Confessions and confusions

I pray to be granted the unrealistic clarity I seek by the cleansing power of confession.  I wish to stop confusing reading with writing, and blogging with both.

The first confession I have to make is that every five years or so I get hit by an irresistible urge for self improvement.

Many years ago (a multiple of five, to be sure) I took a class in fiction writing.  Doubting the usefulness of such an undertaking I looked for the opinions of people I respect and admire—my mentors and tormentors—and found something worth remembering:

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best. I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.

The above collection of quotes is a lovely bouquet of rhetorical flowers harvested from Flannery O’Connor’s prolific crop.  The quote most relevant to this writing is the one singled out in red.  I couldn’t resist including the other quotes because I believe in the obligatory inclusion and the explanatory powers of context and because I believe Flannery O’Conner belongs in the writers’ hall of fame on the highest pedestal; in other words I believe she knows what she is talking about and therefore I believe what she is saying.

The class I took was well run and well attended by an excellent instructor and talented students, respectively.  This set of circumstances is unusual in itself, but it didn’t come as a surprise to me, since it was happening at the first rate University of Malo Danto, after all.

What did surprise me, though, was that under the title “Advanced fiction writing workshop” we were being taught how to read.  I realized full well, even then, that writing and reading are two sides of the same coin.  I also appreciated the opportunity to learn more about how to do better reading.  But I was still pinned down in confusion by the obvious: you start reading a full page and you start writing on an empty page.  There was no mistake on my part about it; instead of being taught how to face an empty page we were indeed being taught how to face a written page.

That would have been fine with me had the class been called “Advanced workshop in facing adversity” but that kind of learning is only obtained at the school of hard knocks; it’s not given, it’s taken.  Anyhow it’s not offered at the University of Malo Danto or any other first rate school of high learning.  Remembering just in time that I was prone to confusing teaching with learning, I resolved to suspend my animation until the end of the quarter, before I would allow myself to draw any definite conclusions.  I understood about prerequisites and I thought that maybe teaching reading was a prerequisite to teaching writing and after a while we’ll still get to writing.

I have to report here that I managed enough self control, deferred judgment and was richly rewarded for doing so.  Nevertheless I also have to report that we never did get to the writing part.  Oh sure, we all wrote stuff during the workshop, even the admission to the workshop was predicated upon the acceptance of our pre-workshop manuscripts.  This brings to mind another confession I have to make.  I am confused about the relationship between knowledge and skill, but perhaps I’ll take this one up some other time.  Maybe at the time when I’ll also write about the lessons I learned out of this experience and how that changed my own teaching methods.  For the time being let’s just stick to the confusion between reading and writing.

My reward for not quitting the class on grounds of false advertising came in the form of a most useful book we read in class: “Six walks in the fictional woods” by Umberto Eco.

From this book I learned (among other very deep things that went right over my submerged head) that the single most important force influencing the impact a given writing has upon its readers is simply what was the writer’s mental model about what he was doing (what was he thinking he was doing?)

I don’t know enough literary theory for name calling, so I don’t know whether to call what I am talking about genre, rhetorical strategy, narrative discourse, natural narratology, or what, but here are Eco’s examples, speaking for themselves:

... an Edward Lear limerick:

There was an old man of Peru
who watched his wife making a stew;
But once by mistake
In a stove she did bake
That unfortunate man of Peru.

…the same story given by Eco as it might be reported by the New York Times:

"Lima, March 17.  Yesterday Alvaro Gonzales Barreto (41, two children, accountant at Chemical Bank of Peru) was erroneously cooked in a shepherd's pie by his wife, Lolita Sanchez de Medinaceli..."

Why is this story not as good as Lear's?  Because Lear tells a story, but the story is [not] the content of his tale.  This content has a form, an organization, which is that of the simple form, and Lear does not complicate it with a plot.  Instead, he expresses the form of his narrative content through a form of expression, consisting of the metrical patterns and playful rhymes typical of the limerick.

I added the [not] to Eco’s text to draw attention to what I think he actually means, but then again I could be totally wrong.  From the little I know about semiotics, it seems that in this field a sentence could be true at the same time with its negation, or if not exactly at the same time, than very soon after.  Nobody seems to be excessively worked up about avoiding contradictions.  This is another one of my confessions of confusion among many others to come: the hardest thing for me to learn in a different culture is the difference between yes and no.

At this point I have to explicitate a few of my current beliefs.

But before I go any further, I have to make an aside close to a confession.  I use the word “to explicitate” as an abbreviation of “to state explicitly”.  This reminds me of the time when Nabokov saw in the writings of one of his students the sentence “The butterfly exits the flower”.  Being the great lover of butterflies that he was, the most famous lepidopterist in the world and a man of “Strong opinions”, Nabokov didn’t hesitate to draw a circle around the word “exits” and to write a short comment right next to it, on his student’s paper.  He wrote “Idiot!”  Needles to say that in the current climate of political correctness Nabokov would have most certainly run into a lot of trouble at my beloved University of Malo Danto, where this episode actually took place many years ago.

To button up the topic of my confusion between reading and writing for now, without waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel to turn out to be the oncoming train, here are my current believes and the decisions I am basing on them.

I believe every writer (or every person for that matter) has a “core material”.  I think that’s what O’Connor is referring to in her first quote above.

I believe that a given core material “gravitates naturally” toward certain themes to the exclusion of other themes.  This believe of mine was recently strengthened by reading “Themes and Texts” by A. Zholkovsky.

I believe a certain theme “gravitates naturally” to a “best” form of expressing it to the exclusion of other forms.  I interpret the examples quoted above from Eco to support this belief.

I believe that a writer tends or “gravitates naturally” toward forming a mental model of “best” writing based on the “best” reading he’s ever done.  I base this belief on the old cliché “practice makes perfect” to which I also add my own twist by saying that if this is so it must also be true that “the wrong practice makes it perfectly wrong”.

I believe that this mental model is the single most influential factor over the expressive power of the resulting text.  In other words, you write what you read just about as much as you are what you eat.

To sum it all up I’d say two things come into the writing process:  the writer’s core material and the writer’s readings and one comes out:  the writer’s text.  What happens in between I wish I knew, but I don’t.

The good news is I don’t need to know that, because (fiction) writing is not a matter of knowledge but of skill.  I’ll take up this particular confusion in a future confession.  For now, suffice it to say that I have disconnected all my blog feeds, and all the comments in an effort to avoid the “garbage in—garbage out” outcome.

Thank you very much, but I’ll face the music of the empty page on my own.

© Copyright 2003 Muta Ceva. Last update: 6/12/2003; 12:26:39 AM.