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

The Professional Student

75 The Professional Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the blue-​ collar neighborhood where I grew up, one of the worst insults you could hurl was to call someone a professional student. It meant that he was avoiding work; it meant that he was brainy but lacked common sense; it implied that he was too weak for manual labor; it also implied that he thought he was better than everyone else. When I think back on it now, the people who were disparagingly called professional students had simply gone away to college. Yet there was a stigma attached to going to college, as if there was something wrong with the person who wanted that much education. The insult tended to come from my parents’ generation, many of whom grew up during the Great Depression, and I suspect that going to college was akin to slacking off. The insult was also a class issue, one born of insecurities and, I’m sure, fear. Because of my own intimate knowledge of the term “professional student,” I hesitate to use it here, and yet there does come a time when you may ask yourself—or should ask yourself—how many workshops are too many workshops? When have you crossed over from “student” to “professional student,” when you should have crossed over from “student” to “writer”? I don’t know precisely where the line of demarcation is, but I have seen workshop junkies who are always in search of “the solution” that eludes their manuscript or who need the workshop for inspiration , just as alcoholics feel they need alcohol to loosen up before going to a party or a job interview. In other words, taking workshops becomes an addiction.Or it becomes an excuse, the excuse being that the person can’t write unless they have a deadline. At some point, you have to sit down and face the page alone. At some point, the final decisions need to be yours. At some point, you have to give yourself deadlines and stick to them. Even though I continued on to get a PhD in creative writing, I took only one workshop while working toward that degree because I was already workshopped out. I also trusted my own judgments of my work by then. I went into that degree program to buy more time for myself. The last thing I wanted to do was sit through another workshop as a student. 76 Education and the Writer I recommend taping toyour wall James Joyce’s famous quote from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with special emphasis on the final four words: I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning. Silence, exile, and cunning eventually become necessary for doing the work, day in, day out, and for calling yourself a writer. ...