Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary

Appendix: Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student

Appendix This page intentionally left blank Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student Write as simply as you can for the most intelligent person in the room. —Blanche McCraryBoyd, OutWrite, Boston, 1998 You write simply, we might add, so that your hypostasized intelligent other can more quickly catch you out when you write down idiocies— and, if that intelligence is imbued with enough generosity, so that it can bracket those idiocies and go quickly to what's interesting among the suggestions in your work. From time to time (or again and again) the writer must write directly against that simplicity to enhance and tocontrol just the suggestiveness in which, for such an intelligence, much of the work's worth will reside. This tension between clarity and connotation iswhy so many writers have twovoices—I first heard Dudley Fitts put forward the notion from his wheelchair at a poetry seminar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 1960—often in evidence and in tension in the same text. Fitts used Henry Reed's moving poem on Adamic pretensions in the light of World War II, "The Naming of Parts," as a particularly clear example, more than half a dozen years before anyone this side of the herring pond had even considered the Lacanian notion of a split subject. I have written the following notes as simply as I can.But what use they may have, if any,will be entirely in what they can suggest—as much as if I had written them with the recomplications of some of my examples. What is literary talent? To what extent should it be treated as a skill? A skill may or may not be something to be mastered. Certainly the physical ones require strength, muscles, and,in general, those facilities that must be built up by repetition. 434 Appendix My feeling is that literary talent is definitely not something that involves mastery in any way,shape, or form. Thus, the treatment appropriate to the mastery of a skill is whollyinappropriate to the training of literary talent. Both encouragement and the proffering of judgmental criticism in the early stages are equallyout of place—though the student may desperately want one, the other, or both. As far as I can see, talent has two sides. The first side is the absorption of a series of complex models—models for the sentence, models for narrative scenes, and models for various larger literarystructures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism. (And,yes,that means criticism of the writer's own texts as well as the criticism of others.) Nothing else affects it. To know such models and what novels, stories, or sentences employ them certainly doesn't hurt. Generally speaking, however, the sign that the writer has internalized a model deeply enough to use it in writing is when he or she has encountered it enough times so that she or he no longer remembers it in terms of a specific example or a particular text, but experiencesit, rather, as a force in the body, a pull on the back of the tongue, an urge in the fingers to shape language in one particularway and not in another. The only wayto effect this isto encounter that model or structure again and again in other texts and to experience i t . . . well, through the body. Clumsy, inadequate, and not quite accurate, that's the only way I can say it. These models must be experienced through what the early German Romantics called Begeisterung—the sine qua non for the artist, more important than intelligence, passion, or even imagination and the foundation for them all. Literally "in-spiritedness" and often translated as "inspiration ," it carriesjust as strongly the sense of "spirited," so that it is more accurately designated by the English word "enthusiasm." Begeisterung —inspiration/enthusiasm—can alone seat these models in the mind at the place where they can, with like energy, forget their sources, seize up new language, and reemerge. The training of literary talent requires repetition of the experience of reading, then: But it does not require repetition of the experience of writing (other than that required to achieve general literacy) in the same way that piano playing or drawing does. Far too many writers have written fine first novelswithout ever having written much of anything of particular value before—Jane Austen, Emily and Anne Bronte...