On Becoming a Novelist (13 page)

In a bad workshop, the teacher coerces his students into writing as he himself writes. The tendency is natural, though not excusable. The teacher has worked for years to figure out his style and has persistently rejected alternatives. The result is that if he is not careful he is likely to be resistant to writing markedly unlike his own or, worse, written in a style opposed to his own, as in the case of the elegant stylist confronting a rough, demotic prose. The teacher’s purpose ought to be to help students find their
own
way. This is the point teacher and poet Dave Smith is making when he says, “My object is to catch right now what will embarrass my students when they look at their poetry ten years from now.” His object, in other words, is not to impose some strictly personal standard but to notice, within the implicit laws of the student poet’s standards, what will not stand up in time. The poetry teacher who by force turns a light, anapestic, lyrical poet into an ode writer in stern Anglo-Saxon rhythms, the fiction teacher unwilling to tolerate experimental writing of a kind he himself hates to read—the teacher who consciously or unconsciously seeks to make fundamental changes in his student’s personality—is, at least for that student, an inadequate if not a destructive teacher.

In another kind of bad workshop, there are no standards of goodness. I mentioned earlier one common set of standards for good fiction—creation of a vivid and continuous dream, authorial generosity, intellectual and emotional significance, elegance and efficiency, and strangeness. Another teacher of writing may have other aesthetic values—though I hope most teachers would admit the general validity of these. If the teacher has no basic standards, his class is likely to develop none, and their comments can only be matters of preference or opinion. Writers will have nothing to strive toward or resist, nothing solid to judge by. As I’ve said, undue rigidity can be destructive; but even a rigid set of standards, if it’s clear and at least more or less valid, can be useful in giving the student something to challenge. An individual style is developed as much by resistance as by emulation. Students of a teacher who refuses to set standards are in danger of falling into the philistine persuasion that all literary success is luck or public whim. In that class, the student who writes an excellent story about fishermen and dolphins will be open to the objection that some particular classmate hates all stories of the sea. This is not to say that standards cannot change, adapting themselves to new successes. The moment I propound my principles, I can count on it that some clever student will consciously, perhaps even brilliantly, defy them. In that case, as a serious teacher I must determine without guiding rules—nothing but my honest thought and emotions—whether or not the story works, that is, interests me and moves me. The workshop teacher who has no basic theory, no set of aesthetic values conscientiously worked out, is probably doomed to mediocrity, as is his class. There is in the end no substitute for a critical understanding of fiction—which is not to claim that fiction is philosophy.

No experienced teacher underestimates how hard it is to see a student’s work in its own terms. Since I generally teach fairly advanced courses, mainly graduate school level, I’ve often seen student work I thought to be quite bad and then later learned that the same piece was singled out for praise or even publication by other teacher-writers I respect. Recently I was given a story (a work sample on the basis of which I was to decide whether or not the student should be admitted to my course) that had been praised by two earlier writing teachers, both of them firmly established writers reputed to be good teachers. I did admit the student; the energy and vividness of the work were undeniable. But I thought the story execrable. It was a first-person story told inside the head of a madman, a tour de force of violence and scatology, seething with malice, frighteningly cynical, ending in the same place it began. It did none of the things I think art ought to do, except that it was vivid and (in a nasty, discomforting way) interesting. And the sentences were carefully made. When I said, with restraint, that I did not like the story very much, the student sighed and confessed that he didn’t like it, either. Some of the verbs were too low-key, he said, and when he tried to put in more lively verbs they seemed to call undue attention to themselves. At this point, of course, I saw that I hadn’t been thinking well. The student really was a gifted writer, fully conscious of what he was doing, earnestly looking for help from a teacher whose standards are about as applicable to his project as the rules of pinochle or the gladiator’s oath.

One forgets the extent to which aesthetic standards are projections of one’s own personality, defensive armor, or wishful thinking about the world. If there are objective laws of aesthetics, not all of them apply in every instance, and none of them finally have to do with purpose. One can argue, as I’ve done elsewhere, that—descriptively speaking—the fiction that lasts tends to be “moral,” that is, it works with a minimum of cynical manipulation and it tends to reach affirmations favorable rather than opposed to life. One can argue on this basis that a writer is generally unwise to fake despair and nihilism he does not really feel. One cannot argue that the writer’s purpose should be the creation of moral fiction, or any other kind; one cannot even argue that his purpose should be to create something beautiful or pleasing or even honest or universally interesting. A given writer may wish to set such standards for his students; but insofar as he means to be a teacher, he must leave room for intelligent rebellion.

In a bad workshop, the teacher takes the place of the student’s critical imagination. This is the one great danger in a workshop where the teacher is not only an impressive writer but also a skillful and articulate teacher, one who can figure out narrative or stylistic problems, solve them, and make his mental processes clear to students. This fully articulate teaching implies, of course, a close teacher-student relationship—not just one in which the teacher jots an occasional comment on the student’s writing but rather one in which the teacher goes over each of the student’s works with meticulous care, missing neither the virtues of the piece nor the defects. How it is that the best teacher’s help and concern can impede the student’s progress—how the virtue of showing students ways of evaluating and correcting their fiction can pass over into the defect of making student minds clones of the teacher’s—is a matter both teacher and student need to become sensitive to.

The best kind of writing teacher, it seems to me, not only meets his regular workshop classes but deals with each student individually, half an hour or an hour each week or so, in tutorial sessions, like a violin instructor. The teacher closely analyzes the student’s work and shows him, not on the basis of the teacher’s own personal preferences but in terms of the inherent logic of the student’s fiction, what is right and wrong and what needs to be done. This is not a matter of opinion or individual feeling. In any true story, certain things have to be shown dramatically, others can be summarized or implied. In general the rule is simply this: Anything necessary to the action’s development must be shown dramatically. For instance, if a man is to beat his dog, it is not enough for the writer to
tell
us that the man is inclined to violence or that the dog annoys him: we must see how and why the man inclines to violence, and we must see the dog annoying him. For young writers it is sometimes hard to recognize what has to be dramatized or how it can be done. And here the problem arises.

Nothing is easier than to give the student specific actions, even specific sentences, that will solve his story’s problems; and at a certain point in the young writer’s development it may perhaps be valuable to do such things, so that the student can get the hang of it. But basically what teachers need to teach students is not how to fix a particular story but how to figure out what is wrong with the story and how to think about alternative ways of fixing it. At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference I’ve frequently worked with writing assistants—young writers with successful first novels—whose inexperience as teachers led them to focus on finding the best solution to problems in the writing placed in their care, led them, in other words, to show the student writer what to do to make his fiction work. In case after case, when I myself looked at the student’s work later, I felt there were a number of possible solutions to the problems—alternative solutions whose relative value must depend on the student writer’s preferences—and that in suggesting only one solution, the one he himself would choose, my assistant had done an unwitting disservice to the student. What the beginner needs to learn is how to think like a novelist. What he does not need is a teacher who imposes his own solution, like an algebra teacher who tells you the answer without showing how he got there, because it is
process
that the young writer must learn: problems in novels, unlike problems in algebra, may have any number of solutions. At some point—the sooner the better, some would say—the teacher’s job is simply to say, “Not good enough,” and vanish.

Finally, a bad fiction workshop is “workshoppy.” It tends to emphasize theme and design over feeling and authentic narrative. Working too much with too many young writers, or having no teaching talent in the first place, the teacher may slide into simplifying his work by forcing original ideas into what all good editors immediately recognize as workshop formulas. The evil is perhaps most easily described in the case of poetry: rather than helping the student poet to feel out the natural development of his poem, the writing teacher may rest on some simpleminded habit of design—for instance, the notion of “orchestration,” the idea that the end of a poem should somehow bring back, like a musical comedy, all its main ideas and images in a final stanza. The same mistake is possible in fiction. Beware of the teacher who cries, “Reprise! Reprise!” The reader who encounters a reprise ending—if he’s not very good at reading poetry or fiction—feels a superficial thrill of recognition. The more experience he gets, the more annoyed he is by such foolishness.

A story may be “workshoppy” because the writer (or the teacher) has too often thought from the literature student’s point of view rather than from the writer’s, so that instead of working like a storyteller, beginning with what happens and why, and only gradually moving (in his thought process if not in the actual writing) to the larger issues (how this story is in some way every human story, an expression of a constant or universal theme), the student writer begins with theme, symbolism, etc., in effect working backward from his imagined New Criticism analysis of a story not yet in existence. One can quickly spot this tendency in a workshop. Class discussion of a story begins in the wrong place, not with the immediate virtues of good fiction (an interesting and original but not distracting style, a clear and well-designed plot, vivid characterization and setting, an interesting and expressive use of a particular genre) but with the kinds of things normally central to a class in literature (theme and symbol). It is of course true that in a given story these less immediate matters may be the appropriate starting point; indeed, one mark of the first-rate writing teacher is his ability to move discussion swiftly to what happens to be the most important ground for judgment of the story at hand.

Another reason workshops become “workshoppy” is that often teachers slide unconsciously into overprizing the kind of narrative writing that teaches well, undervaluing and even dismissing work that does not. This sometimes gives an advantage to, for instance, the symbolic or allegorical story over the straightforward, well-crafted realistic story, and to almost any short story over the more sprawling prose of a novel-in-progress. For the teacher, a well-made allegorical story is a delight, a puzzle he and the class can, if they wish, play with for hours. In the fiction workshop I am teaching this semester I encountered a story entitled “Jason,” which I hope soon to publish in the magazine I edit,
MSS
. Early in the story, a child, Jason, loses one shoe; much later in the story, we come to a huge old Vermont inn, many-storied and circular, whose hallways wrap around like the coils of a snake (the idea is better expressed in the original). The story is told so cunningly, with such realistic detail, that only one member of this well-read graduate class caught on to the writer’s use of the Jason and Medea myth. Once the secret was out, the class pounced on one allusion after another, and after that members of the class delighted in turning over, with subtlety almost equal to the writer’s, the story’s deconstructionist (or revisionist) tricks. I think no one who attended the class or has read the story would deny that it’s an interesting and effective piece. But the point is, the first chapter of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
probably could not have stirred such lively discussion.

Short fiction in the symbolic or allegorical mode can no more compete in the arena of well-constructed full-length novels than a bantamweight can hope to compete in the ring with a skillful heavyweight. (It goes without saying that each has its/his place.) But in the writers’ workshop the heavyweight may not fare well. For practical reasons (the fact that young novelists try out their wings on the short story, for one thing), most creative writing workshops are oriented toward short fiction. For the young novelist, this can be troublesome. His talent may go unnoticed: his marathon-runner pace does not stir the same interest as the story writer’s sprinter’s pace; and the kinds of mistakes workshops focus on are not as important in a novel as in a short story. Poets and short story writers must learn to work with the care of a miniaturist in the visual arts. Novelists can afford to stand back now and then and throw paint at the wall. Granted, they must throw well; but there can be no comparison between the skillful paint thrower and the Japanese master who touches his brush to the surface between heartbeats. Sometimes it happens that the young novelist distorts his art in an attempt to compete with the short story writers in his class. He tries to make every chapter zing, tries dense symbolism and staggeringly rich prose; he violates the novelistic pace.