About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

Teaching/Writing

6 Teaching/Writing The young painter who has set about learning to paint “realistically ” is often surprised that the eye must do the learning; the hand more or less takes care of itself. “But I can already฀see what’s there! Tell me what I’m supposed to do to set it down.” Keep your hand still and look more closely. As “realistic” painting does not exhaust art, neither does the comparatively high resolution of narrative storytelling exhaust fiction. But the young writer who has decided to utilize his or her experience of the world at this comparatively high resolution , for like reasons, is always surprised when he or she is told to go back and reexamine his or her experience. “But I want to know how to write an exciting piece of action !” Examine your reactions when you are excited; as well, when you are bored. “But how do I create a vivid character?” Look closely at what individualizes people; explore those moments when you are vividly aware of a personality. Explore the others when you cannot fathom a given person’s actions at all. “No, no! You don’t get the point. Tell me about style!” Listen to the words that come out of your mouth; look at the words you put on paper. Decide with each whether or not you want it there. But it will always be a paradox to the young artist of whatever medium that the only element of the imagination that can be consciously and conscientiously trained is the ability to observe what is. Teachers of narrative fiction fail or succeed according to the ingenuity with which they can present the above in as many ways as possible—a success or failure that, alas, has nothing to do with their own writing ability. 64 Part฀I:฀Seven฀Essays A teacher at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop,* you may live in the dormitory with the students, or room in a separate building . The students are energetic, dedicated, writing and revising throughout the six weeks. The solution to most literary problems is time and thought. But if someone can be there immediately to suggest where thought might be directed, so much the better. I chose to room in the student dorm. I had given occasional lectures and one-day seminars. Summers ago I had taught remedial reading to a volunteer class of adolescents at a community center. But Clarion for five days was my first formal teaching experience. A handful of the students were older than I. Several had sold stories and novels already. The situation would intrigue any teacher of fiction. A writer of fiction, I could not resist it. The real worth of that summer, as with any intense, living experience, is in the texture of the experience itself. I had set up exercises and discussion topics for the formal three-hour morning classes. Part of this time was set aside for the group discussion of stories handed in the previous days. In my first class, we began by discussing some complex ideas about the way information is carried by and between words. We read some sentences, a word at a time, to see just what the information given was—tone of voice, mood, order of presentation, and importance—and at which points in the sentence this information became apparent. I tried to examine just what happened in the microleaps between words. I had notes. But there were great silences in the discussion when I and the students were at a loss for what to say next. Afterward, I was very relieved when two people came up to discuss ideas of their own that more or less took off from things I had said in class. But later, when I asked two others, whose comments had *The Clarion Writers’ Workshop is a writing workshop, held annually since 1967, that specializes in imaginative writing, fantasy, and science fiction. It runs for six weeks during the summer, June through July, with a different professional writer in attendance as instructor every week, with one branch held at Michigan State University and the other, Clarion West, held annually over the same period, in Seattle, Washington . Since 2004 Clarion South has been held in Brisbane, Australia. Teaching/Writing 65 seemed the most astute, what they thought of the session, I was cheerfully informed they hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was talking about. The next morning...