The Emotional Work of Writing

To study creative writing is to study craft.  That's the premise on which virtually every workshop course is built, and it makes sense.  This is an apprenticeship like any other.  And yet the more I've thought about it, the more I've come to believe that it is understanding the emotional work of writing--not the craft--that makes the most difference in a writer's success.

There are many ways to talk about this emotional work, but the one that makes the most sense to me is the tension between two impulses, both of which are essential to writing well:  the impulse to suspend judgment and the impulse to criticize.  Because I teach freshman writing, I encounter lots of students who "hate" writing, students who would avoid it if they could.  These students are often hard on themselves, and from this emerges victim narratives:  stories of writer's block, of missing writing genes, or tales of resistance to school writing.  While these may not be particularly thoughtful perspectives on their own abilities, they certainly are emotional accounts.  I can see it in their faces. There are, of course, many reasons for this lack of faith, including the evidence their own writing provides; it can be pretty rough.  But there is one thing these students share: They only write when forced to.

I remember, many years ago, the first student I had in a creative nonfiction class who was far more talented than his teacher.  This is not false humility.  It's happened a lot since then.  I remember saying to Dan at the end of that semester how much I admired his talent, and I encouraged him to submit his work.  "Some of this is publishable," I said.  As far as I know, he never did, nor did very many of those supremely talented writers I've encountered in my classes over the years.  Clearly, knowledge of craft--and these students had it -simply didn't make much difference in the end.

Here's the one thing I do  know about getting better:  You have to write a lot.  This is as true for an MFA student as it is for a first-year writer in a composition course.  Writing a lot is the thing I've struggled with over the years, and some of this is easily explained by the many competing demands on my time.  I am more teacher than writer, and always have been, something I've only recently admitted to myself.  But this is a weak excuse for not writing because there is always time to write, at least a little. The problem with not writing enough isn't really about lack of time or some deficiencies in understanding of craft. The problem is an emotional one: the fear of failure.I don't think I've ever met an aspiring writer who doesn't wrestle with this.

In a psychological sense, I think of writing as a difficult marriage between two selves, each inclined to antagonize the other. There is a playful, wondering, curious self who relishes crashing through the underbrush in the wild pursuit of meanings.  The other self--the one who is inclined to judge--is thoroughly impatient with this recklessness. He finds it naive and inefficient.  His favorite two words are "so what?"--a question that can seem indifferent, or even contemptuous.  And yet, depending on the day, I trust him.  Sometimes I find myself in awe of what he can do with a knife, shaping and shaving sentences, paragraphs, whole essays. That self is the one who makes me feel like a good writer, which is one of the best feelings I know.  Just as often, however, he makes me want to quit. Managing these two selves is the emotional work of writing.  .They must cooperate somehow, and part of this is knowing when to put one--or the other--in charge of the work  But deeper still--and this is the hardest emotional struggle of all--is knowing that for many of us the critical self is the most dangerous because it ferociously protects the memory of failure. In some ways, this has little to do with writing.  To be overly self-critical is a psychological problem that many of us share. But it can be fatal to writers when it short-circuits the doing of the writing because this eventually undoes the desire to do it at all.  

Over the years, I saw that a partial resolution to this was finding faith in the usefulness of my"bad" writing--the stuff that won't see the light of day anywhere but in a journal, on a manual typewriter, or in the scribbles on the blank side of a recycled page. This is a solo performance in an empty auditorium--no need to show how smart I am and no reason to be anything but honest.   I needed a reason to write that had nothing to do with anybody else, This, above all else, is what has made the difference for me over the years,

Return to the Typewriter

1.

My return to the typewriter began suddenly, with a feverish compulsion to acquire not just one but a handful, beginning with the machines I used in college—a Hermes 3000 and a Royal desktop.  But I didn’t stop there.  I developed a pornographic interest in early typewriters with glass keys, and purchased a  1940’s era Smith Corona Sterling portable and a Royal Arrow.  The touch of a fingertip on that Sterling’s black keys gave me a sensual thrill.  A few weeks later, a West German Olympia SM3 portable arrived from an eBay seller, and I left it on my desk—to write on, I thought—but I spent much more time simply staring at it, running my hand over its graceful metal curves, tracing the chrome trim with my finger, and remembering when, a very long time ago, a car could give me the same kind of thrill.   My wife, observing all of this, suggested I mention this typewriter business to my therapist.  She wasn’t joking.

A few weeks later I did. 

“This is probably silly, but Karen said I should mention that I recently developed this sort of typewriter obsession,” I told the therapist.  “I’ve bought a bunch of them over the past few months, and she thinks it’s a weird kind of nostalgic thing.”

 In my case, nostalgia is an affliction, a warning sign that I’m looking backwards for something that I can find right that is right in front me and I just refuse to see it.  But I didn’t think the typewriter obsession was this kind of pathological nostalgia, and I told the therapist that, and he smiled and nodded in agreement.

“How many typewriters do you have at the moment?” he said.

“I think I have seven,” I said.  “Or maybe eight.”

“Don’t you think that’s enough?” he said. 

“Oh yes,” I said.  “I don’t  think I’ll be buying any more.”

But a few weeks later I did.  I spent way too much money on a replacement for the first Hermes 3000—another Hermes but  in “mint” condition (and it was)—a move that seemed necessary because I had attempted to “fix” the carriage return on the first one and disassembled a part I could never put back together again.  It was a situation that reminded me of the time I tried to adjust the valves on my 1970 Fiat—the last of the machines in my life I felt I could actually fix—and had to call a tow truck to have the car taken to the repair shop.  In 2014, there is no one to call in Boise to fix a broken typewriter.

But one day I did fix the Olympia, a success story that later prompted me to tackle the Hermes, and it was a heady experience that made my love the typewriter all the more.  The Olympia SM3, a portable built in the 1950s, exudes German engineering.  If you turn it over and look at the gleaming guts of the machine you see an orderly regiment of springs commanding a row of shiny type bars, all rigidly waiting for orders from the typist.  There are stainless steel screws everywhere.  Looking at the inside of the Olympia, I simultaneously felt intimidated and that anything was possible. 

The carriage was jamming on the typewriter case, and after a half hour of following the logic of connected rollers, springs, and screws, I found the screw that would slightly elevate the carriage and it has worked well ever since.  Fixing the Olympia gave me a giddy feeling, and it wasn’t just a sense of accomplishment but the feeling that in some small I had recovered something I had lost:  a machine that I could actually understand.

My introduction to this year's Writer's in the Attic anthology of stories by Idaho writers.  Will be released by The Cabin on December 5.

Necessary Detours

Lately, I’ve been getting into arguments with my GPS, who insists, among other things, that it is necessary to drive through, rather than around, Sacramento when we return to Boise from the coast.  Maybe it’s just me, but I’m pretty sure I detect a little irritation in her voice as she says “recalculating” whenever I ignore her directions.  Overall, though, I’m grateful for her help with navigation.  I am not good at this, often taking a left turn when I should take a right, driving eastbound when it should be west, often following the longer distance between where I am and where I’m going.  Writing, of course, is something else entirely.  To navigate the world with words is to recalculate all the time.  

One of the commonest conversations I have with writing students begins something like this:  “I had this idea in my head of wanted I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and I simply couldn’t get it down right.”  This is the main reason writers abandon drafts.  They imagine that writing should be a straight shot from where they are to where they’re going, avoiding the inefficiency of detours, much less accidents.  But I’m always hoping for accidents.  Why else do the hard work of writing if not for the chance that you’ll find out what you didn’t know you knew?  If there was a literary GPS, it would lead us right off the cliff every time.

I don’t know it for sure, but I suspect that most of the wonderful stories in this collection began as cars that their authors drove off the road but refused to abandon. Writing often demands this kind of stubborn faith in necessary detours, but so does reading; we learn to expect the unexpected.  TheCabin invites you slide into the passenger seat and trust your drivers, some of southern Idaho’s finest writers, as they navigate this year’s theme: Detours.

Teaching a Starling to Talk

While the passenger pigeon was well on the way to extinction, the starling, a British native, was introduced into New York’s Central Park by the American Acclimatization Society, a group that hoped to introduce into the U.S. every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. Eugene Schiefflen, a founding member of the Society, released 100 birds in the park in 1890 and 1891. By 1950, there were fifty million of the birds in the U.S., greatly annoying people from coast to coast who resented the starlings’ appetites (they like fruit), their tendency to collide with airplanes, and potential to carry disease that infect livestock.

Starlings are great mimics, a not always charming habit that inspired one BD Collier to post instructions online on how to teach a starling to say “Shiefflen.” Since the birds frequently mimic each other, the thinking was it would take just a few trained birds that, once released, might telegraph it to the many untutored starlings. “By following any or all of the strategies outlined on this website,” wrote Collier, “you can help change the starling from an unwanted invader to a productive environmental teaching tool.” Passenger pigeons were not mimics. They simply cooed, a call that is comforting when we hear it from a single bird but would become a thunderous sound in a flock of 5 million. If we could have taught Martha, the last passenger pigeon, to talk perhaps we would have trained her to say “Forever.”

There are just over 900 native bird species in North America. They are the wild vertebrate we are most likely to see in nearly every region of the U.S. , and if we do notice a bird it’s probably a starling or English sparrow, both immigrants, or perhaps a pigeon (not a passenger), all species reviled by bird lovers. Birders are list makers. They measure their passion for birds like an accountant would: how many have I seen, when, what birds do I hope to see before I die? Bird lovers carry hope with them along with their binoculars. It is a particularly fierce kind of hope. Thirty years after the last passenger pigeon died, some citizens still insisted that the great flocks survived somewhere down in Mexico. There were also lingering reports of a few wild pigeons here and there in the Midwest by people who were “well acquainted with the difference between a mourning dove and a passenger pigeon.” This is the same hope that inspired reports a few years ago of Ivory-billed Woodpecker sightings in a remote Arkansas swamp, a bird that was declared extinct in the 1940s.

 Most of the rest of us, the non-birders, are at least vaguely aware of birds. If nothing else, we envy flight, especially when we’re stuck in highway gridlock or hiking up a long trail that pivots back and forth up a mountainside. If only we could fly to the top. If only we could drift home aloft from there, “as the crow flies.” Even at the edge of awareness, birds still fly across our field of vision: A magpie’s explosion of wings when our car comes impossibly close to the bird on a highway, feeding on a dead cat; the muttering of geese in geometric agreement against a gray November sky; gulls circling greedily at the town dump. Birds come and go, flying in and out of our vision, in and out of our minds, defying the very thing that makes our bodies bend and ache in old age—gravity.

Fearless Teaching

 To a large extent, we teach the way we've been taught, or at least the ways that took hold and made us want to learn.  I was lucky as a graduate student: I had a handful of  wonderful instructors who weren't afraid to make their classes a genuine marketplace of ideas, people like Donald Murray, Tom Newkirk, Melody Graulich and many others.  I later learned that this approach was grounded in constructivist theory, especially the idea that knowledge is a social phenomenon--we make meaning together.  At the heart of this an open inquiry into what we think about what is known.   From class to class, we may not know where this will take us.  But the payoff--discovery--is well worth the risks.  This is something I recognize not just as a teacher but as a writer.

In practical terms, this means that in most of my classes I listen more than some of your other instructors.  I take notes on things that students say that I think are particularly insightful or provocative; in a sense, I'm a student, too.  I will guide discussion, certainly, and when appropriate share knowledge that might fill in our understandings of what scholars have said.  But I'm not inclined to lecture.  To students who prefer professors who profess, my teaching style might seem strangely passive, or perhaps even manipulative:  "Why doesn't he just tell us what he thinks or what he knows!"  The simple answer is that I'm convinced that you will learn less if I do.

Some years ago, the literary scholar Jane Tompkins published "Pedagogy of the Distressed," an article on teaching that strongly influenced my thinking. (I've attached it in case you want to take a look).  For many years, Tompkins taught in the conventional way--lecturing, leading, professing, establishing her authority, (which, by the way, is considerable).  At some point she realized that her motives for teaching that way weren't as pure as she thought.  Tompkins wrote that she suddenly understood that "most of the time" she was concerned about  "three things: a) to show the students how smart I was, b) to show them how knowledgeable I was, and c)to show them how well-prepared I was for class. I had been putting on a performance whose true goal was not to help the students learn but to perform before them in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me."  Tompkins called this the "performance model" of teaching, and concluded that what was behind it was fear.  She decided to stop being afraid.

This spoke to me, because like Tompkins, I've always felt a bit like an impostor in front of a college classroom.  On bad days, I feel like the dumbest guy in the room. But I was lucky.  I had the good fortune to have teachers who didn't respond to fear by continually demonstrating how smart they were, and so I could see another way to teach, one that isn't really about me at all.

How to Kill a Passenger Pigeon

I began a long-term writing project this summer on birds.  I mean to be deliberately vague. Though I'm sorely tempted to name the project--this is a book, this is an essay, this is a collection--I've learned that this isn't a decision one can make for some time.  The material--if it is useful--will tell me.  The poet Richard Hugo distinguished between the "triggering subject" and the "generated subject," and he advised poets to welcome the triggering subject but always be on the lookout for the generated one.  This, he thought, was the real subject of the poem.  This is an enormously inefficient process, of course.  I have spent two months reading and writing in my notebook about birds and I still have no grasp on the slippery fish.  What I do have are things that get my attention.  For instance, I've read extensively about the extinction of the passenger pigeon this summer, and I encountered an account of the last great flock of the birds in Arkansas in around 1877.  The size of these flocks is unimaginable--it could take an entire day for it to pass--and witnesses said that the thrum of a million wings made it nearly impossible to speak.  There was a "pigeon" smell, too, as the flock passed over.  The birds would roost in mature forests, a single tree so adorned with birds that “pigeoneers,” hunters of the bird, were drawn as much to the incessant crack of fracturing limbs and branches as the birds’ cooing.  Excrement covered the ground like a snow.  Such was the flock that descended on Hickory Plains, Arkansas.

Pigeon killing was an industry back then and the methods were crude. Pigeoneers would capture the birds long sticks, nets,and guns.  But the saw may have been the most effective weapon; hunters just cut down the trees in which the birds nested, and the sound of falling timber added to the chorus of cracking limbs, cooing, and gun blasts.  Assisted by the telegram, word traveled fast when a big flock alighted, and when word went out about the wild pigeons in Hickory Plain, an army of hunters arrived and the birds--particularly the "squabs," young birds that were especially good eating--died by the thousands.  It is easy, in retrospect, to condemn such a slaughter.  But the flocks were so large that the hunters took only a fraction of the birds.  It was beyond belief, even as the great flocks began to disappear by 1877, that the wild pigeon was in danger.

The hunt in Hickory Plains, Arkansas, went on for days until, by accident apparently, someone started a fire in the dense woods. When nesting, passenger pigeons took turns leaving the roost to look for food, the females leaving in the morning and coming back in the afternoon, and then the males took their turn.  The birds would sometimes fly a hundred miles to find suitable forage.  To the horror of witnesses, the pigeons did not abandon their nests as the woods burned around them, and the returning birds simply flew into the conflagration.  "They poured into  that fire by the hundreds," said one observer, "keeping it up all week while that roost was burning.  The ground was alive with naked pigeons that had the feathers singed off of them...Ever since that fire there have been no more wild pigeons in Arkansas."

The Ethics of the Lie in Creative Nonfiction, Part 2

Does it really make a difference that D’Agata intentionally traded accuracy for art?  Put another way, what is the nonfiction writer’s higher obligation:  To the story or to reality?  Before discussing this question, let’s see if we can agree on two things:

1.     Memory is fallible and deeply subjective.  My memory of an event will be different then your memory of an event, and it may be inaccurate.  Was the bike really red?   Since it’s hard to remember—or to check—the important principle is not accuracy but simply that the writer remembers it as a red bike.

2.     Creative nonfiction writers should not be held to journalistic standards.  This is especially important in the matter of dialogue.  While a reporter needs to quote accurately, it’s impossible to remember with any accuracy a conversation that took place some time ago in the absence of notes.   (On the other hand, should the creation of composite characters—which is verboten in journalism—be avoided as well in creative nonfiction?)

With these principles, creative nonfiction writers have considerable latitude to tell their own stories, to not get stymied by worrying about the accuracy of hard-to-remember details, and to create scenes with dialogue that carry the spirit of the conversation not the exact quotations.  But we’re still left with this question:  Is it okay to knowingly make things up?  I think it’s possible to summarize the major schools of thought on this question, drawing on the comments of two accomplished nonfiction writers.

The Joan Didion school would argue for emotional truth.  The point of keeping a notebook, she once wrote, is not to keep a “factual record.”  The story-telling impulse is not to get it right but to discover “how it felt to be me.”  This might mean compromising the reality of what actually happened if the writing speaks to emotional truth.

The Tracy Kidder school, on the other hand, takes a very different position, one more closely aligned with those who feel a stronger obligation to reality and to what actually happened, to the extent it’s possible to know.  He sees lying in nonfiction as poisonous, and the victim is the writer not the reader.  Kidder writes, “I’m afraid that if I started making up things in a story that purported to be about real events and people, I’d stop believing it myself.  And I imagine that such a loss of conviction would infect every sentence and make each one unbelievable.”

                  It’s not that easy for me to see the middle ground between these two positions because each works from such different premises about the obligations of the nonfiction writer.  But at the heart of both Didion and Kidder’s comments is not a concern about the reader’s reaction to invention or accuracy but what it means to the writer.  For both, Oprah is beside the point.  When we’re telling a true story does it matter that we get it right?  Kidder says, yes, absolutely.  Didion says, no, not really.  But both are concerned with truth, with trying to get it right in the larger sense.

                  As a practical question, in my own work I’ve struggled with whether I should check the accuracy of a remembered event.  Was it really the summer of 1963?  Was there really a total solar eclipse that day in July in northern Wisconsin?  In one ear, Didion whispers, “It felt like it, that’s what matters.”  In the other ear, Kidder whispers, “You really should check.”   And so I do check.  I quickly discover online that there was, indeed, a total solar eclipse that in 1963, and that it occurred on July 20 and in northern Wisconsin it lasted 31.5 seconds.  I’m moved by this, and not because it confirmed my memory of the event, but because in memory the blackness seemed to last so much longer.  Why, I wonder, did it seem that way?  The writer in me wonders, too, and this opens an unexpected window on the material and especially on “how it felt to be me.”  In this case, trying to get it right, as Kidder advises, helps me to stumble towards Didion’s emotional truth.  So perhaps they aren’t so different after all.

                  There is no way to finally resolve these questions about the ethics of lying in creative nonfiction.  There can be no rules for this sort of thing.  But it seems to me the most productive discussions of these questions might start from confronting this question: Which is the creative nonfiction writer’s higher obligation, to the story or to the reality of what actually happened?  Those in favor of taking imaginative liberties with nonfiction narratives almost always do so for the sake of telling a good story.  Those who guard against inventing things that didn’t happen feel responsible for reality, however imperfectly it is remembered.  Reality is where the story must be found if it’s to be found at all.

The Ethics of the Lie in Creative Nonfiction, Part 1

Many years ago, when I first started teaching college writing, I prepared for a conference with a student by reading her narrative essay on a summer experience as a life guard.  The story focused on the narrator’s dreary summer job being a lifeguard at a local public pool.  It was late August, and the newness of the job had faded long ago; now there was just day after day sitting on a high chair beside the pool in the blazing summer sun.  It was hard to stay focused, and one day, at the other end of the pool, a small boy slipped under the water.  The narrator, glazed with boredom, failed to notice that the boy never surfaced.  But someone else did, and he dove into the water and pulled the boy up on the deck, frantically trying to resuscitate him. Waving her off, the narrator’s supervisor took over.  Overwhelmed with guilt and blinded by tears, the young lifeguard staggered into a poolside room, pressed her back against the cold cement wall, sunk to the floor, and held her head between her knees, trying to catch her breath after each wave of sobs.  As some point, she sensed there is someone else in the room, and when she looked up the narrator saw through the blur of tears that it was the boy, and that this was the men’s room, and that the boy was standing in front of a urinal, peeing with apparent satisfaction.

                I was taken with this ending of the narrative, and looked forward to talking with my student about why it seemed powerful—for one thing, the juxtaposition of the mundane (a boy urinating) and the profound (life and death)—and how this implied meaning made her story far more interesting to me.

“You liked that ending, right?” my student said after she sat down in my office.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“I thought you would,” she said.

                When my student said this I began to wonder about the truth of the ending.  “The boy in the bathroom, it really happened right?” I said.

                “Well, no,” she said.  “But don’t you think it makes the story so much better?”

In the years since then, I’ve thought a lot about why I was so disappointed by the student’s confession.  I’ve also taught a great many of what we’ve come to call creative nonfiction courses, and I often tell the story to my students and ask them if they would have been disappointed if the student had made the same confession to them.  Opinion is divided.  Some say they aren’t disappointed at all, that the student writer was writing “creative” nonfiction, and this must certainly mean taking some imaginative liberties with the material.  Essentially, the argument is this:  If it makes the story better and it feels truthful then it’s okay to go ahead and make things up.  On the other side, of course, are people who are offended by my student’s invention.  They complain that it “ruins” the entire story for them, and makes the narrator seem like someone who can’t be trusted.  This argument rests on the premise that an implicit contract has been violated between reader and writer.  In nonfiction, you simply don’t make things up.

These days one of the hottest topics in creative nonfiction is the ethics of lying.  I probably don’t  need to list too many of these controversies.  They’ve already gotten considerable ink.    Perhaps the most famous was the confrontation between Oprah and James Frey.  In his “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, Frey apparently invented, among other things, how much time he spent in jail after a drug-crazed confrontation with Ohio police.  Frey said he spent 3 months.  The reality, critics charge, was that Frey was in jail about three hours.  Frey’s Oprah moment was similar to a public controversy over another memoir Augusten Burroughs , Running with Scissors.  The eccentric family portrayed in the book said Burroughs made things up about them that simply weren’t true.  Burroughs maintained that he didn’t take liberties with the truth, arguing that the story he told in the book “was not my mother’s story and it’s not the family’s story, and they may remember things differently and they may choose to not remember certain things, but I will never forget what happened to be, ever, and I even have scars from it and I wanted to rip those scars off of me.”

Most recently, we have the case of John D’Agata, an essayist who teaches in Iowa’s writer’s workshop.  D’Agata’s essay on the suicide of a Las Vegas teenager had been rejected by Harper’s, the magazine that commissioned it because of “factual inaccuracies.”  Another magazine, The Believer, agreed to publish it but wanted to do some fact-checking.  Seven years later, after much haggling between a fact checker named Jim Fingal and D’Agata, the piece was finally published.  The recently published Lifespan of a Fact is a book that chronicles their disputes, and the following interchange between Fingal and D’Agata was typical:

In D’Agata’s manuscript, he writes this:

On the day that Levi Presley died, five others died from two types of cancer, four from heart attacks, three because of strokes.  It was a day of two suicides by gunshot as well.  The day of yet another suicide from hanging.

When the fact-checker called the coroner’s office, he discovered that there were actually eight heart attacks in Vegas that day.  The ensuing conversation went like this:

Jim:  John, should we change this “four heart attacks” to “eight?”

John:  I like the effect of these numbers scaling down in the sentence from five to four to three, etc.  So I’d like to leave it as it is.

Jim:  But that would be intentionally inaccurate.

John: Probably, yeah.

Jim: Aren’t you worried about your credibility with the reader?

John: Not really, Jim, no.  I’m not running for public office.  I’m trying to write something interesting to read.

Jim:  But what’s the point if the reader stops trusting you?

John: The readers who care about the difference between “four” and “eight” might stop trusting me.  But the readers who care about interesting sentences and the metaphorical effect that the accumulation of those sentences achieve will probably forgive me.

Jim:  I guess I’m confused: what exactly are the benefits of using “four” versus “eight” in this sentence?

John: I’m done talking about this.

Thesis Tyranny

Just the other day our university Writing Center sponsored a "thesis workshop" for students.  This is, of course, a laudable move especially since a thesis is a feature in much assigned writing.  Organizing a piece of writing around some dominant idea makes a lot of sense.  What I find interesting, though, is that we never sponsor student workshops on how to come up with a good question.  After all, where do theses come from?  The answer, I'm afraid, is that they mostly come out of thin air.  A thesis is invented not because it answers an interesting question but because the writer needs a thesis, and needs one now.  This state of affairs  leads to a finding like the one reported by Project Information Literacy:  that nearly 60% of students in their large survey of student researchers try to come up with a thesis statement "early on."  I found a similar result in a survey I did of first-year writing students some years ago.  Cooking up a thesis is an easy way to solve the problem of having a thesis.

I worry that the relentless focus on the thesis in academic writing is one reason for this.  We should, of course, expect a thesis, or controlling idea, or whatever you want to call it but wouldn't it be useful to focus on where the thesis comes from?  In academic inquiry, a thesis emerges from discoveries that are seeded by questions.  But not just any questions.  We craft questions that will ultimately lead us towards judgments.  Knowing what kinds of questions do this--and will sustain the process of research--is at least as difficult as knowing what a good thesis statement looks like, and I'd argue that learning how to ask good questions is even more important.

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.