Exile on Ninth Street

Last week I finished reading Arthur Plotnik’s The Elements of Authorship, a thought-provoking, humorous, encouraging, but realistic look at the writing life. In it he shares lessons he learned from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Are these lessons standard for creative writing workshops?

1. Understate. Excessiveness kills. Show, don’t tell. The best writing is completed in the reader’s mind. Don’t stretch metaphors into conceits. Zap modifiers. Let context do its work. “She said,” not “she enthused.”
2. Surprise. Predictability is death. Declare war on the generic and the cliché. Pop in the unexpected word. Take characters out of character — but within their character. Fake in
   

   Arthur Plotnik

   one direction and go the other.

3. Reward. Delight. Writing must divert. Keenness of eye, melodious cadence, freshness of phrase, and wit lightly applied. Let style establish itself. Mix it up: long, short; upbeat, downbeat; comic, microscopic. Give the gifts of enlightenment, substance, catharsis. Challenge, do not punish the reader. Say goodbye to self-indulgent, inaccessible, and anal-retentive writing.
4. Focus. Kim’s question must be answered — what is the meaning of all this? Meaning trickles from every element into a mighty flow.
5. Believe. Get inside the subject. Insincerity begets boredom. Irreverence from the chronically irreverent is tiresome.
6. Be accurate. Cows can’t fly, at least not in a rigid zeppelin after 1937. Readers care about truth in detail; slipups hurt credibility.
7. Particularize. Not “bird,” but “red-breasted nuthatch.” Exploit the delights of nomenclature, the power of association, and clarity of the senses. Use all the senses, but not all at once in every description.
8. Justify. People act, things happen, for good reason, even if that reason is perverse antireason. Logic rules the reader. The quirkiest turns of plot and character must add up in the end.
9. Dramatize. Set the stage and get out of the way; keep the author’s hand out of the action. Let motivation arise from characterization, and action from motivation. Intensify: Create conflict and tension — someone fights someone or something; someone strives against the odds; something awful is awful is happening and must be stopped.
10. Get attention. Leap above the ordinary. Somehow, shake the audience from its television-induced torpor. Close in, seize the most immediate, most intimate yearnings; probe the least touched, most sensitive territories of heart, soul, and flesh — or, put another way: You gotta grab those readers by the short hairs.

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the most useful book you’ve ever read? And, why?

The bible of simple and direct prose: The Elements of Style, aka Strunk and White. The slender volume, touted by such literary lions as Kurt Vonnegut and Francine Prose (who lists it as a must read in Reading Like a Writer), was holy writ for me as a student writer.

“Pound for Pound, no American writing guide is more revered than the five-ounce Elements of Style . . . .,” writes Arthur Plotnik in his tongue-in-cheek writing guide, Spunk & Bite. “No reference book sells more copies or draws gushier superlatives (Timeless!; Nonpareil!; The best book of its kind!). With some ten million  copies rooted on as many reference shelves, Strunk and White has become the ivy (if not the kudzu) on our great walls of clarity and correctness.”

Despite its dated 19th century prissiness, its heralding of Standard English — whatever that is — it’s a solid reference book, a swift guide to usage, a kick in the pants to those who overuse jargon, passive voice, and abstract language over the concrete. Reading Strunk and White and following its guidelines, cleared my prose like a Neti pot clears the sinuses, especially in grad school with its jargon-clogged literary theory.

For basic advice on writing, especially for beginners, few books beat it. At the same time, gushing aside, as Plotnik notes, it’s musty and wrinkled, and it’s rules are often too limiting, and allow for no rule bending.

“Both Strunk and White knew well that bending the rules — judiciously breaking them — can give writing its distinction, its edge, its very style,” Plotnik writes. “Bending the rules can spring writers from ruts — get them out of themselves, out of the ordinary, and into prose that comes alive, gets noticed, gets published.”

So, as useful as Elements of Style has been for me, I would ally it with Spunk & Bite and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well to goose your writing.

The first how-to write fiction book I ever read was Rita Mae Brown’s Starting From Scratch. That book led to an addiction to how-to write books. I gobbled them up.  John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (which introduced me to creative nonfiction/literary journalism), Josip Novakich’s Fiction Writer’s Workshop, and on and on and on.

In The Atlantic‘s current fiction issue, writer Richard Bausch critiques writing instruction manuals in an essay “How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons”.

“My quarrel,” he writes, “is with the implication in the how-to books market that one can merely read them to find the magic secret for writing well enough to publish.”

Bausch argues the writer’s manuals promote being a writer without the need to do the work. He tells a story of a student who “with great pride” said “he had ‘over a hundred books’ in his library — I [Bausch] could see that I was meant to be impressed by the number, and that he considered himself a vastly well-read type of guy. He went on to say that many in his collection are how-to books . . . . He did not come to writing from reading books, good or bad. He came to it from deciding it might be cool to walk around in that role.”

The argument is similar to the one John Aldridge makes in Talents and Technicians, a critique of MFA writing programs. Aldridge argued that MFA programs created cookie-cutter writers whose prose was so similar the only difference was the byline. The writing programs, Aldridge said, produced writers for the sake of being writers. These writers didn’t come from reading other writers; it came writing in the writing programs.

Bausch addresses this argument:

I know an assumption exists in certain quarters that writing programs do damage, mostly by causing a so-called cookie-cutter effect, everyone sounding the same. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and you need only look at the work to know it. Allan Gurganus, Jane Smiley, T.C. Boyle, and I were all at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at roughly the same time. Allan and I had classes together. We hung out. I went horseback riding with Jane Smiley . . . and we talked about everything under the sun, including writing

You would have trouble finding four writers who are more different.

If a cookie-cutter effect ever develops, it will come from people keeping to the manuals and how-to books.

And writing that comes from those whose reading is confined to the how-to books is cramped and obvious.

My experience with how-to books has, overall, been decent. I don’t view them as negative, cookie-cutter mills. Bausch says there are classics in the genre such as Gardner’s Art of Fiction. These books, he says, deal with the “aesthetics of the task.” But, I’ve never viewed the manuals as substitutes for reading and learning to write from reading novels, essays, poems or plays.

Bausch says the manuals steer would-be writers away from reading and learning from other writers. Reading the manuals has helped me become a better reader, even better, I think than the reading I did in graduate school. I read deeply and learned to analyze texts in grad school, but  much of that analysis was fueled with theory.

After reading a manual I could go back to the books I loved and pick up on the techniques the manuals had taught. I could see what was bad and what was good. Those books also introduced me to writers such as Bausch and Boyle.

The other thing I learned from were the exercises and prompts. I learned to apply the techniques, and I would practice the techniques, not only at home, but at work when I was writing feature stories. Those exercises were important, too, because they got me to place ass in chair and write.

Of course, the manuals are full of the standards: write what you know; use active voice; show, don’t tell.

But many also go beyond those standards with practical advice like considering journalism as a way to make a living and actively write.

Still, the manuals won’t make you a writer, any more than an MFA program. They can only give you a tiny amount of instruction. Some of it useful, some of it trash.

The truth is this: Writing is a bumper-to-bumper crawl through hell with an occasional jolt to the next level of anguish. To be a writer means hitching one’s self-esteem to the slimy tail of success. Slip loose, and it’s into the wreckage of failed artists.

If there are cheerier routes to the blessed state of authordom, few take them. Like a nation of exiles, millions of tortured souls go forth in search of a byline and a word of approval. Only a three-chain flagellant is assured more misery. Yet being a writer remains the dream of any romantic who ever watched the seasons or fell in love or counted the zeros in some lucky idiot’s book advance.

— Arthur Plotnik, The Elements of Authorship

You may not know that you know David Gerrold’s work. I know I didn’t know I knew. But, if you’ve ever regularly watched the original  Star Trek series,  you saw “The Trouble With Tribbles”. He wrote that episode.

I just picked up Gerrold’s Worlds of Wonder, a book on writing science fiction and fantasy. My mind’s been toying with the notion of trying to write science fiction. (At the moment it’s only a notion and most of the ideas I’ve been having are fairly derivative.)

Anyhow, after just reading a few chapters, I have to say I would recommend this book not just to those interested in the genre but to all writers. From what I’ve read so far it’s as much about attitude toward writing as it is technique.

He first notes one aspect of writing every writer at some point must acknowledge: Writing is hard. And it doesn’t get easier the more you do it.

Acknowledging that writing is hard is the first step. From there you have to be enthusiastic about the work. You have to find what Gerrold calls “stardrive”.

Of all the things I’ve ever learned about writing, this is the most important: There’s a domain of excitement and eagerness and delight that can be astonishing. It is a place of commitment and discovery and wonderment. It is the far side of passion. It is a totality of purpose, an inspired obsession. I like to call it stardrive. It’s the engine at the center of your personal starship. It’s your heart of brightness. It is who you really are. It is simply you — you are the source.

A confession: I like Stephen King. Never met the man, though I feel as if I have, or rather, I like the persona he presents in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. He seems personable. Maybe in real life he’s an arse, but something about the persona delivered in the book suggests he’s not.

He shares similar feelings about reading, writing, and literature that I do. I think if I were to ask him, he’d put a lowercase “l” on literature instead of the upper case “L” English teachers like, which is something I’ve tried to do as a reader over, say, the last 15 years.

What do I mean by this? Simply that genre writers — horror, mystery, science fiction, etc. — deserve as much attention as what many consider “literary” fiction. Not all. Some of it is crap. Just as some “literary” fiction is crap, no matter how many scholarly articles have been published on that fiction saying otherwise. I think King would agree.

“[N]o matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously,” he writes, “I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.”

Some of you reading this may put King in the pen with bad writers. I confess I did, say, 15 years ago. Back then I had read one of King’s novels, The Running Man, which he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

I didn’t particularly care for that novel, but I was expecting it to be more like the Schwarzenegger movie based loosely on it that I saw a year or two before reading the book.

Before then, I hadn’t read any of King’s stuff because I was afraid to read any sort of horror novels (I still today resist horror movies, although that largely has to do with the gross-out factor: Watching someone on screen get dismembered with a chainsaw is disturbing, especially when it seems so gratuitous; I’m less squeamish witnessing the horrors of war in gritty detail in such films as Saving Private Ryan). Horror novels/movies — the few I read or saw — really did give me nightmares, or at least gave me the creeps enough to think twice about turning the lights out before going to bed. I was 18 before I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was creeped out each night by something scratching on my bedroom window, which wasn’t near any trees.

In graduate school, King, among other writers, seemed to be scoffed at by my peers, and wanting to fit in and seem intellectual — I became a pretty capable scholar — I scoffed too.

The scoffing was a front. Most of my reading life until grad school consisted of reading science fiction and fantasy, although I had by then developed a serious Hemingway fixation. But in grad school, I wouldn’t read such trash, unless, say, it had been “legitimized” as serious in an English class (in my senior year I took a course in the short story and the anthology included Asimov and Ursula K. LeGuin, so those two were OK, sort of).

At the same time I was scoffing, I was also reading Henry Miller — in particular his “gob of spit in the face of Art,” Tropic of Cancer — and beginning to see literature should be spelled with a lowercase “l”.  I was reading a novel/memoir (Miller is a genre-buster) full of exuberant prose that was kicking the shit out of my notions of literature.

And yet, at least then, the academic literary world wasn’t all that convinced of Miller’s seriousness. Or that was the impression I had once I tried to find scholarly articles on Miller when I finally was able to write a paper on Tropic of Cancer. 

Of the slim pile I did find, many were negative, written by hardcore feminists who seemed bent on destroying Miller’s reputation. One book, however, caught my attention — Erica Jong’s biography/memoir/critical treatise on Miller, The Devil at Large.

She defended Miller with the gusto of an evangelist. What she also evangelized was the power of reading, the power of literature, the power of art in all its forms.

I find that same joy reading King’s memoir. Reading and writing are a joy for him. Art sustains him, invigorates him.

“Writing is magic,” he writes, “as much the water of life as any other creative art.” I couldn’t agree more.

Sometimes you find the right book to read. Or perhaps it finds you. However it happened, Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola became for me the right book at the right time to read.

As you know,  I have recently hit a dead zone with my writing. While my passion for writing isn’t fully revived, it’s getting resuscitated by attempting  Tell It Slant‘s writing prompts. In the past, when I’ve been stumped by the blahs, I’ve turned to exercises, but the prompt and exercises I tried were from books on writing fiction. This is the first time I’ve ever tried creative nonfiction prompts, though in the past year or so I’ve made attempts at the form.

Switching genres when the passion for writing wanes is one thing Miller and Paola recommend in the book’s brief but inspirational Epilogue “Regaining Passion”:

Sometimes when you’re in a writing class or studying writing intensively, it’s easy to lose, temporarily, the passion that brought you to writing in the first place. It’s easy to feel as if you’ve taken all the magic out of it, and you sit at your desk, bored or resistant, unable to find one single thing worth writing about.

. . . .

When this happens (and it happens to all of us), you must do whatever it takes to “refill the well.” This might mean just taking some time out to roam the city or spending a week on the couch with your favorite books and comfort food. It might mean making a date with your writing group or deciding to write poetry or fiction for a while instead. The important thing to remember is that your passion for writing will come back. Your passion for writing will always return, doubled in force, after a period of dormancy. The writing life is one of patience and faith.

In The Practical Stylist (6th Edition) Sheridan Baker offers an excerpt from Loren Eiseley as an example of exposition:

The apes are not all similar in type or appearance. They are men and yet not men. Some are frailer-bodied, some have great, bone-cracking jaws and massive gorilloid crests atop their skulls. This fact leads us to another of Wallace’s remarkable perceptions of long ago. With the rise of the truly human brain, Wallace saw that man had transferred to his machines and tools many of the alterations of parts that in animals take place through evolution of the body. Unwittingly, man had assigned to his machines the selective evolution which in the animal changes the nature of its bodily structure through the ages. Man of today, the atomic manipulator, the aeronaut who flies faster than sound, has precisely the same brain and body as his ancestors of twenty thousand years ago who painted the last Ice Age mammoths on the walls of caves in France.

A detailed descriptive passage, but no motion, and some abstraction. It doesn’t set a scene in the same way narrative summary might. In Write Away, Elizabeth George cites as an example of narrative summary — though fiction —  a passage from E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India:

So the cavalcade ended, partly pleasant, partly not; the Brahman cook was picked up, the train arrived, pushing its burning throat over the plain, and the twentieth century took over the sixteenth. Mrs. Moore entered her carriage, the three men went to theirs, adjusted the shutters, turned on the electric fan and tried to get some sleep. In the twilight, all resembled corpses, and the train itself seemed dead though it moved — a coffin from the scientific north which troubled the scenery four times a day. As it left the Marabars, their nasty little cosmos disappeared, and gave place to the Marabars seen from a distance; finite and rather romantic. The train halted once under a pump, to drench the stock of coal in its tender. Then it caught sight of the main line in the distance, took courage, and bumped forward, rounded the civil station, surmounted the level-crossing (the rails were scorching now), and clanked to a standstill. Chandrapore. Chandrapore! The expedition was over.

A detailed but quick summation of  a train trip. Compare the above to a passage from a scene from Richard Selzer’s “Under the Knife” cited in Tell It Slant:

There is a hush in the room. Speech stops. The hands of the others, assistants and nurses, are still. Only the voice of the patient’s respiration remains. It is the rhythm of a quiet sea, the sound of waiting. Then you speak, slowly, the terse entries of a Himalayan climber reporting back.

The passage further explores the surgery Selzer is describing; it extends it to the dramatic moment the surgeon discovers a cancerous deposit.

These examples are clear to me when another writer points them out. Where I feel I falter is differentiating between fully evolved scene and narrative summary in my own writing.

This week, to reinvigorate the writing juices, I’ve been working on the exercises in Tell It Slant. The first exercise says to go through a piece of your writing, pick out a passage of summary that might work better as a scene, and then write that scene.

Here’s the passage from a piece of writing that I selected:

Of grief I was aware. My August 1, 2006 blog post contemplates what my father might have felt as he lay dying in the hospital. Almost two years after my dad died, I was still haunted by his death. I was not there in the hospital at the moment of his death. I was there several hours before, watching his kidneys fail, his blood rinsing his catheter, while me, my sister, my aunt and my uncle huddled with Dad’s pastor to pray. On my part the prayer was forced; it was to a god long dead, one indifferent to my grief.

Clearly summary of  a dramatic event. Here is the scene I wrote:

For days my father lay semi-conscious in a hospital bed, a rasping ventilator tube unnaturally twisting his lips. The ventilator is off, he is alive, but not conscious, or at least, as far as I can tell, not aware anyone is with him, when I get to his room in ICU that Sunday evening. His body is swollen and distorted. His mouth is probably slack, ringed with the vestiges of peppery whiskers. But the image I remember the most is this: a stream of blood, bright red like children’s cough medicine, flushes through the clear plastic catheter tube and winds its way into a clear plastic box at the foot of the bed. Someone — a nurse perhaps — told me kidney failure is the first sign a patient is dying. Or the last. As the blood spills into the box, its tendrils reach into a pool of brackish urine.

At about this moment, if not before, my aunt, uncle, and father’s pastor materialize. When I see the three of them, I become aware of how thick my breath is with beer. The reverend huddles us up for prayer. Her hand touches mine. She and my aunt and uncle bow their heads. The beer fogs my breath so much the odor seems like a permanent fixture in my nostrils. The reverend is saying something, probably my father’s name, something like blah blah blah your servant Parker. I can’t wait until we break our huddle, I can’t wait until the pastor leaves, I can’t wait until my sister gets here.

What I wonder is if I was successful in revising my initial passage into a scene. Or is the revised passage narrative summary?

We all tend to use too little scene in creative nonfiction. We especially forget the possibilities of representative scene. Even when we’re reporting a typical rather than specific event, use of scenic elements . . . conveys a sense of character and situation far more effectively than summary does.

— Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola

I’ve just started reading Tell It Slant and early on I’m pondering, When do you use exposition and when do you use scene?

When writing newspaper features — and to some extent freelance magazine features — I often felt limited to exposition. At times, when I had the space, I would beef a feature up with mini scenes, usually with short descriptive passages of place or a brief — very brief — description of a person. I rarely had dialogue. Much of what I wrote was expository or quickly dashed-off narrative summary, often out of necessity.

I was envious of writers I read at larger papers, or at alternative weeklies, who seemed to be given the space and time to write detailed, compelling features, alive with scenes, dialogue, characterization. And envied even more New Yorker writers like John McPhee (talk about detail) or Susan Orlean.

And yet, with my recent forays into creative nonfiction I find myself slipping into exposition and narrative summary more than scene. Often I’ll start out with scenes and then slip for pages into exposition. When I read and revise, I see the exposition, and in the back of my mind I think I should cut it, revise it, build a scene, but then, at the same time, the exposition seems to fit so well with the essay. And I think of some the essays and booklength works of nonfiction by writers such as Larry McMurtry or the wonderfully lyrical Diane Ackerman and those writers rely heavily on mixes of scene and exposition.

And I wonder, When should a scene be used, and when should you use exposition?

Yesterday, other than a blog post, I did no writing. A fever held me hostage. Achy muscles. A swirling head.

This morning I woke up some time around 11 a.m.  still not fully recovered from whatever illness had overtaken my body. I reminded myself that I had missed my regular writing session yesterday, and then I remembered something Joan Didion wrote in the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem about writing the title piece:

I was . . . as sick as I have ever been when I was writing “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”; the pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece. (I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meat the deadline, but that would not be entirely true;  I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.)

Today I’m half-heartedly working on my book. I’m fighting off chest congestion, but the fever is gone. I think I may need gin to get rid of the cough. And maybe that would get rid of the blah writing day I’m having.  Anyone out there want to send some gin my way?