, and shall, in time, send them home again. I have dressed them and may well choose to undress them." "How can they do that?" my students demand. "They can do anything they like," I tell them, "they're the authors." Which is the lesson of metafiction, to remind us that fiction is only as natural as we allow ourselves to believe. Significantly, although metafiction is now passé, it still causes a stir, exemplified recently by Tim O'Brien's novel, In the Lake of the Woods, where O'Brien has no qualms about entering the narrative (through the trapdoor of footnotes) to speak his mind: "Biographer, historian, medium-call me what you want-but even after four years of hard labor I'm left with little more than supposition and possibility (about the events in this story)." One reviewer (in Publisher's Weekly) called these "an uncomfortable authorial intrusion" which "distract from, but cannot completely offset, the power of O'Brien's narrative," a judgment tantamount to saying that O'Brien, lacking ingenuity enough to make the story work in a conventional manner, failed by virtue of this shoddy practice-he cheated, in other words because, as we all know, the author is supposed to be invisible. In teaching, my aim is not to thwart the realist æsthetic which I myself embrace but, rather, to help liberate students from their assumptions about the ways things should be in the realm of fiction-writing. Maybe "liberate" is too grand a word but this was how I felt when I realized that I didn't have to write the way my teachers demanded. For years, I and other emerging writers were admonished for using the present tense in fiction because the present tense, we were told, betrays a shallow, fast-food-and-television-loving sensibility, a profound inability to apprehend the depth of history, i.e., the past. (See William Gass's "A Failing Grade For The Present Tense".) Never mind that a considerable number of "classics" have been written in the present tense (Dickens' Bleak House, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Updike's The Centaur, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, to name four), not to mention nearly every other poem that's ever been penned. Is this to say that anything goes? I'm not that libertarian and, in fact, believe that every genre and sub-genre of writing constitutes a neighborhood which, like actual neighborhoods, makes demands upon its inhabitants. Those who would be well received in a particular neighborhood must observe the decorum of behavior appropriate to those who live and work there. This explains why an avid reader of Danielle Steele, say, may not enjoy reading Bernard Malamud. If I am more comfortable in Malamud's neighborhood, it's no doubt due to my training: I've been taught how to enjoy his behavior as a writer. Which is where the rules come in. The rules or codes that delineate a certain kind of writing constitute that community's decorum-a set of conventions that signal how one should behave in this neighborhood. If I would write experimental fiction, for instance, I'd do well to know what people deem the standards of mainstream or traditional fiction: I have to know what the rules are before I can break them, in other words. Ultimately my students and I strive to articulate the conventions a writer seems to be observing: How does the writer negotiate these in the course of telling a story? Usually we discover some regularity, some consistency, in the writer's rhetorical strategies. If we were to examine Robert Waller's work, we would find, I suppose, that while the writer attempts to respect the American realistic tradition, in some instances nearly parodying Hemingway in his journalistic attention to observable action, he subjects this to a romantic sensibility which makes realistic concerns secondary. One of his primary strategies appears to be a form of shibumi, the Japanese term for making use of white space in painting. Waller explains and explores so little (i.e., he offers lots of "white space"), and puts so much emphasis upon the abstract, transcendent nature of Robert and Jessica's sudden love, that willing readers are compelled to fill in the blanks-the book is a fantasy that makes readerly participation not only inviting but necessary. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't work for me. Despite the experiments my students try, mixing genres and playing against conventions, most of them return finally to the realm of the Real-the æsthetic of literary fiction in the US-because this is what they know best; this is where they are most comfortable. We are, after all, products of our environment, of what we have been encouraged to read and write. Nonetheless, by allowing dissent from the prevailing æsthetic, by encouraging students to question the status quo, we may begin to show, in the words of Jonathan Culler, that "reading is not an innocent activity," that "it is charged with artifice," that "to refuse to study one's mode of reading (one's mode of writing) is to neglect a principle source of information about literary activity." In contradiction to this notion, there persists in America the post-Romantic myth of the artist as the Gifted One who somehow-through meditation and magic (inspiration)-apprehends the ideal form and style for his or her work. Which is to say that the artist has need of nothing but time to write: eventually lightning will strike. Perhaps such faith extends as far back as the Greeks and their sense of the poet as oracle, one touched by divinity. I have heard successful writers say, "I don't want to know what I do when I write well, I just want to do it," as if interrogation of their artful rhetoric would ruin the mystery. To them I would say, Don't worry; the mystery won't disappear, because it's not in the writing, it's in us, it's in our ability to surrender ourselves to a fiction, in spite of our understanding of its tricks and tropes, because we want, above all, to believe in the make-believe.
Ron Tanner has just completed work on a short-story collection, A Bed of Nails, and is now revising a novel. He teaches writing at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland.
WORKS CITED 1 Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. 2 Coover, Robert. Pricksongs & Descants. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969. 3 Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. 4 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 5 Gass, William. "A Failing Grade for the Present Tense." The New York Times Book Review 11 October 1987: 10. 6 Review of In the Lake of the Woods. Publisher's Weekly 11 July 1994: 61. 7 O'Brien, Tim. In The Lake of the Woods. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. 8 Twain, Mark. "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" in Anthology of American Literature. Ed. George Michael. Vol. 2. New York: McMillan Publishing, 1974. 9 Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Crest Books, 1960. 10 Vonnegut, Jr., Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dell, 1973. 11 Waller, Robert. The Bridges of Madison County. New York: Warner Books, 1992. 12 Wolfe, Tom. "Stalking the Billion Footed Beast." Harper's November 1989: 45-56. Frederick Busch--from What a Writer Might Need to Hear, Introduction to Letters to a Fiction Writer AWP Writer’s Chronicle May/Summer 1999 ….Anton Chekhov-do you believe it?-who, grumbling and sco1ding, nevertheless makes time to offer this advice to a new writer: In my opinion, descriptions of nature should be extremely brief and offered by the way, as it were. Give up commonplaces, such as: "the setting sun, bathing in the waves of the darkening sea, flooded with purple gold," and so on. Or: "Swallows flying over the surface of the water chirped gaily." In descriptions of nature one should seize upon minutiae, grouping them so that when, having read the passage, you close your eyes, a picrure is formed. For example, you will evoke a moonlit night by writing that on the mill dam the glass fragments of a broken bottle flashed like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled along like a ball.1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps even busier and more harried than yourself, sir, returned a short story to a sophomore at Radcliffe with these admonitions: "I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present," he begins. And then he instructs: It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway's first stories "In Our Time" went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In "This Side of Paradise" I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile. That. is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is "nice" is something for you to decide. You wouldn't be interested in a soldier who was only a LITTLE brave.2 William Faulkner, like Fitzgerald, suggests what it takes to write serious fiction; in addition, like Chekhov, he grapples with some of the inner workings of the endeavor: You are learning. All you need is to agonise and sweat over it, never be quite satisified even when you know it is about as right as it can be humanly made, never to linger over it when done because you don't have time, you must hurry hurry to write it again and better, the best this time. Not the same story over again, but Joan Williams, who has the capacity to suffer and anguish and would trade it for nothing under heaven. The mss. is still too prolix. It needs to be condensed. There is more writing than subject; you see, I read it again last night. A child's loneliness is not enough for a subject. The loneliness should be a catalyst, which does something to the rage of the universal passions of the human heart, the adult world, of which it-the child-is only an observer yet. You don't want to write just "charming" things. Or at least I don't seem to intend to let you.3 The point, sir, is that these artists, these masters, address those who may be starting their apprenticeship with a certain concern for the new writer's dignity, and a respect for the art. John Steinbeck was clever enough (and generous enough) to offer a set of guidelines: 1 Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised. 2 Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material. 3 Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn't exist. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one. 4 If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there. 5 Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. 6 If you are using dialogue-say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.4 Frederick Busch is the author of 20 books of fiction, including Girls, Closing Arguments, and The Night Inspector (Harmony Books, May 1999). This is the introduction to Letters to a Fiction Writer, which will be published by W.W. Norton in May 1999.
NOTES 1 Anton Chekhov to A.P. Chekhov, May 10, 1886 in The Letters of Anton Chekhov, translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. The Viking Press (a division of Pengiun Putnam, Inc.), 1968. 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald to Frances Turnbull, November 9, 1938, in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A LIFE IN LETTERS, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1994. 3 William Faulkner to Joan Williams, 1952. Reprinted with permission of Jill Faulkner Summers. 4 John Steinbeck to Robert Wallsten, 2/13-14/1962 from Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, ed. Elaine A. Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten, 1975. WEEK 12--From Life is Not a River- Some Thoughts on Teaching Poetry Gerald Stern AWP Writer’s Chronicle, November/December 1987
Gary Snyder wrote that he would teach young poets how to write by having them learn to fix truck engines. Robert Bly would have them concentrate on anything but their own small labors. Everywhere I go the workshop instructors are designing strategies to revivify workshops, to make them more exciting or more directed for the students, to make them more , bearable for the instructors. There is a doubt about the procedure, almost a kind of crisis. One teaches literature, one provides subject matter, one form. Maybe the crisis has to do with sheer numbers. Could there be that many poets? Isn't there something grotesque in the mass production? How do you institutionalize the teaching of poetry? Have not poets always learned their art by endless reading and endless writing of bad poems and then by a sudden transformation as they find their own voices and their own methods? Can or cannot the workshop be structured to reflect this? Wasn't it a different thing when a very small number of stubborn and gifted and slightly crazy young writers presented themselves on the doorsteps of their chosen masters or into an overcrowded and poorly run new type of collective called a "workshop"? Is this position reactionary? How do you treat a collection of young writers as a class- how do you give B-in writing-do you base it on quality, quantity? What poet in his right-mind wants a B-student anyway, or, another way of putting it, how can you as a teacher respond in an even-handed, detached, kindly way to twelve or fifteen young writers over fourteen weeks? What if there's just one or two you want to, or can, teach-what about the others? And don't the B- and D- young poets come back anyhow to haunt you at the time of their own transformations-do not one or two of them transform themselves just to prove their point: that you were blind and mean and stupid? Wasn't I myself one of them? If I make a special claim for poetry, I can hear a professor in the medical school or the School of Social Work or the department of Linguistics make the same claim. But I think it's not the same. This is not a profession, writing poetry, and it cannot be licensed, and there is no way of predicting hat will constitute excellence-we call it beauty-no matter how we try. Unless things have altogether Changed, and I don't think they have, a young poet's ambition is the same: not to have an agreeable job or a tailor-made house-at least not in his or her role as a poet, at least not when he or she is young-but to have fame, and recognition; and there is no way of decently incorporating this. Children they must have, jobs, lawnmowers-let's not argue this-but fame more than this, and more important than fame, the creation of the beautiful poem. How do you train this creature? I love to read the grand schemes of young poets or their rich letters home, how they ransacked the libraries, how they mastered the disciplines, how they did it alphabetically. I tried to read five books a week, I remember, and I felt terrible guilt when I wasted a single day. I tried to resist writing at first. I thought I didn't have the right, let alone the knowledge, to do any writing if I didn't have the wisdom, and I thought the wisdom came through reading. I spent many evenings-every evening-with my two mad friends (it was in Pittsburgh) reading poems aloud or analyzing texts, but we didn't exchange poems very much, hardly at all. We preferred to relish the bitter thoughts of Jeffers-who was in Pittsburgh before us-or marvel at the beauty of Yeats or the heroics of Pound. When we did read our poems to each other, we read them for approval, for proof. We weren't interested in each other's criticism-at least we didn't submit them for criticism. That was my first education in poetry, and it was done altogether outside of the university, although we were all students. How should we alter the curriculum? I hear endless nostalgia for the quonset hut the workshop used to be housed in at Iowa before the English-Philosophy Building was built. Imagine having nostalgia for a quonset hut-how desperate we are for the Left Bank. I myself prefer as informal an arrangement and as much freedom as possible. And I prefer to create a system where the very best students will prosper, even if the others flounder a little. Probably I, like others, will either recreate the program of my own youth (as I have described it) or I will modify it, or turn against it-reverse it-according to how dissatisfied I was with it. I would like to see the flow come from the students. The direction. It will anyway. That is the way poets learn. It is madly ironic that they are seated nearby other graduate students who tend not to learn that way. Poets even read for different reasons. I am not making a mystique of this; there's hardly any mystery in it. It is describable, analyzable. As for form, I preferred here too to study it on my own. It partook of ecstasy then, as did Medieval Latin. But the individual can make his or her own choice. As far as economics, there is nothing to tell young poets except that "You abandon the good life, ye who enter here." There is occasionally a teaching job, which will be good for some poets. The Ph.D. in literature or linguistics is more or less ruinous, though some have survived it. What Williams did was good for him because it provided him subject matter, or rather a life that was not only rich for poetry but tied in with his own theory of art. I am amazed that I make money from poetry now; sometime in my twenties, I had relinquished any hope for that in this life. It's not difficult to understand-s-people just don't buy enough books of poetry. So you have to be a little more skillful than the rest, a little more cunning. It's part of the poetic sensibility. I always challenge my students when I discover narrowness setting in-or exclusivity. One of my own regrets is that I didn't pursue more things; I should have allowed myself to develop as a painter, I should have continued singing in a chorus, I should have become a rug buyer in a department store, a social worker. I should have truly learned Yiddish. I don't mean that you should avoid specialization. I mean that you should have five specialties, ten; it's not that hard. Needless to say, the whole field of literature, not one decade or one century or one country, is the proper area of concentration. Criticism is a sore point. I think sometimes our poets avoid reading criticism just out of perversity, because the other graduate students spend so much time on it, or they avoid it because so much of it is badly written or so alien to the work, so reduced in intensity, so ugly in the face of such beauty. Yet good criticism can hurry you to the work and force your attention and enlighten you-obvious things. I can't agree with Rilke that reading criticism destroys the poetic spirit, as good as that sounds, nor that "trusting yourself and your own feelings" is all that you must do and the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you." I think the sudden changes I made in my own life, that is in my writing, were always the result of reading other poets, but reading criticism, what shall I say, alerted me. Anyhow, critics use language, and if you find someone using language well, or if the ideas are provocative, or suggestive, how can you resist? This is not to ignore the mythic hostility between poet and critic, with all its psychological and cultural and religious roots and overtones. But you can read the other-I don't want to say "enemy" -and have dinner with them and marry them and go on canoe trips with them. As far as theory is concerned, or what is called theory, I think the same criteria should prevail: if the writing is interesting, and if the ideas are provocative, it is worthwhile reading. You will not be able to resist reading. I don't know if poets are troubled by the same thing in theorists as the more traditional critic, say the literary critic, is. They are not upset if that critic is being displaced or challenged, nor are they terribly upset by the power or the dance of the theorist. In many ways they see the bizarre and unexpected postures of some theorists as being fairly close anyhow to the behavior and postures of artists-poets-and they find themselves-to their surprise-sharing a certain brotherhood or sisterhood with them. (Maybe cousinhood.) Of course, not all poets think alike. Some are alarmed by theorists, some are amused, some are a species of theorists themselves. What I dislike most about theory is the bad writing and the arrogance. I also dislike the mystique, the boosterism, the fake scientism, the clannishness, the code words, the contempt for experience, the faddishness, the Buddha smile, the disdain for authors. I do like the puzzling mixtures, the absurdity, the subversion, the new gathering of old disciplines, the reconsiderations, the redescriptions, the attempt to make the familiar strange. Although I might prefer it in a novel or an epic. In its most vital sense, theory is an attempt to enlarge and redefine the nature and the boundaries of literary criticism. It is therefore radical. Although it may be presumptuous. Of course, it ceases to be literary criticism and becomes something else, part sociology, part psychology, part linguistics, part history. [Terry] Eagleton sounds contemptuous when he writes about literary critics who object to theory "ousting and standing in for literature," (his words) or "smothering the object it was supposed to mediate." He calls this "customary humanist banality," and says that "the claim that theory is admissible only in so far as it directly illuminates the literary text is a blatantly policing gesture." And "the disparate preoccupations now somewhat randomly grouped under the aegis of 'theory' are rich enough in their own right to warrant 'independent' intellectual status; they are not tolerable merely as a mirror of the all-privileged literary work, which their implications in any case far outstrip." This arrogance-I would have to say this stupidity-is almost incredible, if I am reading Eagleton right, and I think I'm pretty good at that. The almost universal objection to theory is that it gives no preference to the original text, or even denies there is such a text, and that it claims its own critical response to be serious literature. It might even claim supremacy over the text it is considering-and why not? My own objection to theory is its consistent refusal to take life seriously. This may come out of historic embarrassment, a refusal to be taken in again, or a deep cynicism posing as irony, but-though I love playfulness and roles and symbolic behavior and indirect action and irony itself (and lying and concealing and masquerie and buffoonerie)-at bottom I believe my life and the life of the universe is deeply serious, even unforgettable. Harold Bloom, himself a theorist among theorists, objects strenuously to the anti-poetic, anti-humanist, anti-imaginative position of his Yale colleagues, those Derrideans. He believes in author, intention, and the power of the imagination. He believes in poetry as an expression of human will and affirmation. He also believes in Oedipal Titanism, and he has strange taste, but that's another matter. His fury at the non-believers may, in part, be derived from constant association with them; he may bump into them in the stacks. And speaking of Derrida, I have not found him to be wilder or more original than either Gertrude Stein or James Joyce. Needless to say, not as moving either, but that is my own bourgeois pathos showing through, the affective fallacy. I suspect that the next stage of theory, after the present rag is wrung dry, will be a move towards a Zen-or Tao-like simplicity. After all, it's already there, isn't it? Doesn't one thing mean another? Isn't some thing something else? Or am I, in my ignorance, unaware that this has already happened? For my part, I can't wait for the solemn banality. In the meantime, things shift for themselves. One hand puts down Foucault and one picks up Chaucer. One eye glances at Dickens, the other at Barthes, I love those shocking eyes, those dancing hands. What is the one thing I would tell a young poet-s-student of mine or not-that could change his or her life? What would I undo-what choice would I have made that I didn't make? Should I say that I would change nothing? Everything? There are a thousand versions of the "river joke." ("Is it your position that life is not a river?") I like the one with the Chasidim lined up beside the dying master, the Chasid. There the intonation counts, (It's all in the intonation.] I can see the poor, weary, half-dead, bored Chasid raising one eyebrow and I can hear him ask (in Yiddish), "You think it's not a river?" Should I say, "Read more"? Should I say, "Submit, submit, don't be afraid"? Should I say, "Forget family, forget money, give yourself completely up to poetry"? That's what I would say: "Read more, don't be afraid, give yourself completely up to poetry." "And live a long time in either Greece or southern France." WEEK 13, 14--The Yin and Yang of Teaching Creative Writing Joyce Greenberg Lott AWP Writer’s Chronicle February 2001 My professional life revolves around two activities-writing and teaching. As in the old song "Love and Marriage," I used to think I couldn't have one without the other. Writing gives me integrity. When I don't write I feel like a shadow; or worse, like an unidentifiable lump in a pot of porridge. Teaching gives me the ability to live in this world. When I don't teach I feel like a woman without feet; or worse, like a narcissist about to fall into the water. Together, writing and teaching make me feel whole. However, as a result of a recent experience, I am beginning to realize that, rather than affording balance, these two activities create opposition. Writers take risks. They dig into their psyches and try to express something new. Using words for tools, they choose those with the sharpest edges. Teachers, on the other hand, try to avoid risks. They inhibit their creative impulses and censor their language for fear of repercussions. And for good reason. Just click on the People for the American Way's website at <http://www.pfaw.org> to see the list of censorship issues and banned books in schools-or read any high school handbook for the prevailing policy on "bad language." According to a report released in September 2000 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, 152 challenges to books were filed in Texas schools. Of these 152 challenges, 42 banning incidents resulted. While it appears that most of the challenges were for language and sexual content deemed to be "inappropriate," other targets included books containing references to witches or the supernatural, like the popular Harry Potter series and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Specific curricular choices in individual schools also have been under attack, along with state and national reform movements and the very notion of a free public education for all Americans. So have teachers. In 1997, The Albuquerque Journal reported that Patsy Cordova and her sister Nadine were suspended and then fired from their longtime teaching positions in Vaughn, New Mexico after they introduced a curriculum that included lessons on Chicano history. Cordova told a group of English teachers that before her troubles began, she expected to be named teacher of the year for her innovative curriculum. That same year, about a hundred people gathered in Salt Lake City, Utah, to sign a petition to keep their children out of Wendy Weaver's classroom, because Weaver, after 17 years of superior evaluations, had come out as a lesbian teacher. Teachers such as Cordova and Weaver are not alone in facing such attacks on self-expression. On May 1, 1999, writing and teaching clashed badly for me. I had just returned from a month's stay at a writers' colony, my first. The public school district, where I have been teaching for the past 20 years, supported me in this mini-sabbatical. They believed, as did I, that after all those years of teaching English literature, academic writing, and creative writing, time to focus on my own work would not only benefit me, but also my students. As a finalist for the Frances Shaw Fellowship, I traveled to Ragdale in Lake Forest, Illinois. My residency turned out to be even more astonishing than I had anticipated. Poems that I had regularly lost among pages of student work fit snugly into my journal. Uninterrupted hours stretched before me. I began to write short stories in addition to poetry. And I found myself thinking about my students: what it's like to sit in front of a computer screen and be afraid to begin; what it's like to know you are expected to produce. My new friends at the writers' colony ribbed me. When I talked about "my kids," they said, they didn't know whether I was talking about my own children or those I taught. Since I didn't have email at Ragdale, a few students wrote me letters-about contests they had won, readings they wished I had been able to attend. They inquiried about my writing, about how I spent my time. Grateful to get a taste of the writer's life, albeit under idyllic conditions, I looked forward to sharing my experiences with the adolescents I taught, especially those who dreamed about becoming writers themselves. When I returned in May, I spent the first two days gabbing with students in my four creative writing classes. Many of them had never seen Chicago. They wanted to know what a prairie looked like, if the quiet bothered me, if I became bored without TV. They asked me if I had made friends, how old the other artists were, if any of them were men. And, they also asked to hear what I had written. This didn't surprise me. I have always believed that a creative writing classroom is a place where traditional boundaries of authority and deference between students and the teacher break down. Since I not only see myself as a certified teacher, but also as a struggling writer-one who takes risks, revises, makes mistakes, and tries again-when I teach, I invite my students into my own private world. Oh, not completely-I'm not that dumb-but I give them a hint, a smell. I read them passages from work in progress. I tell them stories about something that happened to me yesterday or in the past. I am not the only teacher who spices her lessons with personal anecdotes. Nor does this sort of openness happen only in creative writing classrooms. My husband, a history teacher at a private day school, tells his students as much about his eighth grade teacher, Aden Van Wie, and about the price of broccoli, as he does about Puritans. And my colleague down the hall talks to his classes about his wife's death. I know this; I've heard it from students. I've also heard from students that my husband and my colleague down the hall, both popular and demanding teachers, know how to get the most from them. Stephen S. Hall, in the New York Times Magazine (June 4, 2000), says this very same thing. Writing about "The Smart Set" at Midwood High School in Brooklyn, Hall mentions that when he asks students why Midwood has been so successful in recent Intel competitions, they invariably remark about the close and informal rapport with their teachers. Hall comes to the conclusion that "in order to push students to their limits, and perhaps a little beyond, you need to know them well." It has been my experience that in order to know students well, they have to feel as though they know you well. Many of my students work to their limits, or beyond. They win contests and publish in national teen magazines. And, just as important to me, some of them experience growth in their personal lives. Hank Kalet, a journalist and poet who visited my classroom and also helped judge a recent poetry reading (more about that later), wrote an editorial about my program in the local newspaper. He said that I "encourage (students) to put their feelings and observations into words. It's not something that should be minimized." Kalet continued: "The images we see of teens, generally, are unflattering, portraying them as apathetic, commercialized robots, locked in a greedy culture of violence and sex. Watching these teens... easily expoldes these stereotypes." Don't get me wrong. In no way am I tooting my own horn or nominating myself for best teacher. Far from it. Just read further. When my first block class asked to hear what I had written, I read them an excerpt from my journal. (I had looked over my work the night before and earmarked a few pages.) I read the entry about how I had overpacked and had to sit on my suitcase to zip it. And how, in the airport, I watched a small man, who looked as though he had traveled halfway around the world, open his suitcase. It held only one shiny suit and three nesting bowls. My class liked the entry and said I should turn it into a poem. We talked about their journals, and the way writers use journals. Prepared to read this same entry to my third block creative writing class, I was surprised when they said they would rather hear something I had worked on. "I wrote several poems," I said. "I'll read one to you." Then I said, "I tried to write short stories, too. Maybe that's because I taught them to you before I left. It's all your fault," I kidded them. "Read us one of your stories," they said. "Oh, I can't," I said. "They're not very good. I only have one with me. I'm still working on it. It's 18 pages already-much too long to read." "We want to hear it." So, caught in a moment of intimacy, victim of my own pedagogy-"Don't say it's not any good; just read it."-I read my students the first draft of my story "Hungry Woman." I read about deprivation, the way the mother in the story pulled food from the protagonist's mouth, when she was a baby, to keep her from getting fat. And I read about fulfillment, the way she fell in love with a man who gave her a melon. I read all 18 pages of "Hungry Woman," many of them descriptions of meals; and among all those hundreds of words, I read these two lines: "Sometimes we brought bananas to bed, dipped in honey. Other times I licked chocolate from his penis." When I read these sentences, I swallowed hard (no pun intended) and thought to myself, "Oops, I should have left that out." But it was too late. I know this makes me sound irresponsible. I considered saying, for the sake of this essay, that I wrote "body" instead of "penis." But the truth is less flattering, at least less flattering in terms of how teachers, particularly female teachers, are expected to behave within a public school system. If this were another piece of writing, I might discuss the connection between creativity and eroticism, the old-fashioned muse that liberates writers. Or, I might take another tack and write about how either inhibition or expression of budding eroticism fuels high school writers-how they flourish when they're allowed to be just a little bit naughty. But instead, I will stick to what really happened. To my surprise, when I finished reading, the class applauded. "Have I offended anybody?" I asked. "I forgot that ‘Hungry Woman' wasn't entirely PG." No one seemed uncomfortable, except for several students who said the story made them hungry. "You shouldn't have read it to us before lunch," they said. We talked about how food worked as metaphor, and they even gave me suggestions: I should develop the mother more, flashback to the protagonist's childhood. No one mentioned my indiscretion. That afternoon, as I gathered my papers into my briefcase, the thought passed through my mind that teaching and writing can be a risky combination, but they do complement one another. Three weeks later, my supervisor called me into her office and shut the door. Visibly worried, she came right to the point. "The superintendent of the district just received a complaint from a parent that you read your classes pornographic material that you had written," she said. "What did you read to the students when you came back from Ragdale? We must see it." "I read from my journal and some poems," I said, even though I knew full well where the problem lay. "What class was it? How many parents?" "Only one," she said. "But I can't tell you which class or what parent. They asked the superintendent not to reveal their name, because you would take it out on their child." "That's ridiculous," I said. "I know," my supervisor said sympathetically. "You would never do anything like that. But the principal says he must see the story." Immediately, I felt protective of my creation. "I may have read something inappropriate," I said, "but none of my students complained to me. We're pretty close. I don't know if I feel comfortable showing the principal or the superintendent what amounts to an unfinished draft." "You may have to," she said sadly. For two days, I taught the 24 students in block three, not knowing which one had asked his or her parents to call the short story police. To say I felt paranoid would be an understatement. I thought I might lose my job. Even worse, I thought the high school might lose the writing program I had worked so hard to initiate and maintain-a program that has grown each year, one that the district supports generously. I blamed myself, my lack of judgment, the impulsive way I go about things in the classroom. I measured my words and watched my most enthusiastic students stifle yawns. My worst fears, though, involved the Fourth Annual Celebration of Poetry and Prose, the reading that was to take place at the high school the following week. My students had already selected their pieces; and for the first time, I began to worry about the political ramifications of their work. Cori's short story "Brick" dealt with an abortion; Matt's story "Absolute Uncertainty" depicted teenagers drunk on alcohol. I reminded myself that Sarah's memoir "Timber Races" recalled playing in the family pool with her sister, and that Amanda's poem "Grandpa's Eye" celebrated her grandparents. Then I began to worry about Amanda's poem: she didn't portray her grandparents as stereotypically loving. Dave, one of my best students, wanted to open the program playing the bongo drum and reading Allen Ginsberg's "When the Light Appears Boy." I rushed to my anthology to look at Ginsberg's poem, and there glaring back at me, eleventh line from the last, stood the words "your big hard cock," the same apparatus, in different language, that I had evoked in "Hungry Woman." "You can't read what you planned," I told Cori, Matt, and Dave-and a half dozen other students, one of whom had written a memoir about learning from her father's therapist that her parent was transsexual. "Why not?" they asked. "You told us to select our best work. You encouraged us to take risks, not to be clichéd and sentimental. What's going on, Mrs. Lott?" So, I told them. We are living in conservative times; this is a public high school; I am frightened of losing my job and the program. Well, it didn't work. They're kids. "Freedom of speech!" they shouted. "We'll picket; we won't let anything happen to you or creative writing, Mrs. Lott. What do you want us to do?" Kasey twisted her nose ring, Jesse's red hair blazed, and I knew I had taken the wrong approach. Unfortunately, many of today's teenagers live the lives they're writing about. They have experienced hardships, fallen in and out of love, or suffered the fracture of families. "Go ahead and read what you've planned," I said. "We're all in this together." That same night, two days after having been called into my superintendent's office, I came up with a plan: I'd write a letter of apology, try to deflect the furor. Getting out of bed, I tiptoed downstairs to my computer. (I had not yet told my husband what had happened. In fact, I had told no one. I felt too confused and embarrassed.) "Dear Parent," I began, still not knowing the name of the person who had caused me so much anguish. "Please accept my heartfelt apologies... I had no intention of having my story viewed as pornographic. In fact, I see this story as a serious attempt to illustrate needs and power plays in relationships. Thank you for bringing this indiscretion to my supervisor's attention. Please understand that my own work is not a formal part of the curriculum and that no one besides me should be blamed... As a result of your concern, I will be more careful in the future and will review any work before I share it spontaneously with students." I showed the letter to my husband that morning and told him the story. When I got to school, I gave it to my supervisor. While she was reading it, she looked up and said, "This is wonderful. They asked for an apology. I'll give your letter to the principal." "May I see the letter they wrote to the superintendent?" I asked. "The principal will make that decision." Then she looked at me sympathetically. "I'm sorry this happened," she said, "but you must be more careful. You should be more aware of the times in which we teach." That was Friday. We had scheduled the poetry reading for the following Monday night. Before I left school for the weekend, I met with the principal. He also approved of my letter and had xeroxed the complaint the parents had written, along with a copy of the district complaint policy, for me. I found him sympathetic and straightforward. But, he still insisted upon reading my story. "I'll think about it over the weekend," I told him. Upon reading the letter of complaint, I was relieved to find that the student turned out to be someone who had not done particularly well in my course. She had had problems generating original work or understanding material we studied. Somehow I felt less of a sense of betrayal than if it had been a student whom I thought of as a buddy. The letter, though, appalled me. In it, the parent called me "a well-seasoned pornographer." She said that my story "was filled with descriptions of sexual acts that (she was) even too embarrassed to repeat." And she asked, "Is this where our hard-earned taxes are going? What happened to exposing our children to the great and valuable writers of our time, such as Hemingway, Joyce, Brontë, Melville?" I was glad she hadn't mentioned Hawthorne, since I was beginning to feel a little like Hester Prynne, too sexually and intellectually independent to be female. In fact, I thought I might be living in similar times. Reading the letter of complaint helped change my attitude, since what I had written was not nearly as bad as what I had been accused of writing. I decided to submit a copy of my story with one change ("penis" to "body") to my supervisor and my principal, with the understanding that they would not xerox it or show it to anyone else. I admit this hypocrisy with some shame, but the frightened, practical teacher side of me insisted on replacing the word "penis." Neither my student nor her parents attended the poetry reading Monday evening. In fact, the mother complained, in a letter to me, that "if the school system requires this type of activity when the school is not normally in session, they should be prepared to provide bus service for all our children to and from the school." I was relieved. About 40 students, about a dozen staff members, and many parents did attend the reading, along with Hank Kalet and three other judges. Amanda read her poem about her grandparents and won first prize in original poetry. Sarah read her story about playing in the family pool with her sister and won second prize in original prose. Matt and Cori read their stories and won third prize and honorable mention, respectively. Dave opened the reading with his bongo drum and Allen Ginsberg's words and won first place for dramatic presentation of a published work. I perspired profusely and beamed with pride at the same time. Now that the trauma has receded-my principal gave me a copy of the letter he sent to the parents, enclosing my apology-I am still somewhat anxious. Although I feel grateful that I have a 20-year tenure and am not a new teacher, I remain uncertain about my professional life. I know that next year I will continue to do what I love: teach and write. But I do not know if I will share my work with students. I still crave that illusory balance, the yin and yang of being who I am, whole and integrated, on the page and in the classroom. I know, though, that circumstances will force me to compartmentalize. The energies that produce writers do not maintain teachers. Like most adults, I realize that inhibiting part of myself is necessary to keep a positon or preserve balance in life. Yet I still mourn the loss of some of my best impulses, the excitement and creativity that adolescents experience when I lower the barrier between myself and them.
Joyce Greenberg Lott's essays, poems, and stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Journal of NJ Poets, Kalliope, and other journals. She is the author of A Teacher's Stories, Reflections on High School Writers (Boynton/Cook Heinemann).
Italicized Writings Two years ago, I was surprised to find myself unprepared for the emotional outpouring contained in the first in-class writings by my Chicano Studies creative writing students. I had asked them to recount the first time they were teased because they spoke Spanish or because they were Mexican or Chicana/o. I expected that one or two students might confess they had never experienced such a moment. I expected that another couple of students might shy away from exploring such painful territory. What I hadn't expected were 15 bitter accounts of childhood humiliations, accounts that included a playmate's derisive taunt ("You're a dirty Mexican. I'm not going to play with you anymore"), a teacher's well-intended observation ("If you didn't have an accent, people might think you were American"). For the balance of the semester, the students drew from these early accounts to articulate their struggle to define their cultural reality. I encouraged them to write in both English and Spanish. We explored cultural myths and legends. We re-invented personal histories. Sometimes the results reminded me of Gloria Anzaldua's comment that "I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one." More than half of these students were juniors or seniors. None had ever taken a creative-writing course. They all had completed the required nine semester hours of composition and six hours of literature courses through the university's English department. None of them, however, felt they could comfortably express themselves in a creative writing course through that same department. As one student noted, "I want to be a writer, but I want to write what I know. Sometimes what I know I can say only in Spanish." Unfortunately, this meant that two of the best writers in my class, both graduating seniors, probably would never again write creatively. Their presence in a Chicano Studies creative writing course reminded me of another student who, when I asked if he had ever taken a creative writing course through the English department, answered: Why should I take creative writing classes? Who was I going to take them from? I met the professor who taught the class. Automatically, from the first Intro to Poetry class, when I showed my poetry to him, he said my imagery was too angry and emotional, and he was coming from the point of view that my situation couldn't be that bad, and he asked if I was sure I wasn't imagining it. So many voices are silenced before they are revealed. We fail to acknowledge that in some parts of the country, Spanish weaves its cultural footprint through our daily lives. For many bilingual students, the university is their first experience outside and away from familiar cultural surroundings. Yet many of our creative writing programs overlook this reality. As a result, many bilingual students never explore their creative voices. Unfortunately, those who do enroll in English-department creative writing courses sometimes find themselves in the position of the student who wrote: I think that some of the professors and some of my creative writing classmates don't think it's important to write in both English and Spanish. What that means is that they don't respect who I am. When I first began questioning how we could recruit more students of color into our creative writing courses, I kept returning to the model with which I was most familiar: the traditional creative writing course offered by the English department. Yet there are two other models with which I am also familiar: the previously described creative writing course I taught in the Chicano Studies department at San Diego State University, and a series of poetry workshops I conducted in two different history classes in that same department. In the history classes, I began with an overview of the material covered that semester, including pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-colonial history. The students responded with a series of pre-writing exercises. Then I gave the students a series of prompts related to their personal experiences as Chicanos. Finally, I modeled a poem for them, using Sor Juana as my influence. The students responded with poems of their own, focusing on one figure in Mexican history, drawing connections between that figure and experiences from their own lives. The results amazed us. For the professors, the poems provided a novel insight into how their students processed newly acquired information. The responses went beyond the essay exam and the six-page research paper to incorporate personally relevant images and experiences. For the students, poetry provided a new approach to analyzing and integrating historical material and personal experience. One student, in particular, chronicled her own journey from the barrio to the university, focusing on friends and family who accused her of betraying her culture because she had left her community. Then she compared her experience to that of Malintzin/Malinche, the Aztec princess whose name became synonymous with traitor after she was sold into slavery to become Cortez's translator and later his mistress. Many of us incorporate contemporary ethnic literature as models in our creative writing courses. How many of us, however, remember to encourage our multilingual and multicultural students to incorporate native languages in their creative work? What discussions and directed exercises could we use to explore our students' cultural myths and legends? How many of us assemble short bibliographies that introduce students to the broader spectrum of works by writers of color? Why not assign oral presentations that focus on those writers? As creative writers, we enter and create entire worlds through language. We envision possibilities. As creative writing professors, however, we need to imagine the possibility of a larger interdisciplinary approach to creative writing. We need to examine the possibilities of introducing creative writing outside the traditional English-department model. Imagine what might happen if we taught poetry in a humanities program or a creative nonfiction course in a life sciences program. Imagine students crossing over to English-department creative writing courses after rediscovering the magic of expressing themselves creatively in an ethnic studies program. Imagine an explosion of creative writing courses when a growing number of students realize they have something to say. Imagine all the possibilities. Diana Garcia, fiction writer and poet, teaches in the Department of English at Central Connecticut State University. Her fiction and poetry have been published in numerous journals and anthologized in Pieces of the Heart (Chronicle Press), edited by Gary Soto, and Paper Dance: Fifty-Four Latino Poets (Percia Books), edited by Victor Hernández Cruz, Leroy Quintana, and Virgil Suarez. WEEK 15--Fibbers, Nappers, Hens: Grammar and Grading in the Creative Writing Workshop AWP Pedagogy Exclusive Julie Schumacher Whenever I teach creative writing to undergraduates, I find time at the very beginning of the semester to hand out a chart to clarify any confusion between lie and lay . The students look surprised when they see it. This is a Creative Writing class, not an "English" class. They haven't signed up for a lesson in grammar. Here is the chart:
Fibbers Nappers Hens Today lie lie lay Yesterday lied lay laid Lots of times lied lain laid I tell the students to make up sentences, quickly, in which children fib, women habitually sleep in the daytime, and hens (or humans) set an egg on a clean bed of straw. After a vigorous round or two of Fibbers/ Nappers/Hens, a tentative hand will usually go up. "We aren't going to be graded on our grammar, though, are we? We're going to be graded on our writing of course." Well, of course they're going to be graded on their writing, I reassure them. What else could they be graded on? Then I direct them to the required reading list on the syllabus, which usually includes a copy of The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. To my students' further horror, I soon explain to the group of would-be novelists and short story writers that certain subjects and types of writing will be banned. Yes, in creative writing , I am outright prohibiting a number of subject matters and approaches. These include: • anything written from the point of view of an animal. • anything written from the point of view of an inanimate object. • any work of fiction set on another planet. • dialect, without written permission of the instructor. • stories that end with a character waking up. • stories that begin with an alarm clock ringing. By the time I've finished with another grammar exercise and a few more guidelines, some of the students look depressed; others are furtively consulting a battered copy of the course catalog To my knowledge, creative writing classes are the only ones in which even the shy and retiring students will, before the first assignment has been discussed or scheduled, actively debate and argue about what their homework should consist of, what they are to be graded on and why, and whether the professor assigned to evaluate their work is qualified to do so. (Or whether she is simply predisposed to apportion As to the stories she likes .) Set aside for a moment the fact that most prose and poetry produced in an Introduction to Creative Writing workshop is very easily recognized as A, B, C, or F work. The distinctions aren't subtle. The larger question-the one that a significant number of students and even teachers of creative writing tend to get worked up about-has to do with grading on the basis of what some would call effort (I would call it compliance) versus talent. "I don't think it's fair to penalize students for a lack of talent," several fellow teachers have told me. How strange, I think. If only such generosity of spirit had been extended to me when I studied Economics. I simply had no talent for the subject. No particular gift or calling. Despite my faithful attendance at the extra study sessions and my earnest note-taking technique, I failed to thrive. I doubt the professor thought twice about awarding me my final C. I can't imagine him wringing his hands about my lack of talent. But writing is different, the argument goes. Writing isn't like Economics. The implication here is that economists (and mathematicians and philosophers and linguists and sociologists) succeed in their respective fields because of years of honest hard work. Writers, on the other hand, succeed because they are born that way . Sort of like Miss America candidates, they are simply endowed with good fortune. Or talent. Or luck. This might seem to be an issue particular to the arts -not only to Creative Writing but to music, dance, studio arts, and theater. Not so. Undergraduates enrolling in an Introduction to Ballet class are likely to confess to their two left feet, their lack of experience, or natural inclination. But students in an Introductory Creative Writing class seldom express a similar lack of preparedness. On the contrary: they have feelings, and they have ideas. They are therefore prepared. They have been arranging words on pieces of paper for many years. To extend the analogy a little further, the student of dance doesn't come to the first session thinking, I have been moving my arms and legs around for decades - of course I can excel in this class. But the creative writing student is often operating under this sort of delusion. Which is why I keep piling on the exercises, a series of plies and jetes before a single student is allowed onto the floor to dance. 1 Write a grammatically correct sentence one hun dred words long. 2 Write a one page short story without using the let ter E. 3 Write 11 sentences in a row that contain exactly 11 words each, every other sentence beginning with a dependent clause. The students groan. They have stories roiling away inside them: a stormy afternoon spent fishing with a best friend, a great aunt's fourth marriage, a family trip to Mexico. And their teacher is talking about the semi-colon and the dependent clause. Worse, she plans to grade them (at least in part) on essays in which they have to analyze a given writer's voice or style. The larger question here is one that writers who teach are (too) often asked. Can creative writing be taught? No , I answer firmly, whenever I am asked. Neither can music. Or dance. Neither, of course, can Economics. I am living proof of this fact, for I survived an entire semester of the subject but never learned it. After receiving my C minus, I understood that one either had an aptitude (and learned) or one didn't. Furthermore, I understood that an 'A' in Econ 101 was not necessarily a mark of genius. It was a reward for those who brought to the topic a particular combination of hard work and natural aptitude, neither one of which was graded by itself. Can creative writing be taught? Yes-that is, like any other subject it can be studied and, up to a point, learned with assistance. But it can't be taught well if it is structured experientially as an exercise in write what you feel . Though some organizations do encourage writing as therapy, this approach has no place in a formal classroom. I am not a therapist: I'm not prepared to grade the quality of a student's grief for his dead brother, and I don't want to assign a B minus to a date rape or a meditation on the end of the world. On the other hand I am always eager to help a student learn to recognize a weak or mixed metaphor, or to help him cantilever a 107 word sentence out into thin air. To grade creative writing students on "effort" or attendance or compliance is to do them a disservice. To allow an ignorance of style and grammar is to teach woodshop without a working knowledge of the tools. And skillful employment of the tools is generally the best subject of an undergraduate writing class: most writing teachers would agree that it isn't the overall idea that makes for a successful workshop story -it's the execution. An ability to distinguish lie from lay shouldn't be the aim of any creative writing class. The aim is an awareness and an attention to the rhythms and networks and structures and possibilities of the language, to its unending potential and its demands.
Julie Schumacher has published The Body is Water (a novel) and An Explanation for Chaos (a collection of short fiction).
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