Not Another Writing Book

There are over a hundred books on writing available in bookstores or through online booksellers. Some of these are written by wildly popular writers such as Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Anne Lamott, and Stephen King.

Others still have been written by noted critics and editors, ranging back to E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing, and Robie Macauley and George Lanning’s Technique in Fiction. In more recent years, Betsy Lerner’s writing guide, The Forest for the Trees, Michael Seidman’s Fiction: The Art and Craft of Writing and Getting Published and publisher/editor/novelist Sol Stein--Stein on Writing( wherein I am referenced)and Creating Memorable Characters by Linda Seger(where I am also quoted)--are but a few examples. Of these mentioned and those not mentioned, sales figures attest the overwhelming popularity of the Anne Lamott Bird by Bird.

The number of want-to-be writers increases yearly as, in fact, do the number of schools and classes to teach them how. Guides and reference books for writers have become a book trade staple. Many of these are valuable in a historical sense, in much the same spirit as Aristotle's Poetics is valuable for writers in a historical sense. But note well, while these and some of the unnamed ones are of some value (and some of some considerable value) they are all out of date.

As the wheel of time ratchets into century twenty-one, evolution is visible on any number of species, including those of story and writing. The first chapter of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is still one of the most compelling opening chapters of all, repeat all Western literature, holding up after a century and a quarter, and Great Expectations (1860-61) still remains the quintessential first person novel (narrow eclipsing my own favorite, Huckleberry Finn,published in 1884).

Back in the day, when Charlie Block ran the Bantam Books office in Los Angeles and I ran the Dell Publishing office in Los Angeles, we often met on neutral ground, somewhat like the cops in The Wire, to gossip, exchange notes, wonder if paperback books would supplant hardcover books. Charlie had to go to a sales meeting in New York, wondering if I'd do him the favor of taking two of his classes at USC. What did I know about teaching? What do I know? Charlie said. You don't talk about teaching, you talk about editing. You talk about writing. And so I said okay, and so Irwin Blacker called me at home after the second class was done and said, cleaning up his language somewhat, They are fucking threatening to boycott the rest of the semester unless you agree to come back and finish up. What about Charlie? I asked. I'll set Charlie up with a seminar on theory. You keep telling them what you told them.

I already did, I explained. Well, you probably have more--you just haven't accessed it yet. Of course you can always assign Aspects of the Novel for your text, I suppose. Sure, I said. Of course.

You have read it, haven't you?

Sure.

Well then, you'd better. I'll send you my copy, order a batch at the student store.

And thus my third encounter with books on writing, the first being Writing Magazine Fiction by Stanley Vestal, which was foisted off on me by a well meaning eleventh grade English teacher name of Herman Quick, my second being The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, which title I rejected as offered as a reprint because, having read it, "it didn't feel right," which was all my publisher needed to hear. (It was not what a subsequent department chairman needed to hear. Sometimes, when he was exasperated with me, he'd introduce me as The man who rejected Lajos Egri.)

Are writing books good for you?

Since I am in active collaboration with Digby Wolfe (head writer/originator Laugh-In, John Denver, Frank Sinatra, Jonathan Winters, etc specials, emeritus department head Dept. of Drama, Univ of New Mexico, Visiting Prof Univ of Canberra, etc and then some) I have to say yes. At least, they're good for us because we think a) some of it can be taught b) we think we know how to do it, c) we have overlapping theories on how to do it d) we've taught and worked together before, and e) we like the idea of carving our initials on this particular desk.

So what are we saying that's different?

We're saying that it comes from you, that there is a place in you whence it comes and you have to find and trust that place, allow it to speak to you and influence you, and okay, take notes when someone in your writing group or MFA seminar has notes or comments, but remember also that this is not the standard format of thesis defense before a committee, this is you, your voice, your take.

And you think you two are worth listening to?

Sure, because look where it got us, which is to say nervous, suspicious, notional, but not overly defensive. Somewhere between food stamps and resentment toward the IRS, mercifully free of jobs selling hot dogs in the COSTCO booth, our major resentments toward network and university bureaucracies, but able to carry on meaningful conversations with deans and some of our academic colleagues. Compulsive maybe, obsessive maybe, but not overly defensive.

Defensiveness being the key to it all, we are able to say in apercu, let it be. Bring it up, let it out, let it be. That's not grammar we're talking about or syntax or style, it is discovery, the thing you dig up in every character you create, the thing you dig up in yourself.

In the Appendix of our book, we're going to have a list of some of the men and women writers we admire, with descriptions of how each can be said to be in some way screwed up.

"I want my place--my own place--my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing to do, which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry--" Nathaniel Hawthorne

On Defensiveness

It is a truth not universally acknowledged, in fact completely overlooked, that within the rant and venom of the despot is a large grain of self-inflicted defensiveness. To express the matter less formally, Harold Ickes, in his protestations yesterday that the presidential election was being hijacked, took aim at a target and shot himself in the foot. While it was and is clear to many observers and indeed (to build toward a metaphor) passengers, The Titanic of Hillary's presidential bid had struck a gigantic iceberg, sprung a rupture, and was taking on water, Mr. Ickes insisted in his way of the splendid engineering of The Titanic, augmenting his rhetoric with the notion that The Titanic was better able to stay afloat than, say, The Pequod.

Mr. Ickes was, of course, being defensive.

Politicians can afford to be defensive. Writers cannot.

Writers must stand behind their visions as sincere believers, bordering more on dithyramb than choler, more on satire than cynicism, more on rigorous observation than the self-justification of explanation.

Typical writer defenses:

It gets better in the next chapter.

But it really happened that way.

Everyone in my writing group liked it.

Tom Woolf does it that way all the time.

People of my generation will understand.

I'm a writer because I love words.

There are others of course, What I particularly like about the last defense is the implicit notion that musicians don't like notes, dancers don't like steps, artists don't like pictures.

Of course they all do like their various platforms but do not use them as excuses to parade techniques so much as the platforms are considered tools to convey a feeling, a meaning, a choice that must be made.

We may portray defensive characters and in fact frequently seize upon such individuals with great tantivy thanks to the dramatic trampoline they present us, but we ourselves must have a vision which we pursue without thought of defense, with no excuse for the honesty of our vision it will reveal.

We are all of us equipped with survival devices that we listen to (on occasion) or ignore completely. It is no easy thing to set forth among our characters with such nudity, our scars and wrinkles, our foibles and hair growing in all the wrong places glaringly visible. Nevertheless, we go, alert to the settings we invent and the denizens of these settings with which we populate our own alternate universe, hopeful and alert for those moments where we are no longer aware of our nudity or foibles, having for the moment transformed ourselves into pure story as we engage our craft. In those moments, there is no room for defensiveness. Then, whatever our age, we are at another age, the writer's age, where there is all the drama and interpretation we can possibly accommodate.