Rules, Shmules

My final post for Ploughshares, 4.11.11:

Because several of my preceding posts have been very earnest, and also, possibly, a little depressing, I thought that it might be nice to end my tenure as a Ploughshares blogger on an upbeat note.  With this in mind, I recently asked a group of anonymous literary authorities to comment on some of the writing rules many of us learned in school.

Part I – All Things Junior High

1.  You should never end a sentence with a preposition.  We’re not sure why this is a rule, but we like it very much and take issue with that know-it-all Winston Churchill who opposed this directive, and about it once said, “That is such pedantic nonsense, up with which I shall not put.” 

2.  You should never split an infinitive.  Infinitives are sacred objects, on a par with golden chalices, fragments of the Berlin Wall, swatches from Jesus’ shroud, and the last chocolate éclair at the bridal luncheon.

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The Fine Art of Saying No

This week's Ploughshares post, 4.4.11:

Whether I’m a spectator at a reading or taking part in one, two questions that I often hear during the Q & A session are “When do you get your writing done?” and “Do you have a set schedule?”  Despite having heard these questions many times before, I’m still interested in the responses.  Whether or not a writer has small children or a second career with demanding hours or a family member in need of frequent, possibly exhausting, care, there is no shortage of forces conspiring against a person’s desire to sit alone in a room and put down something interesting on the page.

I’m in awe of the writers who do keep to a schedule, those early-risers who rarely ever fail to awaken at 4:30 a.m. to write for two hours before the rest of the house stirs, or the night owls who are able to write until two or three a.m. and a few hours later get up for work (an effort, I suspect, that must be fueled by large quantities of espresso).  I remember reading an article by Brett Lott, right around the time Jewel was chosen for Oprah’s book club, in which he stated that he really did wake up before dawn every morning to write.  If this is what it takes, I thought at the time, my writing career is doomed.  It could be that I need more sleep than a lot of other writers, or maybe it’s that I’m unwilling to say no to as much as I should – do I really have to keep a book and movie journal, along with my regular journal?  Do I need to send several dozen emails a day, some of them quite lengthy, and write letters or cards to family and friends for birthdays or for no other reason than to say hello?  Should I be sending out a hundred holiday cards complete with handwritten notes and going to spinning classes at the gym five or six mornings a week?  And why on earth do I feel that it’s a moral necessity to read every article in the three magazines I subscribe to?  Should I try to keep lunch dates three or four days during some already-busy weeks on top of teaching full-time?  Those are only some of the activities that might occur on any given day – what about laundry, dishes, meals, cleaning, grocery-shopping, phone calls, bill-paying, commuting, and grading student papers?

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Wherefore and Why the MFA?

This week's Ploughshares' post, 3.28.11:

I realize there is no shortage of essays justifying or vilifying the creative writing MFA degree, which some consider the educational equivalent of fool’s gold and the universities that offer this degree little better than diploma mills.  At the college in Chicago where I teach creative writing and literature courses, many of my hopeful young students ask each year if I think going to graduate school for creative writing is a good idea.  What jobs can someone with an MFA expect to find?  What are the odds on publishing a book right after graduation?  If you can get in, is Columbia University worth the money?  Or is it better to go to a school that offers full funding, even if it doesn’t boast the reputation that the more prestigious MFA writing programs do?  Is a teaching requirement reasonable or is it better to go somewhere you don’t have to teach?

MFA programs are a good idea, I tell them, for these, among other, reasons: they offer you a ready-made place in a community of serious writers; they require you to read and write with earnest single-mindedness for two or three years; they give you the chance to make friends with other writers who will, ideally, help you with the practical as well as the personal aspects of the writing life.  Because there are so many brutal and brutalizing uncertainties in this profession, it is perhaps even more important for writers and artists to find a support network than it is for people in other fields.  Ours really is a punishing career – rejection arrives early and often for so many of us – and if you don’t remind yourself frequently that thousands of other writers are having the same experiences, possibly at that same moment, it’s very easy to put away the notebook or turn off the computer and not go back.  (In some cases, you might be saying, not going back is an excellent idea!  Save us from the next poem in the “Self-Portrait with a Bucket” series or the fifteenth draft of The Sky Looks Like a Big Blue Bruise.  We value our sanity.  That’s hard to argue with, but I do think that talented writers are as likely as less talented writers to give up if they face rejection often enough.)

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Why Is It Taking So Friggin' Long?

This week's Ploughshares post, 3.21.11:

It’s hard to dispute the omnipresent signs that we are a nation of strivers and slackers who have been told that we deserve immediate results, and if at all possible, we should be able to reap the rewards of the good life without any real or prolonged struggle.  Instant gratification seems now to be the prevailing ethos of both the financially stagnant and the upwardly mobile.  Text messages, tweets, MP3s, iBooks, and iPoems – small doses of powerful media that might already have written themselves into our DNA.  Patience? Waiting? Why?  (Hey – does anyone around here know where I can buy a lottery ticket?)

Today, if you want to publish your work, you need only find a good host site and start a blog.  Or you can buy a domain name and design your own full-fledged web site if you don’t mind paying a little rent in cyber-space.  The days when writers were forced to wait for the postal service to make its deliveries of an editor’s verdict are more or less extinct, although some literary journals still accept hard-copy submissions, the kind sent with the quaint materials of a nearly-extinct age: stamps and envelopes.  Due in part to the fact that most writers own computers and have internet access at home, along with the parallel growth of environmental initiatives to reduce the waste and overuse of natural resources, online journals have proliferated, as have those that still offer print versions but also accept online submissions through Submission Manager or Submishmash.

So many of us want results as soon as possible, preferably an hour or two after we have finished a new story or poem or essay or philosophical treatise.  We want to be adored, adulated, serenaded to, stared at longingly, canonized, and above all, remembered and paid grandly.  We don’t all, however, want to do the necessary hard work that such emotional tributes usually require.  The harsh truth is, for most of us, it won’t happen overnight.  Despite the fact that the careers of some very famous and respected young writers seemed to have shot out of the publishing gates with the speed of Secretariat (Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Dave Eggers come quickly to mind), most of us have to wait and work a lot longer for our prose or poetry to be smart and interesting enough for the people who are likely to read and admire it.

Alice Munro was in her late thirties when she published her first book, The Dance of the Happy Shades.  She had married, divorced, raised children, and in the interstices, managed to find a few hours to write stories.  Carol Shields was almost sixty when The Stone Diaries won the Pulitzer and earned her a much larger readership than she had previously claimed.  Similarly, the marvelous British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald was starting her seventh decade when she published her first novel, The Golden Child, in 1977.

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The Vampire in the Ivory Tower: Genre Fiction

This week's Ploughshares post, 3.14.11:

A year or so ago, a friend who teaches college English courses made a thought-provoking comment about the reality gap between MFA programs and the publishing world, one that continues to haunt me:  “Why do MFA writing faculty turn up their noses at genre fiction,” he asked, “when that’s what most people who still read books actually want to read?”

As much as I’d like to say this isn’t true, it is very difficult to argue with the numbers: Sandra Brown consistently outsells Alice Munro, even if the book prize committees and book critics of the world generally agree that Ms. Munro is the more talented and important writer.

Insults to the world of Brilliant Writers abound:  why, for a significant period of time in the ‘90s, was Robert James Waller, author of The Bridges of Madison County, a much more famous writer than Raymond Carver?  Why does Nicholas Sparks continue to acquire new readers despite mounting evidence that he should not be left unsupervised in a room with a laptop?  And then there’s the Dan Brown phenomenon…well, you know what I’m talking about.  After a few of his stultifying pages, you might feel like you too have been crucified.

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