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

An Introduction: Emblems of Talent

1 An฀Introduction Emblems of Talent I In July of 1967 I waited in a ground-floor room, yellow, with dark wainscoting and wide windows giving onto Pennsylvania greenery. First, four holding notebooks, followed by three in sneakers, two more with briefcases, another six in sandals and Bermudas, then another three laughing loudly at a joke whose punch line must have come just outside the double doors, followed by two more in the denim wraparound skirts that had first appeared that decade, then still another two with foolscap legal pads, who looked as nervous as I felt, most with long hair except an older man and a middle-aged woman, both gray (and one woman, also in Bermudas and sandals with black hair helmet-short), some twenty-five students wandered in to sit on the couches circling the blue carpet. Behind a coffee table, I coughed, sat forward, said hello and introduced myself—and began to teach my first creative writing workshop. Repeatedly, in the thirty-five years since, I’ve been surprised how far and fast that July has fallen away. For more than a decade (19–99), at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now in a pale orange space—the well of a hall called Hasbrook—now on the stage of the Hurter auditorium above the university museum, I taught an introductory lecture course in the reading of science fiction, with, each term, ninety to a hundred-fifty students. Sometime during my first three lectures, I would step from behind the podium, look out over the space that, in the early 1960s, some architect had thought “the future” ought to look like, and ask for a show of hands from students interested in writing the kinds of stories we were reading. Perhaps five to ten people scattered throughout those hundred-plus would fail to raise a hand. 2 An Introduction The rest were eager to write. As well, for over half those years (usually in that same hall, but once in a cement cellar room with nozzles for Bunsen burners on the worn demonstration desk), to the semicircles on semicircles of students with their notebooks ranged around me, I delivered another lecture course on the reading of general short fiction. At the start of the term I would ask the same question to a similar number. Here, perhaps fifteen or twenty out of my hundred, my hundred-fifty students would admit to not wanting to be writers. Among a notable sector of the country’s college students oriented toward the humanities, the desire to write is probably larger than the desire to excel at sports. Over the thirty-five years since I began to teach creative writing (with almost as many years writing about and teaching literature ), I have asked hundreds of students why each wanted to write. By far the most common answer was, “I don’t want to do what my parents do. I don’t think they’re happy in their work.” Readily I identify with those feelings. Neither of my parents finished college—not uncommon during the Depression of the 190s. For different reasons, both might have been happier if they had. Both were energetic and creative. Too much of that creativity was drained off in anxieties. Most worries are a matter of telling oneself more or less upsetting stories of greater or lesser complexity about one’s own life. Turning that ability outward to entertain others, rather than inward to distress oneself, has to have some therapeutic value. Even in a good university creative writing program, however , the number of graduates who go on to publish fiction regularly in any venue that might qualify as professional is below ten percent—often below five. Were we talking about medical school, law school, engineering, or any other sort of professional training, that would be an appalling statistic. Art schools fare better in turning out professional artists of one sort or another than creative writing programs do in turning out professional writers. But even with such distressing results, writing programs are currently one of the great growth areas of the modern university. Emblems฀of฀Talent  Though vast numbers of people want to write fiction, the educational machinery set in place to teach people how doesn’t work very well. While this book puts forth no strategies for correcting the situation, it discusses some reasons why this is the case—and...