A recent text exchange that I observed between two friends: 

            B: What do you want for dinner?

            L: What do *you* want for dinner?

            B: I asked first.

            L: I picked the last 3 nights.

            B: I don’t know what I want.

            L: …

            B: ??

            L: I told you, you have to pick.

            B: You did not.  What you said is that you picked the last 3 nights.

            Considering the millions of quotidian texts and Facebook status updates, the billions of tweets recently acquired by the Library of Congress for their archives, along with the multitude of emails that are exchanged each day despite this last mode’s imminent obsolescence (“Emails take too long,” some of my friends have complained. “It’s so much easier to text”), I’m not sure why our species is still so inept at communicating with each other.  

            Perhaps it would be best to take a lesson from some of the other species that often inhabit our homes – dogs and cats get their messages across to us and to each other with the greatest of ease and speed: Food. Now.  Walk. Now.  If we don’t follow their commands, we are leered at and stalked until we obey. 

            Even spiders, who rarely, if ever, as far as I know, have been heard to utter a sound audible to the human ear, get their message across quite well.  “Consider my intricate, awe-inspiring web,” the spider in your stairwell says.  “Please avoid it.”

What is the title of your book?

Little Known Facts

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I’m not sure what triggered it but one day I was thinking about what it would be like, if you’re a young man, to have a father who is a film star.  If Paul Newman or Harrison Ford or Robert Redford were your father, and you’ve had to live with his enormous global fame since you were old enough to be aware of it, how would this affect you and the choices you make? 

What genre does your book fall under?

Literary fiction

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’m not sure!  Someone suggested Alec Baldwin for the focal character, Renn Ivins; others have suggested George Clooney.  It might be neat to see Alan Rickman play him or Brad Pitt too.   As for Will, the son, maybe the very talented British actor Ben Whishaw or Ryan Gosling – he’d be *great*.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

The children and lovers of a famous actor reflect on what it means to be involved with him, i.e. the difficulties of living their own lives, making their own decisions.

            The idea for the book arrived at some point in 2010, and I’m not sure what triggered it.  One day I was thinking, What would it be like to be the son of Harrison Ford?  Or Paul Newman?  Or George Clooney?  I think it would probably be pretty difficult because almost any potential friends or lovers the son meets, whether they realize it or not, would want to get as close, if not closer, to the father as the son.

            Plot is important in this novel, as it is in most novels, literary or genre fiction, but Little Known Facts is above all a character-driven story, that is, literary fiction, as all of the fiction that I’ve written since I started writing seriously twenty-two years ago is.  I am most interested in voice and character, and each of the major characters narrates one or two chapters in this novel. 

            June 14 – 24 of this year was my first low-residency experience teaching for Pacific University, and it was several things: exciting, moving, exhausting, affirming, and ultimately, enlivening.  Sitting in the craft talks, hour-long lectures given by faculty members (two talks are scheduled most days), concerning some aspect of the genre(s) in which they have published, made me feel again the thrill and expectant hope that I often experienced as a graduate writing student in poetry at Indiana University in the mid-90s, where I studied with Maura Stanton, David Wojahn, Tony Ardizzone, Cathy Bowman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Roger Mitchell, and Alyce Miller.  Why do we write? each craft lecturer implicitly asked us.  Also, how do we write?  Two examples of craft talks given during the ten-day Pacific residency: the marvelous poet Ellen Bass’s sentiment v. sentimentality poetry talk and the funny, smart, and fearless Laura Pritchett’s how-to-write-sex-scenes talk – full of, er…inspiring examples and tips from sexy writers such as Steve Almond and Scott Spencer.  The talks are delivered in many different ways: some writers read from print-outs (as I did when delivering my talk on story structure) and others were dazzling multimedia blitzes, but ones with much more substance than MTV’s airy video glitz – such as Michael Meyer’s “Start with Place” talk on travel and memoir writing and Aimee Nezukhamatatil’s haibun lecture (a haiku – prose poem hybrid.) 

            A question that was answered in many ways while I was out in Forest Grove, Oregon for ten temperate June days: Why is the Pacific University program already ranked in the top five of low-residency programs, despite having been founded fewer than ten years ago?  Some of the answers: 1) its director, Shelley Washburn, has worked her derriere off, as have the assistant director Colleen Sump and the program’s administrative assistant, Tenley Taylor, to ensure that it’s run with passion, dedication, and expertise; 2) the faculty are all working writers as well as major-league teachers: the publications, awards, fellowships, and other citations included in the bios on Pacific U’s MFA faculty web page were heady and daunting the first time I read through them. Along with my admiration for their many accomplishments, I felt as if I wanted to be a student again and study under these writers, who are now, unbelievably, my colleagues;  3) the Pacific MFA students are also talented; each application is read and considered closely by a meticulous and dedicated admissions committee; 4) the faculty are mentors and friends as well as virtuosic teachers. 

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.

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?

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 of 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.)

In an essay published in the New Yorker a couple of years ago about his MFA experiences, Louis Menand wrote that the writing workshop is a peculiar enterprise: aside from the professor, here is a group of unpublished writers telling each other what should be done to the poem or story under discussion to make it publishable.  To compound the surreal quality of this scenario, despite their lack of credentials, everyone takes each other very seriously.

Menand, as it turned out, is in favor of graduate creative writing programs, as am I.  These programs don’t necessarily teach you how to write more brilliantly, but I do think they can teach you to read more carefully and often to become a more flexible and creative thinker.  If you can recognize genius, if you are willing to study minds greater than your own, you are more likely to grow as a writer.  Having been a French major and a business minor in college, I only took two English classes during these four undergraduate years, one of them a poetry workshop, the other a freshman English course, and the reading I did outside of college was all self-directed, scattershot, intense too, but sundry.  After college, I worked for two years as a secretary at a company in Chicago’s Loop and signed up for two different writing classes.  One of them was held at Ragdale, an artists’ colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, and the class was taught by the poet David Wojahn, who at the time was on a leave of absence from Indiana University.  I told him that I was applying to MA programs for the next fall, and he gave me a bemused look. “Why?” he said. “If you’re interested in writing, you should be applying to MFA programs.”  I had no idea what they were but it wasn’t too hard to learn the difference between MA and MFA programs.  You can take creative writing courses for some MA degrees, but their focus is generally on the critical study of literature rather than on an intensive workshop practice in one or two literary genres.

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.

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.

In the mid-90s, when I was a graduate student at Indiana University and nervously facing my first class of undergraduate creative writing students, I understood within the first couple of weeks that there were few things more fascinating or more daunting for writers than the moment they decide to disrobe their characters and place them in a compromising position.  Or several compromising positions – whatever their preference might be.  Some of my own stories feature characters in various states of undress, intent on offering themselves to people they might or might not believe are good for their egos or libidos.  If we dare to write them, sex scenes offer writers the chance to reveal character in one of the most intimate situations conceivable, and they also show our readers how confusing or scary or beautiful sex can be.

The appeal of the romance-novel genre is well-documented, as is the success of pornography – a billion-dollar industry.  Whether we want to admit it or not, we’re a species as interested in sex as we are in money, revenge, and power, and I think it’s safe to say that these impulses are all linked.  For one, scientists have shown that as the bank balance rises, so does the libido.  (It seems that no matter what I write, there’s a pun in there somewhere – further proof that sex is in the genetic code of countless human endeavors.  Or else I just have an inexcusably dirty mind.)  And despite its ubiquity, few of us seem to tire of sex or sexual thoughts, at least not for very long.  Romance-novel fans keep returning to this genre, comforted and reliably thrilled, in spite of its predictable story lines.

I don’t think many would dispute that our sexuality is as inherently a part of our identity as the face we show the world each day.  Ours is also a culture that has transformed sex into an enemy – if you want it too much, you’re a pervert.  If you talk about it too much, you’re a pervert.  If you do it too much, ditto.  But if you don’t do it, you’re missing out, and boy, do we feel sorry for you.  What are you, some kind of freak?  On more than one level, sex is also a political construct, and any idea or concept argued about in every imaginable public forum is going to hold most of us in its thrall.