The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

Do You Have What It Takes?

17 Do You Have What It Takes? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A student asks his teacher, “Do I have what it takes to be a writer?” and the teacher responds, “Do you like sentences? If you do, then you have what it takes.” “Do you like sentences?” may seem like a silly criterion, but the longer I’ve been teaching, the less silly it seems. All too often, I meet students who are interested in becoming writers, but when I read their work, it’s clear that they don’t like anything about sentences. Theycan’t punctuate.Their manuscript is full of misspellings.They’re not interested in learning how to control point-​ of-​ view. Frequently, their primary storytelling influence is TV, and their first stories are full of all-​ too-​ familiar melodrama or sentimentality. More disturbing is the student who takes my class but can’t think of anything to write about. Why take a creative writing class if you can’t think of a story to tell? I wish these were isolated cases, but in the twenty-​ plus years I’ve been teaching, it’s been more the rule than the exception. Most students who sign up for my courses do so as an elective, and that’s fine. But the ones who worry me are the ones who seem more interested in the idea of becoming a writer rather than the reality of becoming a writer. If this book does nothing else, I hope it narrows that gap between the idea and the reality. Yet there are those students who clearly want to become writers from the get-​ go. These students are burning with ideas (and not the plot-​ heavy ideas of a TV series); they’re eager for criticism and not defensive when it’s given; they not only ask for recommended reading , theyactually go out and read books I’ve suggested, and they read them as a writer would, paying attention to language, pacing, details , voice. Most importantly, they’re always writing. And, yes, they love sentences. Early on each semester, as a kind of test, I’ll write on the board the first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude : Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. 18 The Decision to Become a Writer By this point in the semester, I already would have talked about how a strong opening sentence of a short storyor novel can serve as a contract with the reader, and how it establishes any number of important things: tone, rhythm, scope, characters, themes, point-​ of-​ view, and so on. I’ll read García Márquez’s sentence aloud several times and then ask my students what it is that makes this such a wonderful sentence. The students for whom I hold out the most hope are not only the ones who keep finding things to talk about with this sentence but also those whose eyes light up during the conversation. Here, after all, is a sentence that has a life of its own. In a mere twenty-​ six words, the author has given us the past, the present, and the future; he has created an entire world. It’s a sentence worthy of a good half-​ hour discussion. I start losing hope when students, even with my prodding , can’t sustain more than a few minutes or aren’t excited by the discussion, because if this sentence can’t excite one about the possibilities that a sentence has to offer, then no sentence can. So, you want to know if you have what it takes to be a writer? Tell me. Do you like sentences? ...