Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art

Whose Story Is It? Framing the Frame or Writing Bad on Purpose Purposely

Lex Williford organized a panel that asked the above question for the 1996 AWP convention held in Atlanta. The paper was later published in the Writer’s Chronicle. I฀have฀my฀students฀write฀bad฀stories. It is, of course, very hard to do, perhaps even more difficult than writing (as they assume they are doing most of the time) good stories. That is to say, it goes without saying that a workshop is about producing a good story. Assigning the task of creating a bad story actually makes the transparency of the default assignment (you are to write a good story) readily apparent. To ask for the bad in a workshop is a way to confront what is meant by the good. And shouldn’t it be easier to write bad since we usually are trying so hard to avoid bad writing as if it is our natural and fallen state? The solutions to the problem most often generated by the students are good “bad” writing. A convention or rule of thumb is selected, say that one should use active verbs or be specific, and then the bad writing is a satire or parody of this or that craft proscription . In effect, the writer does not create bad writing but creates an imaginary bad writer who then makes the “mistake.” What is interesting to see in this bad writing are the methods the writers employ to signal that the writing is consciously bad, not just W฀hose฀Story฀Is฀It? ฀ FRAMING฀THE฀FRAME฀OR฀WRITING฀BAD฀ON฀PURPOSE฀PURPOSELY 16 plain bad, thereby communicating to the reader the goodness of the creator behind the badness of the text. And if the intent of the writing is clear, even if the intent is to be bad, then it will be read as good, as a good piece of writing. Recently one student appropriated her own writing, bringing in as an example of the bad a selection from a journal she kept when she was ten. After reading it, we all agreed there was something bad about it and that it was a different kind of bad than the parodies and satires of that day. But, I suggested, if the very same writing had been used in a story offered during a regular workshop, a workshop of “good going to better” stories, in which the narrator is a ten-year-old girl and her narrative is in the form of the journal or diary, our response would be the opposite. We would praise the writer now for the fidelity and the realistic texture of the prose. “This is good,” we would say. “This sounds just like the diary of a ten-year-old girl.” I have been thinking about the issue of framing stories and especially how the workshop itself acts as a frame. Most narratives I see in my workshops are from the point of view of an amateur, often inarticulate, narrator who struggles to narrate a crucial moment in a personal or private history. These stories are in the form of the mock memoir or the mock biography. What makes them good is not the writing per se but the success of their realism, their apparent spontaneity, and the artful artlessness of their construction . Writers struggle very hard to make these stories seem to have simply happened. They must seem blurted out. When written in the first person, these stories appear best when they appear to be mere transcriptions of an impassioned utterance. This, of course, is realism’s game, that the apparatus of its construction is completely hidden. But in order for this artful artlessness to be read as artful artfulness at all, the story must be framed as art. The workshop is that frame. The presentation of such stories in a workshop allows these seemingly spontaneous narratives to show forth as art. A frame, then, renders the story, in some ways, safe. We can read it as a story and not have to confront its content solely. We Framing฀the฀Frame฀ 17 can read it as a confession of a rape and a pretend confession, for instance. Or another story presents us with an explanation of adultery and the awareness that it is a made-up explanation of adultery. The anxiety of the reader is relieved; a distance is created. The workshop is very good at disarming or exposing the story’s camouflage...