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

Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student

117 Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student Write฀as฀simply฀as฀you฀can฀for฀the฀smartest฀person฀฀ you฀can฀imagine. —Blanche McCrary Boyd, OutWrite, Boston, 199 You write simply, we might add, so that your assumed intelligent reader can more quickly catch you out when you write down idiocies—and, if that reader is generous enough, so that he or she 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 control just the suggestiveness in which, for such a reader, much of the work’s worth will reside. The tension between clarity and connotation is one reason many writers have two voices. With his shaved head, ivory suit, and orange sunglasses—the first I’d seen—Dudley Fitts explained this to us in a poetry lecture at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. He sat in a wood-frame wheelchair, in front of the stage to the right. (It was the summer of 1960; the stage of the Middlebury College meeting house was not wheelchair-accessible back then.) In a wide-ranging lecture that analyzed a poem by the contemporary poet Claire McAllister and that explored the significance of the family members of Aeneas (Anchises, his father; Creusa, his wife; Ascanius, his son . . .), 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 of the doublevoiced poem, more than half a dozen years before anyone this side of the Atlantic had even considered the Lacanian idea of a split subject. I have written the following notes as simply as I can. What use they may have, if any, will be entirely in what they can 11 Part฀I:฀Seven฀Essays 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 faculties that must be built up by repetition. 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 wholly inappropriate to the training of literary talent. Both encouragement and the proffering of judgmental criticism in the early stages are equally out 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 literary structures. This is entirely a matter of reading and criticism . (And, yes, that means criticism by the writer of his or her own text as well as criticism by 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 experiences it, 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 particular way and avoid another. To effect this one must encounter that model or structure again and again in other texts and experience it . . . 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 “inspiritedness ” and often translated as “inspiration,” it carries just as strongly the sense of “spirited,” so that it is more accurately Some฀Notes 119 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...