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

Reading with Humility

228 Reading with Humility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . It’s easy to read a book and complain about it. I do it all the time these days. But I didn’t do it when I began reading seriously. I was eighteen, and my first creative writing professor had given me a list of books to read. I was reading, for thevery first time, the short stories of Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, John Barth, Mary Robison, and Robert Coover. I would sit in the hallway of my dorm and read, or I would read in the dorm’s lounge, or on the second floor of Morris Library, or beside the escalators inside the student union. I remember reading Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps and thinking , How bizarre! What the hell IS this? or reading about ice-​ nine for the first time inVonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, or reading all of John Irving’s novels, one after the other, and experiencing the utterly compelling worlds of wrestling, bears, and Austria. I liked most of the books my professor had recommended. A few, like Irving’sTheWorld According to Garp, I loved. But I spent most of my day thinking about the ones I didn’t understand or like. I had assumed (correctly, I should note) that if I didn’t understand something, or if a book bored me, that it was my fault. It was a reflection of my own deficiencies as a reader.To remedy these deficiencies , I would search out interviews with the authors, along with criticism of the books, to get a better handle on what exactly it was that I was reading and missing. (These were pre-​ Internet days when finding such things was a treasure hunt, and when you were likely to find other, more interesting things buried on library shelves during the search.) More often than not, I came away with a greater appreciation for the book in question. In some cases, I walked away with an understanding of an entire literary movement. In other words, to best understand the book, I needed a context; and in order to attain context, some extra work was involved. We have since entered what I cynically call the Age of Opinion, and in this new era of public opinion polls, Amazon reviews, blogs, Goodreads, and Facebook, anyone can post an opinion about anything without having to have any expertise on the subject. I hate to sound like an old fogey—I’m only forty-​ four as I write this—but my fear is that having all of these outlets for expressing one’s opinion is eroding thoughtful analysis. More and more, people believe that The Writer’s Life 229 their opinions are as valid as anyone else’s opinion by virtue of its appearance on a blog. Each year, my students seem more committed to their snap judgments of books I’ve assigned, and each year I find myself talking more and more about approaching the work with humility . What I mean by “approaching the work with humility” is that, whether or not you like the book, the writer has created something that you yourself have yet to create: a published book, an acclaimed book, a substantial work of art. If you don’t like it, don’t automatically assume that it’s the fault of the book or the writer. Instead, take a good, long look at yourself. What are your deficiencies as a reader? Where are your gaps of understanding? What is it about you that’s not allowing you to appreciate the book more fully? Put your opinions aside. Read with an eye toward growing as a writer. Let curiosity fuel your reading. You have a lifetime of opinion-​ spouting ahead of you. Take the much more difficult path of trying to view the book from the author’s perspective. What was she trying to do? What did the author’s editor see in this book? And don’t, in answering these questions, play the cynic’s role: The editor, clearlya fool, must be entertained by boring prose. I’m not making a plea to throw critical acumen out the window, but this sort of response is too easy, letting you off the hook in terms of any kind of meaningful self-​ examination. Raymond Carver, who was a student of John Gardner’s, writes in the foreword to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist about the time Gardner had assigned Robert Penn Warren’s short story “Blackberry...