The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

The Effects of Academia on Your Writing

214 The Effects of Academia on Your Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You write what you know, right? Even if you’re writing a historical novel, you tap into some deep unconscious reservoir of personal material and then reconfigure it for the story you’re telling, whether it’s set in nineteenth century Boston or the battlefields of World War II. The perceived danger of spending too much time in academia is that your subject matter will be limited to, well, novels about writers and/or academia. I’ve already addressed this issue to some extent in the chapter titled “What Have You Ever Done That’s Worth Writing About?” but in this chapter I want to take a different approach and say, “So what? What’s wrong with a writer writing about writers or academia?” Let’s pause for a moment and consider some writers who’ve written novels about writers or the academic life. Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, John Irving’s The World According to Garp, Jane Smiley’s Moo, James Hynes’ Publish and Perish, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (to name but one), Stephen King’s Misery (also, to name but one),Tim O’Brien’s Tomcat in Love, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and on and on. Other writers who’ve dipped their toes into the genre of the academic novel include Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Jon Hassler, Richard Powers, J. M. Coetzee, and Saul Bellow—or, to put it another way, Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Critics Circle Award winners, National Book Award winners, and mega-​ bestselling authors. Though Bellow and Roth have written their fair share of novels about writers and academia and though Stephen King’s characters are often writers themselves, the vast majority of the writers mentioned above haven’t made a career out of writing novels about academia .WhenyouthinkofTimO’Brien,youthinkoffictionaboutVietnam . When you think about Richard Russo, you think about novels set in blue-​ collar towns. When you think about Mary McCarthy, you think about novels that explore the world of Catholicism. David Lodge is one of the few writers who has made a career writing novels set in the academy, and he’s damned good at what he does. To this writer’s way of thinking, I have no qualms with writers writing novels set in academia. In fact, one of my favorites is Edward Employment for Writers 215 Allen’s Mustang Sally, which nails the absurdity of this life. The naysayer may point out that of course I don’t have any qualms. After all, I’ve written a novel about writers, edited an anthology of stories set in academia, and I’ve been associated with a university, either as a student or a teacher, for over twenty-​ five years now.To this naysayer, I would gladly point out all the other subjects I’ve tackled in my writing , all the stories and books that have nothing to do with academia or writing, but I would also point out the fact that any subject is a worthy subject for fiction, even the life of a naysayer, as Melville’s Bartleby would tell you, should he so choose. ...