I found myself, via Twitter, giving writing advice to someone I admire the other night. It was appropriate, in context. I mean, I wasn't just forcing my writerly opinion on random people or anything. But it, as sometimes happens, made me think about the practical methodology of teaching writing.
About a year ago, I read Francine Prose's
Reading Like a Writer. It served, in many ways, to remind me of just how much time I used to spend reading. That would be: all of it. Now I work and I make things and I socialize but, as a kid, I was far more interested in reading books than in participating in any sort of human connection.
Books saved my life. I've said it many times before and I'm reasonably sure I'll say it many times in the future as well.
Ed jokes that if there are words on a thing, I will read them. It's not a conscious decision - it's what my eyes automatically
do. We were out at a restuarant and the bread plate had words on it and before I could pass it to Ed, I had to read it. I read cereal boxes and road signs and labels; if the text is in another language, I try to read it anyway, sounding out phonetics I'm not familiar with just because that is what one
does with words.
I don't remember a time before reading.
College was kind of an adventure and I tried many several majors before I came back, settled into the comfortable routine of the English major. I actually graduated, to be quite specific, with a degree in English - Creative Writing. UCF had three tracks (Literature, Creative Writing, and Technical Writing) at that time and while I had a ton of Lit credits...
My first actual creative writing class was in the 9th grade. It was an elective credit, not an English one. And it was really only taught because, I think, Mr. Joiner was bored out of his skull. There were no creative writing classes at the main highschool (housing 10th, 11th, and 12th grades) but I did dual enrollment starting my junior year. Which meant creative writing classes, in addition to everything else, at the community college.
That class in the 9th grade taught me a lot about the business of being a writer - about actually writing things down and journalling. The classes at the community college, every one of them with a woman named Yvonne Sapia, taught me both about craft and about practice - you have to practice, just like any other skill; the more you write, the better you wind up. (Usually.)
Mr. Joiner and Dr. Sapia were both big believers in reading. I was already a compulsive reader - no one ever had to twist my arm to get me to read and respond to something, that's for sure. But they made my reading more conscious, more aware.
I won't say they made it more
critical, per se, but I do tend to analysize everything in the background even as I'm enjoying it. For me, looking at how something works just increased my enjoyment of the thing - writing isn't magic so looking at the mechanics of it doesn't pull away any sort of veil of mystery.
Those classs, and all the ones I have taken since... they've certainly made me more disciplined and they've shaped my conscious thoughts on writing. But I'm not so sure they taught me HOW to write. Because when I read
Reading Like a Writer, it reminded me of something that I rarely give myself credit for. I already knew how to write. When I took that class in the 9th grade, that's not where I learned how to write. It's one of the many places where I learned how to consciously shape what I'm writing and it is one of the many places where I learned how to
talk about writing. It's one of the places where I got better at writing.
But I learned how to write when I was reading. When I was absorbing amazing sentences - and also terrible sentences. When I was getting to know characters, and when I was discovering that some characters are unknowable and that can go one of two ways - and you'd better get it right.
Francine Prose is pretty eclectic in her examples in that book but she keeps coming back to Chekhov. I've spent a while thinking about who I keep coming back to and the list has actually made me laugh a great deal: It's Stephen King. It's older Tom Clancy. It's J.R.R. Tolkien. It's William Faulkner. And it's fairy tales.
And that makes me feel a little bit ridiculous. But then I look at what those writers, as individuals, DO.
King is a masterful storyteller. I don't care that people don't find him literary - he creates compelling characters who are ordinary in all the ways that count. He is amazing at small details that paint a larger picture. I'm reading
Full Dark, No Stars at the moment and I'm forcing myself not to devour it just because I want to spend more time with these people - and because I know terrible things are coming for them. What I want to learn from King, what I hope I have made some progress in learning, is that sense of voice, that inescapable character narrator who, unrelentingly, takes you with them no matter how awful things are.
I swear, Tom Clancy's stuff is ghost-written at this point. But the older stuff.... It always surprises people when they ask for my favorite books and I name
The Hunt for Red October as one of them. I don't go in for military writing as a general rule. I find a lot of espionage stuff just too.... I don't know, maybe Clancy ruined it for everyone? And now it all seems trite? Clancy wrote some pretty exciting stories with lots of action where it counted but that's not why I really love him - it's for the tension. Clancy can make you wait for it - and then when it, whatever
it happens to be, you feel that it was inevitable. OF COURSE that's what happened next; it has the gravitas of reality. Maybe that's a better way to put it than "tension" - it feels real in the way that Bond has never felt real to me (and I love me some Bond). I want to be able to ground my fiction in a feeling of reality so that, when it comes time for the magical realism to really kick in, the reader is 100% along for the ride.
Tolkien... everyone talks about Tolkien. He's the reason I know so much about the world of my novel that will never make it into the novel. Like, the political situation with Cuba, okay? His world is epic in scope, as I think we all know, but the completness of it is what keeps bringing me back. I want to spend more time walking around in that world even though I've read
The Hobbit and LotR and the other assorted histories more times than I can count. Just as I do not remember a time before reading, I cannot remember a time before I knew the story of Biblo Baggins.
William Faulkner is not to everyone's taste. And that's okay. My boss swears I'll appreciate Hemingway more once I hit 40 but I don't know about that. Faulkner is decadent to me. Faulkner is rolling around in the pleasure of a complex sentence. Faulkner is construction and word choice and nuance influenced by punctuation. Faulkner taught me, if any one specific author taught me, that reading aloud can be a visceral thrill and about how language is, in and of itself, a beautiful tool.
It kind of distresses me, sometimes, that I don't return to any female authors, any authors of color, the way I return to these foundation writers. These are the writers of my childhood, before I managed to break out of the B. Dalton's and the Scholastic book order form (man, I loved those forms) and find other authors. Their voices are not my voice - they certainly don't speak to any kind of female experience (though I give King credit, especially in some of his more recent writing).
Other authors have taught me other things (Margaret Atwood has taught me about ambigious endings, for example) and, as I continue to read, I learn more.
I dated a guy who didn't read much but who was trying to make a career for himself as a writer. It... It showed, in his writing.
What my Creative Writing degree gave me is something vastly different. It's often regarded as a throw-away degree because the workshops are so subjective. But that's where I learned how to consciously break down my own writing process. It's where I learned how to revise - and how to even think about revision (both conceptually and from a process perspective). My Creative Writing degree is where I learned the specific names for what I had already seen people do - the specific tricks of mechanics and construction that people use to specific and highly choreographed effect.
Without all of that reading, the degree would be wasted. I'd know the methods without any of the applied theory. And I think I could write without the degree, absolutely - but having that knowledge base helps when it comes times to think about my writing in a larger sense, beyond the surface of plotted events.
I hang out, in real life and online, with a lot of people who are very educated. And while I'd love to go back to collect more degrees, right now it's just me and my lone B.A. in the company of terminal degrees to the right of me, terminal degrees to the left of me. I let that weigh on me sometimes - I feel actively bad about it sometimes, and I wonder if I am cut out for the sort of work going back would entail. But I think my degree, as not-impressive as it is, taught me some valuable things about looking at the world, about reading for meaning, about communicating. It's not a sexy degree, but in the end: it was useful.
I suspect I think about this sort of thing entirely too much. *laugh*
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