“The Writer is Lost”
First of all, the serious novelist can seldom punch straight through, write from beginning to end, knock off a quick revision, and sell his book. The idea he's developing is too large for that, contains too many unmanageable elements--too many characters... too many scenes... too many moments... He may work for weeks, even months, without losing his focus and falling into confusion, but sooner or later--at least in my experience--the writer comes to the realization that he's lost.
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
"The Writer's Nature, Part IV," Page 64
I have been writing a novel for the past eight weeks or so--maybe more like six--and three weeks ago, after my novel-fragment appeared in KU's MFA workshop, I became hopelessly lost. This loss of focus occurred around the same time my students' papers were due and around the time I was conferencing with those students. I was putting in an extra 13.6 hours a week on teaching. The novel, as it stands, is something like 14,397 words long. 51 pages, give or take, and I anticipate the final product being upwards of 60,000 words (between 200 and 250 pages long).
By the time I figured out where the narrative needed to go and what needed to be done with the writing--Thursday last week--I was kind of a mess. I needed a friend to tell me it was going to be all right. Luckily, my wife is supportive of my projects. She always helps me keep things in perspective.
I'd also been thinking a lot about the ghosts of writers, the "refined and distilled spirit" of a writer that Wallace Stegner talks about in On Teaching and Writing Fiction, and I wanted to talk to another writer by reading his or her books and hearing, from the mouth of a professional, that these things I was going through are normal. At the same time, I was wondering, with a sort of detached bemusement, why the hell I even came to an MFA program at all if what I really wanted was time to write. I chose KU's MFA because I was promised the chance to write, write, and write more; I have no interest in being a professional teacher, which, up to this point, is mostly what I've been studying.
And I thought, Wait a minute--where have I heard those things before? And then it hit me--I needed to commune with the refined and distilled spirit of John Gardner.
I picked up On Becoming a Novelist that day. Rather than tear apart and fix my novel, I needed to get my head on straight.
During my last years in college, my adviser--he was just an acquaintance at the time, a novelist from the Iowa Writers' Workshop--recommended Gardner's books to me. Talking with Gardner, the older, experienced critic and author, gave me insight into fiction. His books helped me make the first leap from bumbling amateur to a professional--if somewhat inexperienced--freelance writer. Somewhere in his books, I remembered, I had decided I wanted to become a novelist.
Probably it was in the "Preface," which detailed a strange issue "young novelists" face, one I hadn't thought of (but one I was dealing with at the time; am still dealing with, if you want to know the truth).
The young man or woman who announces an intention of becoming an M.D. or an electrical engineer or a forest ranger is not immediately bombarded with well-meant explanations of why the ambition is impractical, out of reach, a waste of time and intelligence. ... And the discouragement offered by other human beings is the least of it. Writing a novel takes an immense amount of time... The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he's fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow... Almost no one mentions that for a certain kind of person nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist... More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist,
"Preface," Page xxiii - xxv
So, if you're wondering what's normal for a novelist, or for a writer, and you need some words of encouragement, you can't do better than the reassuring tone of Gardner, whose literary-firebrand-and-trouble-magnet reputation doesn't detract from his fierce, protective tone when he talks about the young novelists he taught in life--and that he continues to teach today.
The question one asks of the young writer who wants to know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what you want to do? Really want to do?"
If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is: Do it. In fact, he will anyway.
John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist,
"The Writer's Nature, Part V," Page 72
On Becoming a Novelist
Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural,
partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in
normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit, (a
tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency
towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people
know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and
serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless
lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, and unseemly
propensity for crying over nothing); remarkable powers of eidetic
recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and
mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally
intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a
criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness,
impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and
incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all
writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one
finds one who is not abnormally improvident.
John Gardner
On Becoming a Novelist
Tools of the Trade
In the final chapter of his book On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner addresses a question often asked by aspiring writers. "Do you write with a pen, a pencil, a typewriter, or what?" He says, and I agree, that the question is more important than it appears.
It calls to mind the kind of things professional gamblers are said to worry about, Gardner writes. Should one where a lucky hat? Which color of shirt is best when playing poker? And so on. It asks (without asking) if there is any hope at all for the beginning writer.
Desktop computers and blogs have made writing fast and easy. Is this a good thing? Yes and no.
Remember, just because you can write easily doesn't mean you should. Our world is fast-paced, chaotic, and always has been. But writing is not. It shouldn't be. Writing requires slow, careful concentration. This is as true for you writing e-mails in the 21st century as it was for Lev Tolstoy writing War and Peace.
I compose my stories, articles, syllabus, and blogs on a Sony Vaio laptop computer. Usually I write in Microsoft Word 2008, and I keep the files on a titanium jump drive that, if not on my person, is usually close to me (on my desk, my bookshelf, something like that). Most people write on computers, these days, whether in the library or at home or at work.
It's important to remember (this is a friendly reminder) that writing is a process, a habit, and an act of mindfulness. It is not a physical process. Writing with a pen may be different in some ways than writing on a laptop. The important difference in the physical process, or the actual activity of writing, is a difference, too often, of quality.
Pencils and pens force us to go slowly. To think, compose in our heads, and to move forward with ideas instead of going backwards. Who wants to rewrite the first chapter of a novel 100 times in ink?
Yet computers are important. Remain mindful of computers and research venues (Google Scholar, Lexis Nexus, etc.) as tools. Only tools. A computer may help you write a novel faster, and it may even be good, but in some ways it may also harm your ability to write.
The best artists in this age of technology (and here I mean graphic designers, painters, sketch artists, photographers, and writers, too) understand the power of tools like Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, but they never forget that the programs cannot make the art for them. They still pour in the attention of Tolstoy or Picasso, and the new technology takes them in different directions. In all its complexity, this is the one element that will never, ever become digitized.
Writing What We Teach
In my practicum, English 603, the class has been assigned to write what we teach. The purpose is to write a textual analysis, which the students usually struggle with. Even for graduate students, writing a textual analysis is difficult. We want to produce the desired effect in writing, and so we remember the effect we feel when we read "scholarly" articles: confusion.
In duplicating the Ivory Tower (IT) language of scholarly notes, writers slip into patterns. Long sentences, rambling thoughts, and nonsense words like lapsarianism. We also strive to make the text seem objective, although we never stop to ask if that's a good idea. First, I'll give you a thesis statement in an "academic paper." Here's an example:
Readers may find the persistent and unyielding effect of Aldus Huxley's lapsarianism is responsible for creating a complicated dichotomy between pleasure and life, that is, the actual act of living; however, his negative outlook also undermines his thesis in many places, because it calls into question his authority, not to mention his verisimilitude.
What's wrong with this sentence? Besides the confusion it creates? What's the verb, as Richard Lanham might say, and what's the subject? And what the hell does lapsarianism even mean?
Lapsarianism refers, or so I'm told (the word shows no hits in most dictionaries), to the tradition of civilization sliding downwards, generation after generation, towards the apocalypse. In Jewish culture, for example, each Rabbi is less perfect than his predecessor. We're descending towards chaos. It sounds like pessimism, or a bad attitude. This is over-simplifying a bit, but I feel all right cutting out the word and putting something else in, since I'm pretty confident the writer has no idea what she or he means anyway.
Let's try some revision:
Brave New World sets up a working contrast between pleasure and life; however, Aldus Huxley undermines his credibility with readers by being too preachy, too negative about the future of humanity, and too sparse with his supporting logic.
That first sentence had 53 words; the second has 38. That means the sentence before had a Bullshit Factor (Lanham calls it the Lard Factor) of 28%.
Remember, academic writing doesn't mean complicated writing. Attempts to brick up walls between the disciplines are detrimental, wrongheaded, and part of a system of oppression. Mystifying the lines between literature and criticism allows for an Ivory Clubhouse, a place for Them and Us. It makes great writers into demigods, not men and women. And it creates a culture that not everyone wants to be a part of -- especially not all freshman writing students.
In all cases, writing is writing. Creative writing and academic writing work with the same framework: letters, words, paragraphs, sections, chapters, ideas, and so on. Nonfiction has characters and plots, too. Textual analysis will be at its best when the authors are, as John Gardner put it, making up stories about stories.
What is Writing?
I wrote the following speech as an introduction to a panel discussion towards the end of the semester in one of my graduate seminars; I introduce the problems, define the terms, and establish a framework for the rest of the participants:
Thank you all for attending this
forum. My name is Ben Pfeiffer, and it falls to me now to phrase the rhetorical
question we will be answering, or maybe dodging, during this discussion: What
is writing? The question at first seems simple, then rapidly becomes complex.
Maybe this complexity is one reason for the pressing need to classify, label,
and otherwise stunt dialogue. We fear that writing would remain unconquerable
without the walls we have built, the theories we hold up as gospel, and the
gods and idols we worship. Yet to truly understand the act we love, we must
tear down the façade. To paraphrase John Gardner, Let total war be declared
between those age-old enemies, the Real and the Fake.
This panel is concerned with a
hypothesis: Writing is an Art. My personal concern is that, in teaching
writing, we too often teach the logic of argument and not the craft of writing,
which contains the soul of the discipline. We created a specialty called Composition and filled it with Compositionists as opposed to Writers, effectively distancing
ourselves from an ancient tradition including Homer and Hemingway. We did it
for respect and funding at the university level. We did it because we're lazy.
Also we did it as a defense mechanism, an excuse that we don't play our game on
the same field as Cormac McCarthy and Chrétien de Troyes.
I am not suggesting that Art and
Science are at odds. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting that writing
professors teach--through accident and convenience--reprobic (or false) writing. What is false writing? In my mind, this reprobic
writing is related to Richard A. Lanham's "Official Style," which he denounces
so forcefully in Revising Prose.
Worse than just weak verbs, convoluted thinking, and strings of prepositional
phrases, reprobic writing is utterly, and contemptuously, worthless. It may
even harm a student's ability to use more powerful intelligences.
In On Moral Art, John Gardner writes that criticism, at its best, is
similar to art, and that the successful critic "makes up stories about
stories." However, he worries that criticism had become filled with nonsense words
like hermeneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism,
and so on (not unlike how discussions of "composition" have become dominated by
distinctions between Reader- and Writer-based prose, Cognitivists, Expressivists, Social Constructivists, etc.). He argues--"by reason and by banging
the table"--for an old-fashioned view of art that condemns the hollow, the
tinny, and the academic. Why should we be concerned with Gardner? He describes,
on page 8, the kind of writing compositionists often teach, although I have
modified the passage, substituting "reprobic writing" for "criticism":
Depending as it does on logic and scheme, on arguments well argued,
[reprobic writing] uses parts of the mind more readily available to us than are
the faculties required for art. And since the tests of [reprobic writing] are
completeness and coherence, whereas art's validity can only be tested by an
imaginative act on the reader's part, [reprobic writing] is easier to read [and
to grade]; that is, it does not require the involvement of as many faculties of
the mind.
In his introduction to What is Art?, translator W. Gareth Jones
admits that Lev Tolstoy's iconoclastic attack on aestheticism inflicted minimal
damage beyond the Iron Curtain. The book--published for the first time as an
uncensored volume in 1898--was dismissed by critics and admirers as the senile ranting of a 70 year-old literary giant. The
text is self-contradictory, as well: Tolstoy uses the tools he condemns, the
"craft" of writing, to make his case for True Art. If the text has one great
failing, this is it: Tolstoy's inability to recognize the subtle and enormous
differences between Shamans and Charlatans. Again, real and fake. The important
difference between Shamans and Charlatans is this: Both know how to manipulate the craft beneath Art to convince people
of their message; Charlatans do it for selfish reasons; Shamans do it for
the greater good. If rhetoric is the counterpart of cookery, then both
shamans and charlatans know how to cook. The difference, as Gary Zukav once
told me, is intention. Magicians use sleight of hand to make us believe
in magic; pickpockets use the same techniques to steal our wallets. Think also
of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Rev. Ted Haggard. I
believe that, in his intention, Lev Tolstoy was a shaman.
Yet Tolstoy also subverted concepts
that we struggle with today. First he preached the importance of art's
"infection," a feature of both J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Dan
Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Malcolm
Gladwell wrote extensively about the mechanics of infection (as it refers to
culture) in his book The Tipping Point.
Second Tolstoy preaches the importance of "awareness" and "love," although he
dresses his conversation in the religious robes and cloaks of his time. Third,
and most importantly, Tolstoy recognizes and celebrates the relationship
between science and art.
The transmission by some people to others of
what people know by proof and reasoning; the arts transmit this by awakening in
the other emotions which the transmitter experiences. Both are essential for
humanity because if there were no sciences or arts people would live like
animals, in no way differing from them.
It may be argued convincingly that
defining Writing as Art is also a political move. I do not deny it. As a writer
myself, I have a personal stake in how writing is perceived at the university,
in the community, and around the world. What matters most is that students
learn to write. English Departments seem to me to be broken mirrors in need of
repair and even unity. Technical, creative, composition, and literature classes
should celebrate their similarities instead of picking apart their petty
differences. Bickering ultimately harms the students. Rather than denounce my
stake as political posturing, I would urge you first to listen with an open mind
as we argue--by banging the table and, as Douglas Adams once suggested, with
enough controversy to provoke an outburst of chair-throwing at the end--for the
ancient view of Writing as Art; and for Art as a way of seeing.
Any Stalking Beast
John Gardner writes that when an artist goes over his or her manuscript again and again, "as tense as any stalking beast," that is when he or she begins to create Art. Following the manuscript through to its conclusion is not enough. You must go further, push harder. This kind of soul-straining focus is hard to sustain. The task is daunting to start with. And yet the process is essential for product. If you want Art, you must give in to the process, however different it may be for each individual.
Besides: once you begin, the rest is not so hard. And the reward is considerable. Today, I'm blowing off non-essentials (everything) in favor of What Matters: my novel, which I will finish and send to agents by May 2008.
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What I'm Doing...
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- More updates...