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Teaching/Writing

The young painter who has set about learning to paint “realistically” is often surprised that the eye must do the learning; the hand more or less takes care of itself. “But I can already see what’s there! Tell me what I’m supposed to do to set it down.”

Keep your hand still and look more closely.

As “realistic” painting does not exhaust art, neither does the comparatively high resolution of narrative storytelling exhaust fiction. But the young writer who has decided to utilize his or her experience of the world at this comparatively high resolution, for like reasons, is always surprised when he or she is told to go back and reexamine his or her experience.

“But I want to know how to write an exciting piece of action!”

Examine your reactions when you are excited; as well, when you are bored.

“But how do I create a vivid character?”

Look closely at what individualizes people; explore those moments when you are vividly aware of a personality. Explore the others when you cannot fathom a given person’s actions at all.

“No, no! You don’t get the point. Tell me about style!”

Listen to the words that come out of your mouth; look at the words you put on paper. Decide with each whether or not you want it there.

But it will always be a paradox to the young artist of whatever medium that the only element of the imagination that can be consciously and conscientiously trained is the ability to observe what is.

Teachers of narrative fiction fail or succeed according to the ingenuity with which they can present the above in as many ways as possible—a success or failure that, alas, has nothing to do with their own writing ability.

A teacher at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop,* you may live in the dormitory with the students, or room in a separate building. The students are energetic, dedicated, writing and revising throughout the six weeks. The solution to most literary problems is time and thought. But if someone can be there immediately to suggest where thought might be directed, so much the better. I chose to room in the student dorm. I had given occasional lectures and one-day seminars. Summers ago I had taught remedial reading to a volunteer class of adolescents at a community center. But Clarion for five days was my first formal teaching experience. A handful of the students were older than I. Several had sold stories and novels already.

The situation would intrigue any teacher of fiction.

A writer of fiction, I could not resist it.

The real worth of that summer, as with any intense, living experience, is in the texture of the experience itself.

I had set up exercises and discussion topics for the formal three-hour morning classes. Part of this time was set aside for the group discussion of stories handed in the previous days.

In my first class, we began by discussing some complex ideas about the way information is carried by and between words. We read some sentences, a word at a time, to see just what the information given was—tone of voice, mood, order of presentation, and importance—and at which points in the sentence this information became apparent. I tried to examine just what happened in the microleaps between words. I had notes. But there were great silences in the discussion when I and the students were at a loss for what to say next. Afterward, I was very relieved when two people came up to discuss ideas of their own that more or less took off from things I had said in class. But later, when I asked two others, whose comments had seemed the most astute, what they thought of the session, I was cheerfully informed they hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was talking about.

The next morning in class, a young woman whose writing had already struck me as among the most talented* asked guardedly, “But what do you feel about just pure storytelling?”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I came out with “I like it a whole lot!”

Then we spent five seconds wondering if we should say anything more, and decided on a truce.

An exercise fared better.

I asked the students to choose partners. Limiting themselves to written words (pencil, pen, and paper; or typewriters), each was to collect material from the other for a brief biography. “Write a question, exchange papers with your partner; write down your answer to her or his question (or your comment or request for further explanation of the question), then give the paper back. Read what you’ve obtained, and write down another question, and continue the process until you feel you have enough information for a short biography. If possible, conduct the experiment without seeing your partner—for example, pass your papers back and forth under a door.”

The dorm hall, usually filled in the evening with frisbees and laughter, tonight was oddly quiet. I passed some four couples sitting on the hall floor, exchanging notebooks, and one young man with his typewriter before a closed door, sliding out a sheet of yellow paper.**

Several people gave me rather odd looks. One girl, coming out of her room to deliver a paper to a boy in another, asked with somewhat amused belligerence, “Where did you get this idea, anyway?”

Next morning in class, I asked for someone to read the questions and answers. No one raised a hand.

“Someone must have done the exercise,” I said. “I saw too many of you working on it.”

People shifted in their chairs, glanced at one another.

Momentarily I suspected I was the victim of a practical joke.

But when a discussion did, haltingly, begin, it seemed that, almost without exception, the twenty-five very bright, very sensitive young people had found, when their communication was limited to the written word, that almost in spite of themselves they had shunted into personal areas and intensely emotional parts of themselves that felt too uncomfortable for oral display … though no one was averse to my or another’s reading these papers.

As the discussion progressed, some people volunteered to read sections out loud. Even from this, it became clear that when a one-to-one situation was fixed between information wanted and information granted, with the communicants checking out one another after each step, the result was a strange freedom, an obsessive honesty, a compelling and rising clarity. The general superiority of the prose style to most of their fictional attempts was duly noted.

This was certainly what I had hoped the point of the exercise would be. But I had never tried it in this way. I was surprised by the emotional force behind the point.

Another exercise we did in class.

“This morning,” I said, “I want you all to look around the room—get up and walk around, if you’d like. Observe the people in the room with you, very closely. Keep looking until you notice something about one of your classmates that you’ve never noticed before. Now examine this thing about them, this aspect of her behavior or his appearance, until you see something about it different from the way anyone else you’ve ever seen exhibits this feature of appearance or behavior. Then write down what you’ve seen in a sentence or two.”

I drank two styrofoam cups of coffee from the urn in the corner while the class milled and prowled by one another. One girl came up to me and said, “But I just don’t see anything!”

“Make up something,” I told her softly, “and see if anyone notices.”

Twenty minutes later, most people were seated again. I suggested we bring the class to order and hear some of the examples. If there was any embarrassment here, it was of a lighter tone. Before we started, there was some humorous anticipation of the crashing triviality of what had been observed. But by the third example, the giggles had ceased. People were leaning forward in their chairs, or looking back over their own examples with renewed attention.

If the previous exercise had discovered a lucid, working prose, this one, in example after example, pushed language to the brink of the poetic. The readings, as we went about the room, became a torrent of metaphors—how many of the unique things noted were resemblances between something present and something else! And those that were not metaphorical still had an astonishing vividness, the gesture, expression, or turn of speech caught with the stark economy of the tuned ear, the fixed eye.

There were other discussions on the economic significance of story setting, the natural tendency of words to say things other than you intend and obscure your meaning, and the necessity for rendering your fictional incidents intensely through the senses. Whenever one of my convoluted arguments brought us to a point of confused silence, Robin Wilson, who led the half of the class devoted to story discussion, patiently and kindly extricated me from the snarls of my own inexperience.

The high point of the five days’ classes for me was when, after a discussion of the way the vividness of fictional characters usually lies between rather than in the facts we know about them, one young woman produced a character sketch of an aging, alcoholic midwestern lady with bohemian pretensions. I had asked the class to put together these sketches of fictional characters through a collection of actions—purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous—which should be observed with the same astuteness with which they had observed one another. Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the sketch here. But when it was read, among the dozen or so other examples, the class was silent in that way which makes someone who has previously been uproariously applauded feel he has turned in a poor showing after all.

I left Clarion aware just how short five days were—I had actually been on campus five days and two weekends. Besides the three hours a day of classes, I had read some sixty-five or seventy student stories (and one novel) and had managed at least one story conference with each student—in some cases, with the more prolific, three, four, or five. It was stimulating, intense, even numbing. Most of the students seemed to feel that the individual work with particular stories was the most valuable part of the workshop. The most repeated exchange in these sessions was:

“Now in this paragraph/sentence/section here, can you tell me just what you were trying to say?”

Answer …

“Well, I think it would have been better if you’d written that …”

In perhaps three or four cases I was able to reassure some people who had worked very hard that the work, at least, was evident. For the rest, I just felt very flattered.

Rilke says in a letter that in the end all criticism comes down to a more or less happy misunderstanding.

I suspect he is right—which is why the literary worth of a workshop like Clarion cannot be defined by simply reviewing what, critically, went on.

—New York City

1970

*The Clarion Writers’ Workshop is a writing workshop, held annually since 1967, that specializes in imaginative writing, fantasy, and science fiction. It runs for six weeks during the summer, June through July, with a different professional writer in attendance as instructor every week, with one branch held at Michigan State University and the other, Clarion West, held annually over the same period, in Seattle, Washington. Since 2004 Clarion South has been held in Brisbane, Australia.

* Vonda N. McIntyre, whose story “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” four years later would win a well-deserved Hugo.

** The then-sixteen-year-old Jean Marc Gawron, who three years later was to write An Apology for Rain (1974), and three years after that, Algorithm (1978).