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

Of Doubts and Dreams

95 Of Doubts and Dreams [First written in 190 as a preface to a collection of my stories, Distant฀Stars฀(191), today this piece appears as an afterword to my collection of short stories, Aye,฀and฀฀ Gomorrah, published in 200 by Vintage Books.] The request to write about your own work—to comment on a collection of your own fictions, say—is, to most writers, an occasion for distractionary tactics. What you do when you “write a story,” like what you do when you bleed or heal, is too simple and too complicated for the mid-level exposition most such pieces presuppose. (“We want something informative, of course—but don’t get too technical . . .”) What makes it simple and complicated is not, oddly, what you do when you write. It’s what people have said about writing over many years. To be simple is to say, in whatever way you choose, that they are, all of them, right. To be complicated is to explain that they are wrong, and why. Simply? You sit down to write a story. The excitement, the sweep, the wonder of narrative comes over you, and, writing as fast as you can, you try to keep up with it till the tale is told. The complicated part? Just try it. You see, what comes as well, along with the narrative wonder, is a lot of doubts, delays, and hesitations. Is it really that wondrous? Is it even a decent sentence? Does it have anything to do with the way you feel about the world? Does it say anything that would at all interest you were you reading it? Where will you find the energy to put down another word? What do you put down now? Narrative becomes a way of negotiating a path through, over, under, and around the whole bewildering, paralyzing, unstoppable succession of halts. The real wonder of narrative is that it can negotiate this obstacle path at all. 96 Part฀I:฀Seven฀Essays A baker’s dozen years back I first found myself, through a collision of preposterous circumstances, in front of a silent group of strangers, some eager, some distrustful, but all with one thing in common: all had registered for a writing workshop I had been hired to teach. And I became formally, articulately, distressingly aware how little I knew about “how to write a story.” The workshops recurred, however; and finally I found my nose pressed up against the fact that I knew only—perhaps— three things about my craft. Since I filched two from other writers anyway, I pass them on for what they’re worth. The first comes from Theodore Sturgeon. He put it in a letter he wrote in the fifties to Judith Merril, who quoted it in an article she wrote about Sturgeon in 1962. To write an immediate and vivid scene, Sturgeon said, visualize everything about it as thoroughly as you can, from the dime-sized price sticker still on the brass switch plate, to the thumbprint on the clear pane in the unpainted wooden frame, to the trowel marks sweeping the ceiling’s white, white plaster, and all between. Then, do not describe it. Rather, mention only those aspects that impinge on your character’s consciousness, as she or he, in whatever emotional state she or he is in (elated buyer seeing it for the first time, bored carpenter anxious for lunch . . . ), wanders over the squeaking planks beside the paint-speckled ladder. The scene the reader envisions, Sturgeon went on to explain, will not be the same as yours—but it will be as vivid, detailed, coherent, and important for the reader as yours was for you. Number two comes from Thomas Disch, who suggested it at a Milford science fiction writers’ conference in 1967 during a discussion about what to do when a story or novel runs down in the middle and the writer loses interest. The usual halfhearted , half-serious suggestions had been made, from “take a cold shower” to “kill off a main character.” Then Disch commented that the only thing you can do in such a situation is to ask of your story what’s really going on in it. What are the characters’ real motivations, feelings, fears, or desires? Right at the point you stopped, you must go down to another level in the tale. You must dig into the character’s psychology deeply enough (and thus build up your vision of the story’s complexity [18...