The Writing Life Read online

  A Writer Should Be Able to Write Anything

  IN THE FALL OF 2001 I created a class called Creative Nonfiction for the graduate students in the writing program. Teaching the fiction workshop the year before had taught me that many of our students would never make a living as fiction writers and should have another outlet for their creative juices. I wanted them to understand that a writer should be able to write anything, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, journalism, papers, letters, love notes.

  In order to teach the class I had to reread many of my favorite books. I was trying to choose books that showed the range of possibilities for nonfiction. In the end this is the list I assigned.

  Plus I gave them a long list of recommended books, with emphasis on Truman Capote and Robert Coles.

  The book the students liked most was Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It inspired two women poets to write some really funny, hard-edged essays that I loved reading and took as much pride in as they did. Three of these essays were published.

  A few of the students liked The Curve of Binding Energy and others came to like it when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Several of them told me their first reaction at the terrible news was “what if it is nuclear.” I had assigned the book on purpose because I worry that not enough people in the United States understand what nuclear energy is or how uranium-235 and plutonium are manufactured and stored.

  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was inspiring to a few students but the rest found it boring. I was amazed by it when I read it in the seventies but could not recapture that feeling when I reread it for the class. Perhaps Ms. Dillard has been copied so much that we forget what a brilliant thing she did by bringing her poetic skills to explaining nature in contemporary terms and using contemporary science.

  I will change my list when I teach the course again next year. It was top heavy with physicists and left out many books that I love. Many of them have disappeared from my library and I am replacing them with the generous “start-up” money given me by the dean when I began to teach. Most new professors use the money to upgrade their computers but I am spending mine on books. Next year I will include The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen on my list. And either African Genesis or The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey. These are seminal books, written by the best writers in their fields. I want my students to read the best and most beautiful writing I can find for them. I’m still searching and reading and ordering books and charging them to the university.

  It is difficult to call this work. I must be the luckiest woman in the world to have this job fall into my lap at this time in my life. I should be on my knees every day to thank the world for its blessings.

  As Einstein wrote, “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”

  Everyone Wants to Be a Writer

  MAYBE I ONLY THINK everyone wants to be a writer because the friends I naturally choose are people who love books. People who love books sooner or later dream of writing them. It’s a natural response to stimuli.

  Down through the years many lawyers and physicians have come to me with ideas for books. The physicians want to tell me a story and have me write the book. Hired help! The lawyers mostly want to write the book themselves but they want to do it fast and have it published and make a million dollars, or else back to the pursuit of justice.

  People have stories they want to tell and that’s an honest desire. Wanting to publish a book is mostly about ego, not that ego is bad, it just isn’t the thing that drives writing. Writing is driven by the muse. Real writers get into spells when they write, they believe what they write, they are in love with what they write, they will sacrifice for it, give it anything it needs.

  My graduate students probably came to the university infused with that spirit but it gets drained out of them by the constant interaction with other writers and the drain on their time of teaching undergraduate composition classes. They are naturally jealous of each other and no matter how hard the smart ones try to keep that at bay it takes its toll. They have to compete for a small number of fellowships and prizes. Plus, they have a difficult time being published. Being an unpublished writer is a terrible Catch-22. You can’t get an agent or a publisher interested in your work until you have published and proved you have an audience. So you have to submit stories and poems to small magazines staffed by aspiring writers like yourself. Many of the magazines charge a reading fee to even look at work the students send them.

  What can I do to help? How do I fit into this equation? More and more I think the only thing I can do is be the hardest editor they will ever have. Tell them what I know about what I do and how I do it. Show them on the page how to edit. Say the same things over and over again. Writing is rewriting. Write what you know. The reward has to be within yourself. Tell the truth about what you know and what you feel. Find out things. Read great literature. Then write. It’s only typing. Stop talking about it and do it, or else admit you only want this master’s degree so you can teach.

  Why am I doing this? Why do I think it will work?

  “You Always Use Setbacks to Help You Play Better”

  —ANDRE AGASSI

  MOST OF MY METAPHORS are from sports. The happiest years of my life were when I was playing tennis all day long in New Orleans. Nothing, not even writing, has ever challenged me as tennis did. I came to the game late in life, in my early thirties, but fortunately I had been running six miles a day for several years so I was in tremendous shape physically when I began to take lessons and learn tennis. I had played on and off as a child but had no real strokes or knowledge of the game. I didn’t even know that I had good depth perception or hand-eye coordination. I knew I was from a family of male athletes and by the time I took up tennis I knew enough about heredity and genes to know that women get the same stuff men get, although in different forms.

  I write exactly the way I played tennis. I get up at dawn and go at it until noon. Nothing stops me. Nothing is allowed to get in my way. I have hurt the feelings of every good friend I have by needing solitude in which to create. Once I even asked a friend who was visiting me to leave. He had come to stay a week and after four days I asked him to get a hotel room so I could work.

  I was on a trip to Europe with friends once and thought of a way to finish a novel I had started so I jumped ship in Switzerland and left them to themselves. The strongest and bravest of my friends have forgiven me these transgressions.

  Since I know it is this sort of dedication that makes a writer I know how few of my students will ever achieve what they are seeking in our writing program. Still, I try to believe that by telling them what it took for me to be a successful writer I will make them strong enough to face down their friends and family and take what they need to create.

  It was easy for me to do. I didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter. For many years my desire to do my work and tell my stories was so intense I would have sacrificed anything to it. I begged forgiveness of the world but I would have continued with my work whether the world agreed to let me do it or not.

  I adore watching Andre Agassi play tennis and I love to hear the stories of how he trains for the game. There is a story that he ran up the very high hill he uses for training on Christmas Day. That made sense to me. The best Christmas I ever had was once when my three sons were busy with their women and I was able to spend Christmas week alone finishing my first novel. There was snow and the work was going well and I was as happy as a lark, alone at my typewriter making things come out well for Amanda McCamey and Will Lyons. Later, my editor talked, begged, conned me into changing the ending and letting the book end with the tragic death of Will in an automobile accident. Ten years later I wrote a story bringing him back to life and insisted on putting it into a short story collection. We had never really seen him die in The Annunciation, so I had some truck drive
rs see the accident and run down the hill and save him.

  This year, twenty years after the original ending was written, I let Amanda and Will become grandparents. When my copy editor at Little, Brown had that manuscript before him, he wrote me a note. “My God, has it been that long. Seems only yesterday that Amanda was abandoning her Samurai warrior stance to scream for drugs …”

  In the original ending, the one I wrote that Christmas Day, Amanda gives birth to Will’s child while he is driving towards Fayetteville in a snowstorm to tell her he has found the daughter she gave away for adoption years before.

  I have had a wonderful time being a fiction writer. I hope I can make it possible for some of my students to do the same.

  I must be tough. I must think of Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, my all-time favorite woman tennis player. I must remember Billie Jean King and Martina Hingis, who goes up against giants with her small five-foot, six-inch frame and wins as often as she loses.

  I must think of Coach K at Duke University. My grandson is at Duke and works for the football team so he is in the know on Coach K. Last year, when the Duke team lost to Maryland, Coach K went into the locker room and took out all the benches and took the name-plates off the lockers. He stripped the locker room bare.

  When I decide what would be analogous to that in a writing class I will put it into action.

  Write What You Know

  WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. What could be simpler, and harder to get a student to believe. A young woman in my undergraduate fiction workshop knows it in her bones. She is a slight, pretty girl with two small children, and, although I did not know it until the class was over, was pregnant with a third the whole time the class was going on. She was quiet, with a charming, small smile. She listened to what I said with great attention. She read the assigned stories and was able to talk intelligently about how they were plotted and where they might have come from in the background of the writer. She was from a rural background and understood Turgenev and Chekhov as I had dreamed young people from farms in Arkansas might understand them.

  The first story she wrote for me was a simple tale about a thirteen-year-old girl trying to protect her younger brother from the bullies on the back of the school bus. It began at the rural bus stop where they waited for the bus. It began with a description of the bus as it drew near the waiting children at a crossroads of two country roads.

  I can still see the story as clearly as the day I first read it. It had such an effect on the class that when they were discussing it everyone was talking at once, telling their own school bus stories. After I read it I began to notice children waiting for buses in the early morning (when I am usually driving to my health club to work out). I became imaginary friends and protectors of two small girls who were always standing at a corner near my house. The older of the two very well-dressed children was always shoving the younger one out into the street. “Stop next time and tell her not to do it or you will call the police,” the author of the school bus story told me when I reported my story to the class. “I bet their mother would have a fit if she knew that was going on.”

  Besides the class being wild with jealousy over the school bus story and filled with their own going-to-school memories, the students were inspired by the school bus story to begin writing all sorts of things about the darkness and blinding light of childhood.

  Any thread will lead you out of the darkness and into the light. The school bus woman was our Ariadne. She had shown the class something that all my lecturing had not been able to do. A handsome young man who had been writing stories set on trains in Europe, where he had been once for a month, began to write about his high school basketball team and his work took flight.

  You can write stories set on trains in Europe, but only after you learn to praise the world you know in your bones. The older I get the more I read Robert Frost and the more I love his small poems about the seasons.

  I have been out of town most of the time since my undergraduate fiction class last semester. Now that I am home I must go and find the young woman who wrote the school bus story and see the baby she was carrying in her womb while she was writing it. It was not the last thing she wrote for me. After the success of the school bus story she wrote at least four more pieces, each equally as lovely and true and funny. I think she could actually become a writer. She was a gift to make me love teaching.

  The best thing about the school bus story was the ending. At the end, no matter how the girl tries to keep her brother in the front of the bus where he will be safe, he keeps going back to the dangerous, high testosterone back of the bus and letting the bullies tease and hit him. Finally, he wins the right to sit with them and be a man. The big sister cannot win. Any field biologist could tell her why.

  Postscript I

  A month after I wrote this essay I ran into the young writer-mother in the hall leading to my office. She had the new baby in a carrier. The baby was on one arm. She had a stack of books of literature in the other arm.

  “Oh, please let me see the baby,” I said, and she put the carrier on the floor and we both knelt down beside it.

  “Is it a boy?” I asked, although I already knew from the clothes.

  “Yes. His name is Luther.” I looked into the baby’s wide, blue eyes. I felt as though I had known him always.

  “I’ve known you since last September, Luther,” I told him. “You have lovely eyes.

  “Will he be stupid enough to keep going to the back of the bus?” I added, turning back to his mother.

  “Who knows?” she answered. “I have three boys and four brothers. You can’t tell what any of them might do.”

  “Keep writing,” I said. “You’re good at it. I’m in my office on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Come and see me.”

  “I will,” she said. “If I have time.”

  I haven’t seen her again, but I am waiting.

  Postscript II

  I ran into her again this morning at the Fayetteville Athletic Club. She was dressing the children to go to the swimming pool. Divine little boys, towheads with deep blue eyes and the wild energy of their English, Irish, German ancestors, cavemen, inventors, cave painters, Stonehenge builders.

  “I’d like to get back to school but as you can see it isn’t going to happen soon,” she told me.

  “You’re collecting material,” I told her. “Besides, this is the real creation. Everything else is shadow.”

  “I hope so,” she answered and disappeared to the swimming pool.

  Choosing the Books

  A BIG JOB FOR ANY TEACHER is to choose the books the students read. For a teacher of creative writing it is even more critical that the assigned texts be the best ones. Having no idea how to pick and choose among the riches of literature I began by giving the students books that had influenced me when I began to write.

  The testing ground was my first undergraduate course in creative writing II, for which the students supposedly have a strong background in literature. I didn’t trust it. Even if they had read Faulkner I was pretty sure they hadn’t read what I considered the best of his work.

  I have always wondered why most of the anthologies I saw being used in English departments were so bad. They had the right authors in them but not the best work of those authors. My agent told me it is because publishers try to make anthologies out of writings that are in the public domain or can be used for minimal fees. This was such sad information that I went around in a funk for days thinking about it.

  I was worried about the cost of the books I assigned the students. Then, standing in line in the university bookstore one day I watched a physics student paying for his books. He paid more for one textbook than the combined cost of everything I had assigned my students.

  In the end I assigned a beautiful Library of America anthology of poetry and four paperback books of fiction: Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger, Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov, and The Wide Net by Eudora Welty. Since the purpose of the c
lass was to write, and the books were only to inspire and give examples, I decided that was enough. It was still less expensive than one physics text. I love the sciences and believe in them, but art is my province and natural home and I will defend it now that I am in a position to do so.

  It doesn’t sound like much of a position. I am an associate professor of creative writing with a BA in philosophy and three honorary doctorates in letters. When I accepted this teaching job they asked me if I wanted to be a full professor and have tenure. I was embarrassed to say yes since I wasn’t certain I could do the work so I said no. Since then I have learned that you must have tenure to vote in English department meetings so I wish I’d said yes to that.

  But all in all I think I am better off as I am. I don’t want expectations to be too high. I am feeling my way into a world I have admired from afar. I’d better watch out for hubris in any form.

  This fall will be my third semester of teaching. I am going to be harder this fall and I have changed the books I am teaching the undergraduates. I have found an anthology I like and I am going to teach fiction out of that. It is called eFictions and is edited by Joseph Trimmer, Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. Besides having the book itself, with its seventy stories, a teacher can order extra stories from a long and amazing list and they will come in bound copies. If I liked I could customorder copies of the book with the extra stories included or substituted for ones I didn’t want.

  I am opposed to professors copying stories and giving them to their students as it violates copyright laws. I have done it several times with poetry written by people who are dead but I felt bad about it and won’t do it again.