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25 Learn Your Craft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Students taking their first creative writing courses are often resistant to learning craft. Why? Because it demystifies their favorite short stories and novels, and it makes the writing process less mysterious . In other words, it takes all the fun out of it for them. Some beginning writing students, though not all, would like to believe that they’re geniuses who don’t need training. These students aren’t taking creative writing classes to learn a craft; they’re taking it for affirmation of their brilliance. I hate to admit this, but I felt this way when I signed up for my first creative writing course. After all, I had been dashing off short stories and poems for years, and all of my grade school and high school teachers had patted me on the back and told me how creative I was. By the time I stepped foot in my first college-​ level creative writing course, I had come to believe that I was something pretty special. When the professor introduced himself as a poet, my first thought was, Aren’t we all? As it turned out, my professor was Rodney Jones, who was on the brink of being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a few years away from winning the National Book Critics Circle Award. What I quickly learned in his class was this: “No, we are not all poets.” He didn’t ever say this to me, but when my first batch of poems was returned with the words cliché, abstract, and didactic in the margins, I started to see, for the very first time, that I wasn’t the little genius I had thought I might be. Nor are my students, by and large, whose recurring problems in their first short stories are often that they use clichés, abstractions, and didactic language. On rare occasions—very rare occasions—a student will show up with full-​ blown talent, turning in stories that are wholly original and devoid of commonplace issues. But I can count on one hand the times this has happened in all theyears I’ve been teaching, and a recent student of minewhose first short story absolutely blew me away was not only accepted to nearly every graduate program to which he applied but offered their top funding as well. In other words, I wasn’t the only one blown away by his work. If you’re a genius, chances are pretty good that your genius will be acknowledged. If, however, you think you’re a genius who’s simply not getting recognition for being one, or if you think your pro- 26 Education and the Writer fessor isn’t bright enough to see that you’re one, I’ve got some bad news for you. Most of us have to work on our craft for many years before we hit our stride. What do I mean by craft? I mean point-​ of-​ view. I mean characterization. I mean language. I mean a few dozen other things. But what I mean most of all are two things: being in control of your craft and making it second nature. The first time I read what John Gardner wrote about “psychic distance ” in his book The Art of Fiction, I had an epiphany. It’s a simple concept, and yet it makes all the difference in the world. Psychic distance refers to the distance that the reader feels to what’s happening on the page. If you write, “It was 1871,” the reader is going to feel more removed from the moment than if you write, “Holy crap, Jack thought,” which places you inside Jack’s head and, in doing so, brings you closer to Jack’s consciousness. There are several levels of psychic distance, and what I learned was that bycarefullycontrolling the psychic distance, I could control the reader’s involvement in the story. If I wanted the reader to feel cold toward what was happening, I could move out; if I wanted the reader to feel what the narrator was feeling, I could move deep inside. It’s all about manipulation.Gardner points out how the sloppy writer has no control of psychic distance. I compare it to watching a film that moves from an intense close-​ up of a character to a bird’s-​ eye view to a medium-​ shot to a bird’s-​ eye view to an intense close-​ up. In other words, the filmmaker’s choices would...

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