On Becoming a Novelist (14 page)
Ideally, he belongs in a novel-writing workshop. The young novelist is as different from the young short story writer as the young short story writer is from the poet. The aesthetic problems he must work out are different from those that confront the story writer, and the novelist’s whole character and way of working are different. (Granted, some people write both good novels and good short stories. I am speaking of extreme examples of the two types of writer.) Every three or four years I run a novel workshop (the rest of the time I teach workshops for anyone who wants to come and can already write well enough to get in). The novel workshop is, one soon learns, serious business. The people who become my students wait like hill-country outlaws for the course to be given, and then, when it is finally announced, strike like snakes.
In the last workshop I gave I had ten students. I asked that they work up a novel outline, which we would go over in class, and then that they present me, each week after that, with a new chapter and also a revision of the former chapter (revised in the light of our conference discussion of it). I didn’t believe anyone could really hold to this schedule; I presented it only as an ideal to work toward, pointing out that the farther they were able to get on their novels, the more I would be able to show them about episode rhythm, overall construction, and so on. All but one of the students kept to the schedule. The exception, a town woman with a full-time job, was hospitalized as a result of overwork. I pushed these students no harder than I push students in other workshops. (In fact, I hardly push at all. If the student doesn’t feel like writing, I don’t have to read his work.) The novelists pushed themselves, as novelists characteristically do. The true young novelist has the stamina, patience, and single-mindedness of a draft horse. Those novel-workshop students who were involved with other college courses that semester dropped those other courses. Of the ten students in the course, eight later published their novels.
Students like these have no very comfortable place in the elegant, leisurely world of poets and short story writers. In the usual creative writing course, the potentially fine young novelist may even look rather dull. One of the best young novelists I ever taught, now a successful writer, got bad grades in high school and entered college (as a rugby player) with one of the lowest verbal aptitude scores on record at that university. His grammar was awful and his social adjustment was less than might have been desired. He stands for me as a kind of symbol of the young novelist, even though some are in fact witty, classy, and petite.
You know you’re in a good writers’ workshop if nearly everyone in the class is glad to be there, if writing and talk about writing become, in the course of the term, an increasingly exciting business, and if the writers in the workshop become increasingly effective as writers. The chief mark of a bad writing class is teacher meanness. Beware of the teacher who scoffs at “little magazines,” claiming that they promote and proliferate mediocrity: you are dealing with a snob. Beware of the teacher who loves little magazines and hates
Esquire, The New Yorker
, or the
Atlantic
. You are looking at the same snob in drag. If you feel miserable in your writers’ workshop, you should talk about your misery in private with the teacher, and if things don’t improve, you should quit. A bad writing class doesn’t only fail to teach writing, it can make one give up.
It is of course possible to become a good writer without a college education or, more specifically, without courses in literature. One does not have to be college-educated to be a sensitive and intelligent human being; in fact, there are some advantages to remaining one of the so-called common people, and thus avoiding the subtle social distancing higher education imposes. Writing ability, however improvable by teaching, is in large part a gift. If one cannot get to college, one need not despair of being a writer.
On the other hand, a college education gives advantages not to be lightly dismissed. The uneducated writer may successfully tell the stories of the people around him, may set down their longings and sufferings in comic or deeply moving or awe-inspiring ways; and if he is a self-educated writer, one who reads books, goes to good movies, and listens intently to the stories he hears among his friends and fellow workers, he may even become a subtle and original storyteller. But he will almost certainly remain a sort of primitive, that is, a kind of folk writer; he has difficulty becoming a virtuoso, one of those writers whose fictions impress us not only by their truth to life but also by their brilliance, their value as performance.
It’s hard to explain the difference between a well-educated writer, one who understands from inside the beauty of a play by Shakespeare, the strange genius of James Joyce, Andrei Bely, or Thomas Mann, and an equally intelligent writer who knows only “the world” or, at best, knows only the world and the popular books he can get from his local drugstore, from a book club, or at a nearby branch of Waldenbooks. The uneducated writer is, for one thing, locked in his own time and place. Not knowing (not really knowing) about Homer or Racine or the contemporary fiction of South America, not knowing the many different ways in which a story can be told, from the rough-hemp tale-spinning of the saga poets to the dandified French allegorical tricks of the Middle Ages to the strange ways of India and China or avant-garde contemporary Africans, Poles, or Americans, he is like a carpenter with only a few crude tools: a hammer, a knife, a drill, a pair of pliers. He has no knowledge of the cunning tools of other times and places, with the result that when he asks himself what the best way of telling a given story might be, he has only two or three answers available. Or to put it another way, he has very few models for his work. He may use superbly the models he knows, becoming the literary equivalent of a maker of fine Shaker chairs; but what he might have done had he known other ways and means we will never find out.
What the writer should study if he goes to college is debatable. A good program of courses in philosophy, along with creative writing, can clarify the writer’s sense of what questions are important—in other words, what worries and obsessions may give real importance to the writer’s fiction. There are obvious dangers. Like any other discipline, philosophy is apt to be inbred, concerned about questions any normal human being would find transparently ridiculous. If one reads major journals on aesthetics, for instance, one cannot help but notice that most of the people who write about the arts seem never to have noticed how the arts really work. With solemn jargon and diagrams, professional aestheticians seek to demonstrate that fiction does or does not actually arouse feelings in the reader; or with great shows of learning they seek to demonstrate that fiction does or does not have, in any real sense, “meaning.” All human thought has its bullshit quotient, and professional thought about thought has more than most. Nevertheless, the study of philosophy, perhaps with courses in psychology thrown in, can give the young writer a clear sense of why our age is so troubled, why people of our time suffer in ways different from the ways in which people of other times and places suffered. Though the ordinary housewife, politician, or ballplayer, as well as most academics, may never have read Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Heidegger, the ideas of those philosophers help make clear—or helped to cause—the problems of ordinary modern people. Moreover, for a certain kind of writer philosophy is interesting in itself. Writers always write best about what they most care about. The writer who cares more about philosophy than about anything else (except writing) should study philosophy.
For another kind of writer, the most valuable course of study may be one of the hard sciences. This is especially true, obviously, of the serious writer whose chief literary love is sophisticated sci-fi. Though it is true that most science fiction is junk, some of it is excellent. Certain books spring immediately to mind—some of Ray Bradbury’s work or Kurt Vonnegut’s, certain modern classics like
Brave New World
and
1984
, not to mention works of obvious high-class intent, such as Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
, William Burroughs’s
The Ticket That Exploded
, or the work of major writers outside America, like Kobo Abe, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, or Doris Lessing. The number of aesthetically valuable works of science fiction is greater than the academy generally notices. One finds intelligence and emotional power in, for instance, Walter Miller’s
A Canticle for Leibowitz
(mentioned earlier), the fiction of Samuel R. Delaney, some of Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, Isaac Asimov, and, when he holds in the fascism, Robert Heinlein. One finds a fair measure of literary merit in Algis J. Budrys’s
Michaelmas
or the work of Robert Wilson, whose novels (for instance,
Schrodinger’s Cat
) out-Barth John Barth without sacrificing the primary quality of good fiction, interesting storytelling. And science fiction is the domain of one of the greatest living writers, Stanislaw Lem.
I don’t mean to say that a scientific background needs to lead the writer to science fiction. Many writers—Walker Percy and John Fowles, for example—put their scientific knowledge to work in writing fiction of the here and now, thereby enriching their art. More and more, as we look around, we see science and literature coming together—Nabokov’s moths, Updike’s symbolism drawn from, among other sciences, astronomy and botany, Philip Appleman’s Darwin poems, and so on. As twentieth-century science becomes increasingly the basis of our life metaphors—relativity, uncertainty, entropy, infinite transformation—and as technology becomes the very ground we stand on, whether we live in skyscrapers or on space stations, a background in science looks better and better as a springboard into writing. A science background cannot help the writer develop the literary skills that change an ordinary work into a fine one, but like any other discipline, it can give the young novelist, insofar as he cares about that discipline, important subject matter.
I will not go on to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of studying the social sciences, history or law, and so forth. A good writer may come out of any intellectual discipline at all. Every art and science gives the writer its own special ways of seeing, gives him experience with interesting people, and can provide him with means of making a living—supporting himself while he writes. Since only a few novelists, including very good ones, earn enough by their fiction to take care of themselves and their families, and since after a day of hard manual labor or taxing white-collar office stress it is hard to sit down and write fiction, the young novelist is wise to train himself in some profession where, if he likes, he can ease up a little, take some of his time for writing. Some novelists (Al Lebowitz) practice law part-time; some (Frederick Buechner) are ministers; some are doctors (Walker Percy); a great many are teachers. The trick, of course, is to find a profession you like and one that will also feed your writing, and not eat up all your time.
It is not necessary—or perhaps not even advisable—that the young writer major in literature. It is advisable that he take as many good literature courses as he’s able to work in. Only the close study of the great literature of the past, in whatever language, can show the writer clearly what emotional and intellectual heights are possible. And only the study of literature can awaken the writer to those techniques which, if he reads only modern literature, he would never know the existence of. Very good young writers invariably become so by exposing themselves to good models, usually by getting a good teacher’s help as they explore fiction of the far and near past. Sooner or later they learn the techniques of the so-called New Criticism (expressed in such books as
Understanding Fiction,
by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
Reading Modern Short Stories
, by Jarvis Thurston, or
The Forms of Fiction
, by Lennis Dunlap and John Gardner; more recent books, such as
Fiction 100
, 2nd Edition edited by J. Pickering, give less emphasis to close analysis but tend to achieve the same thing, an ability to read closely). Learning to read a literary text well helps the student create more complex and interesting fiction. Insofar as possible, the young writer should choose courses dealing with the greatest literary figures available. And he should never study what he can easily figure out on his own. Most survey literature courses, by this rule, should be avoided.
Whatever the student majors in, and whatever he selects for elective courses, college work is enriching, probably more stimulating than anything else the young person can do at this period of his life. If he can, the young writer should give at least glancing attention to as many as possible of the major fields of study: a foreign language, history, philosophy, psychology, one or more of the hard sciences, fine arts. Glancing attention to these fields will enable the student to pursue them further on his own whenever he—or one of his characters—needs information. After his undergraduate years, the young writer who has played the field will find himself drawn naturally to additional interests, picking up paperback books about UFOs, botany, or the Russian Revolution, or falling into intense conversation, at parties, with morticians, go-go dancers, and dog trainers. Even a weak education opens up new worlds. Most writers, one may as well admit, get weak educations. Their minds are too much on their writing, and they lack proper respect. The writer ought not to be too proud of this. At the very least, he should learn to spell.
Some writing teachers claim that the student writer should never think about publishing but should simply work hard at learning his craft—presumably on the assumption that if the student learns his craft well enough, publication will take care of itself. The assumption is probably right, but I’m suspicious of those who argue it: I suspect the teacher’s main motive is the wish not to be bugged by students about publication. And in any case, though it’s generally true that one ought not to publish until one has work worth publishing, and that when one does have such work, publication is not likely to prove inordinately difficult, it is nevertheless a fact of life that young writers do want to get published, and to tell them “Hush and eat your spinach” is to evade real problems.