An Introduction

      Emblems of Talent

      I

      In July of 1967 I waited in a ground-floor room, yellow, with dark wainscoting and wide windows giving onto Pennsylvania greenery. First, four holding notebooks, followed by three in sneakers, two more with briefcases, another six in sandals and Bermudas, then another three laughing loudly at a joke whose punch line must have come just outside the double doors, followed by two more in the denim wraparound skirts that had first appeared that decade, then still another two with fools-cap legal pads, who looked as nervous as I felt, most with long hair except an older man and a middle-aged woman, both gray (and one woman, also in Bermudas and sandals with black hair helmet-short), some twenty-five students wandered in to sit on the couches circling the blue carpet. Behind a coffee table, I coughed, sat forward, said hello and introduced myself—and began to teach my first creative writing workshop. Repeatedly, in the thirty-five years since, I’ve been surprised how far and fast that July has fallen away.

      For more than a decade (1988–99), at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now in a pale orange space—the well of a hall called Hasbrook—now on the stage of the Hurter auditorium above the university museum, I taught an introductory lecture course in the reading of science fiction, with, each term, ninety to a hundred-fifty students. Sometime during my first three lectures, I would step from behind the podium, look out over the space that, in the early 1960s, some architect had thought “the future” ought to look like, and ask for a show of hands from students interested in writing the kinds of stories we were reading. Perhaps five to ten people scattered throughout those hundred-plus would fail to raise a hand.

      The rest were eager to write.

      As well, for over half those years (usually in that same hall, but once in a cement cellar room with nozzles for Bunsen burners on the worn demonstration desk), to the semicircles on semicircles of students with their notebooks ranged around me, I delivered another lecture course on the reading of general short fiction. At the start of the term I would ask the same question to a similar number. Here, perhaps fifteen or twenty out of my hundred, my hundred-fifty students would admit to not wanting to be writers.

      Among a notable sector of the country’s college students oriented toward the humanities, the desire to write is probably larger than the desire to excel at sports.

      Over the thirty-five years since I began to teach creative writing (with almost as many years writing about and teaching literature), I have asked hundreds of students why each wanted to write. By far the most common answer was, “I don’t want to do what my parents do. I don’t think they’re happy in their work.” Readily I identify with those feelings. Neither of my parents finished college—not uncommon during the Depression of the 1930s. For different reasons, both might have been happier if they had. Both were energetic and creative. Too much of that creativity was drained off in anxieties. Most worries are a matter of telling oneself more or less upsetting stories of greater or lesser complexity about one’s own life. Turning that ability outward to entertain others, rather than inward to distress oneself, has to have some therapeutic value.

      Even in a good university creative writing program, however, the number of graduates who go on to publish fiction regularly in any venue that might qualify as professional is below ten percent—often below five. Were we talking about medical school, law school, engineering, or any other sort of professional training, that would be an appalling statistic. Art schools fare better in turning out professional artists of one sort or another than creative writing programs do in turning out professional writers. But even with such distressing results, writing programs are currently one of the great growth areas of the modern university.

      Though vast numbers of people want to write fiction, the educational machinery set in place to teach people how doesn’t work very well.

      While this book puts forth no strategies for correcting the situation, it discusses some reasons why this is the case—and why it might be the case necessarily. As well, it deals with three other topics and the relations between them. One—which it shares with most books on writing—is, yes, the art of writing fiction. The other two are far less often discussed in classes and rarely figure in such “how-to” books. First, how is the world structured—specifically the socio-aesthetic world—in which the writer works? Having said that, I should add that this is not a book about selling, marketing, or promoting your manuscripts. Rather, it is a book about the writer’s world and how that world differs from the world of other people—as well as how that world is organized today differently from the way it was organized twenty-five, thirty-five, and seventy-five years ago, when most of the tales about writing that we still read today, the mythology of Pound (1885–1972), Joyce (1882–1941), Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1939), T. S. Eliot (1885–1960), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and the other high modernists, first sedimented. Second (and finally), this book discusses the way literary reputations grow—and how, today, they don’t grow. (Clearly, they must grow in a very different way from the way they grew a hundred or two hundred years back, because the field in which they grow is so much larger and structured so differently.) In the letters and interviews here, I consider these last two questions—the writer’s world and the writer’s reputation—from the point of view of the writer who strives after high quality and who wants to be known for what she or he actually accomplishes. (I am not interested in reputations that develop when publishers decide they’ve found a “money-making” idea that they can flog into profit through advertising and publicity.) Frankly, I know of no other book on writing that treats all three (the art of fiction, how that art fits into the world today, and the nature of the writer’s reputation), or shows the ways they interrelate. But I have tried to write one—because they do.

      II

      The essays here were written to stand alone. More or less, they introduce themselves. The letters and interviews following them—if only because it’s somewhat unusual to include such documents in such a book—may need some intellectual context.

      The first letter makes a point only in passing that is nevertheless fundamental. So I stress it now.

      Though they have things in common, good writing and talented writing are not the same.

      The principles of good writing can be listed. Many people learn them:

      (1) Use simple words with clear meanings whenever possible. (Despite the way it sounds, this is a call for clarity, not a bid for simplicity.)

      (2) Use the precise word. Don’t say “gaze” when you mean “look.” Don’t say “ambled” or “sauntered” or “stalked” when you mean “walked.” (And don’t say “walked” when you mean one of the others.) As far as the creative writer goes, the concept of synonyms should be a fiction for high school and first- and second-year college students to encourage them to improve their vocabularies. The fact is (as writers from Georg Christoff Lichtenberg