Ten "Truths" about a Writing Life?

1. It’s best, at least in the beginning, not to think about what you’re writing—a poem, a story, an essay, an article—but to let the material tell you what it wants to be.
2. The worst problem writers face? The tendency to judge too soon, and too harshly.
3. The writing life, like any other “career” in the arts, involves sleeping with the enemy: rejection.
4. Joan Didion says, “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker that writers are “con men,” “preying on people’s vanity” and “betraying their confidences.” When you write about other people, especially in nonfiction, your characters are (or were) real people. They live both inside and outside the story. Yet your obligation is to the telling the truth even at the risk of betraying a subject.
5. You want to say, “I am a writer.” But when you do you feel like a fake. It seems presumptuous, even ridiculous. Publishing is the only cure for this.
6. Maybe some of the shame we feel has to do with what we imagine “being a writer” is. Perhaps we all need to ask ourselves another question: “Why do I want to do this, especially when it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone else?”
7. Dancers who love performance but dislike the endless rehearsals that lead up to it will never be very good dancers. Writers who dislike the messy process of making things with words will eventually give up. And they should.
8. Terrible career advice: “Be a poet. Be a novelist. Be an essayist.” What currency do such dreams have in an age of high unemployment? Put more bluntly: “Are you hopelessly naïve, or what?”
9. When we’re beginning as writers, we’re drunk with admiration for successful writers, in many ways embodied by our favorite writing instructors. We take their classes, as many as we can. We are thrilled when they say nice things about our work. Devastated when they don’t. More than anything, we want to write like them. You’ll never get anywhere until you get over this.
10. To borrow a metaphor from E. B. White: Writing is like a frog. It can be dissected but it always dies in the process. This is a lie. While writing is a very individual process—what works for you may not work for me—it is no mystery. Believing this puts your work in peril.

Why Teach the Profile?

For many years, I've taught the profile as a writing genre in my composition classes, and I include it as well in Curious Writer. I like it for several reasons. It is much like the more academic "case study," a methodology that is used in a number of disciplines, but aside from its academic relevance, I'm drawn to how it fits into the kind of sequence that Moffett talks about--writing from the self outward. And yet, I often find that I don't really like what students do with it. Because they don't spend sufficient time collecting information from their interview subjects, the pieces are often unfocused and uninteresting. They frequently don't choose subjects well, either--a friend, a parent, or perhaps a teacher--and the essays are written from memory rather than listening. They become just another version of the personal essay.

This semester, I'm trying something different. The Library of Congress' "Veteran's History Project" provides a wealth of online material about men and women who served in the major conflicts of the last half century or more--WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. This material includes audio and sometimes video interviews with each vet (and there are thousands of them), transcripts, letters, and photographs. Lurking there are stories, and really compelling ones, about an individual's participation in some of the most dramatic public events of our time. This is exactly the kind of information that will challenge student researchers to shape a narrative from the relatively raw materials.

Teaching Abstraction

One of the most useful metaphors I've encountered about helping students understand the difference between what happened and what happens--a distinction that James Moffett suggests reflects two different levels of abstraction--is the 1980s television program "The Wonder Years." This program, about an 8th grader named Kevin growing up in suburban California during the turbulent sixties, uses a narrative technique that is now fairly commonplace on TV: the superimposition of two stories, one that captures what happened to Kevin as he experienced it, and the other a narrator who is the voice of the adult Kevin, reflecting on what happened. Each of these represent the two modes of abstraction--what happened and what happens--and it's clear that without the latter, the program wouldn't be nearly as poignant. We hear the adult narrator--or the "now narrator"--throughout the program, not just at the end, reinforcing the idea that such reflection isn't reserved for some final eureka paragraph. To show a clip to your students go on YouTube. Then talk about how it models a good personal essay, and a method of thinking that applies to everything they write.