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 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.)

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.

Deborah Eisenberg.  Martin Amis.  Steve Almond.  Alice Munro.  Penelope Fitzgerald.  Jim Harrison.  Anne Carson.  W.G. Sebald.  Michael Ondaatje.  John Updike.  These are some of the authors whose books, in recent years, I have all but inhaled, many of them in rapid succession.  As I suspect most book lovers do, I feel a strong, almost filial attachment to the writers whose work I have read closely and sometimes repeatedly.  Or maybe rather than being their daughter, I want to marry them.  Either way, I confess to a minor, ongoing fantasy about sharing the rooms they inhabit, the spaces where they are typing intently or writing with a cramped hand toward their next great book.

One of the authors who continues to interest me most is John Updike.  Whether you admire him or not, he is unequivocally a writer of towering stature, a small-town Pennsylvania-born man who saw approximately sixty of his books in print during the fifty-five years he was writing and publishing.  He once said in an interview with Terry Gross that he aspired to write prose that read like poetry; that is, he hoped his readers would be able to choose any page from one of his stories or novels and read it like a poem.

A favorite passage that I’ve revisited often from his story “Natural Color”: “She was with a man—a man taller than she, though she was herself tall.  He moved beside her with a bearlike protective shuffle, half sideways, so as not to miss a word she was tossing out, her naked hands gesturing in the February sun.”   That “bearlike protective shuffle” is both funny and beautiful.  It gets me every time.  How he was able to write such musical prose that in a few words conveyed more meaning than an entire tax code remains an open question.  But lucky for us, he did.

Last winter I was asked to judge two short-story contests, one for my graduate writing program and the other for a local chapter of a national arts organization.  Not surprisingly, I was flattered and a little excited to have been asked to serve as judge.  What a novelty to be on that side of the desk.  I immediately understood, however, the almost sinister power a judge wields over the contest participants.  Having entered a dozen or so literary competitions myself over the past decade, I knew that the results seriously mattered to most of the participants, and not being named one of the winners could set the contest entrants back for days, possibly weeks.  (As I wrote that last sentence, I hesitated over using the word ‘loser.’ Loser’s connotations are often so unpleasant that even in an essay where it’s logical to use that word, I am reluctant to do so.)

If I remember correctly, the graduate writing program’s contest was four distinct competitions – two for the undergraduate writers, two for the graduates.  All told, there were about forty entries, twenty-five or so from the undergraduates, the rest from the MFA students.  As I began reading, it became clear that many of the undergraduate stories needed a lot of work, and only about four were real contenders for first prize.  Nonetheless, in several cases, I was impressed by the scope of these writers’ imaginations.  One student wrote a very detailed story about a beekeeper, another about a man running into a boy with his car that was, to my surprise, suspenseful at times.  Certainly the majority of the stories were in need of extensive revision, but I could see that these writers were getting the hang of it, that they understood the importance of pacing and characterization, of the right word versus the obvious word.

The place where stories come from? I think that it must be the same place where dreams and nightmares reside. It has no street address, no basement or attic room. I'd say that its closest likeness is a traveling circus, one with sideshows that scare small children, and the whole thing sometimes leaves parents feeling like they've been conned – thirty bucks for six rides? Whose in charge of this dump?

My stories often start with a title, one that's sometimes inspired by an article I'm reading or by an idea that's maybe triggered by an irrational fear. (For example, what if I were in an accident and paralyzed from the waist down and I have a boyfriend I'm nuts about but because I'm now paralyzed, he ends up falling in love with someone else. And guess what, his new girlfriend and I work in the same office!) I keep a small, beat-up notebook on my desk and another more pristine one in my nightstand. In them I jot down ideas for titles, characters and situations that sometimes turn into stories. Many other writers start with an image or a character who maybe arrives with a name, maybe not. Stuart Dybek has said that he begins his stories with a strain of music playing in his head and goes from there, as if transcribing notes into words. Before I started writing fiction seriously about fifteen years ago, I attended graduate school at Indiana University as a creative writing student in poetry. I'm grateful that I did because I think the close attention poets are taught to pay to every word (not that fiction writers don't too, but I didn't, not at first) helped me learn to write stories that flow outward from the few words that sit at the top of the first page. My hope, which is sort of the inverse of Dybek's method, is that the words will become a kind of music in the reader's head. I want the story to carry the reader from paragraph to paragraph like the best songs do. I don't want the reader to be glad when it's over. It'd be nice if he or she would go back and reread it right away, as if hitting the repeat button on the stereo.

I had been writing fiction for fifteen years and publishing stories in literary journals for ten when Supriya Bhatnagar, the publications director at AWP, called me on a mid-May day in 2009.  Listening to her brief message an hour later, I wondered if some pages were missing from the manuscript I had submitted for the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, but I knew that the contest organizers were more likely to discard it than spend time offering me a chance to correct a sloppy mistake.  Was the call a prank?  Or could it be that I was one of the contest finalists?  (Did they even bother to call entrants about such things?  Wasn’t everything done over email now?)

As it turned out, Ms. Bhatnagar had contacted me for the best possible reason:  my story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, had been chosen by final judge Allan Gurganus as the 2009 winner of the Paley Prize.  Ms. Bhatnagar wanted to be certain that Portraits was still available.  Hearing this, I almost laughed.  Yes, it definitely was.  I was touched that she thought my collection might win two contests in one year, even though I couldn’t see that happening in either of our lifetimes.

Soon after the call from AWP, Bruce Wilcox at the University of Massachusetts Press, the Paley prize series’ publisher, contacted me to ask for an electronic file of Portraits.  The 2008 winner’s book, Temporary Lives by Ramola D, wasn’t even out yet, but because Allan Gurganus and the initial screeners had done their work so efficiently, we had a longer lead-time than usual for mine.  The publication date for Portraits was set for November 30, 2010, so far into the future – more than eighteen months – that it was hard to believe this manuscript really would end up in book form.