Writers and Writing

In that spirit, NaNoWriMo has spawned countless tutorials, tip lists, FAQs, wikis and Twitter feeds, all designed to cheer the contestants on to their own personal finish line. (It’s no coincidence that the event is scheduled for marathon season.) “Make no mistake,” the organization’s website counsels. “You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create.”

I am not the first person to point out that “writing a lot of crap” doesn’t sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. And from rumblings in the Twitterverse, it’s clear that NaNoWriMo winners frequently ignore official advice about the importance of revision; editors and agents are already flinching in anticipation of the slapdash manuscripts they’ll shortly receive. “Submitting novels in Nov or Dec?” tweeted one, “Leave NaNoWriMo out of the cover letter … or make it clear that it was LAST year’s NaNo.” Another wrote, “Worst queries I ever received as an agent always started with ‘I’ve just finished writing my NaNoWriMo novel and …’”

As someone who doesn’t write novels, but does read rather a lot of them, I share their trepidation. Why does giving yourself permission to write a lot of crap so often seem to segue into the insistence that other people read it? Nothing about NaNoWriMo suggests that it’s likely to produce more novels I’d want to read. (That said, it has generated one hit, and a big one: “Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen, who apparently took the part about revision to heart.) The last thing the world needs is more bad books. But even if every one of these 30-day novelists prudently slipped his or her manuscript into a drawer, all the time, energy and resources that go into the enterprise strike me as misplaced.

Here’s why: NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it’s largely unnecessary. When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. “Write Your Novel Here” was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.

I say “commerce” because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. “People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.’”

In an essay for the Atlantic earlier this year, the fine short story writer Richard Bausch describes meeting a couple who edited a struggling literary magazine and funded it by publishing a never-ending stream of how-to manuals for would-be writers. The wife offered him $10,000 on the spot to write one himself. “These kinds of books sell better than the fiction books,” she explained.

Frankly, there are already more than enough novels out there — more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it’s our job to do so. This is not to say that I don’t hope that more novels will be written, particularly by the two dozen-odd authors whose new books I invariably snatch up with a suppressed squeal of excitement. (Actually, there are more of those novels than I’ll ever be able to read, as well.) Furthermore, I know that there are still undiscovered or unpublished authors out there whose work I will love if I ever manage to find it. But I’m confident those novels would still get written even if NaNoWriMo should vanish from the earth.

Yet while there’s no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant — publication by a major house — will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.

So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. Writers are, in fact, hellishly persistent; they will go on writing despite overwhelming evidence of public indifference and (in many cases) of their own lack of ability or anything especially interesting to say. Writers have a reputation for being tormented by their lot, probably because they’re always moaning so loudly about how hard it is, but it’s the readers who are fragile, a truly endangered species. They don’t make a big stink about how underappreciated they are; like Tinkerbell or any other disbelieved-in fairy, they just fade away.

Rather than squandering our applause on writers — who, let’s face it, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not — why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built. After all, there’s not much glory in finally writing that novel if it turns out there’s no one left to read it.

Consider turning away from the self-aggrandizing frenzy of NaNoWriMo and embracing the quieter triumph of Kalen Landow and Melissa Klug’s “10/10/10″ challenge: These two women read 10 books in 10 categories between Jan. 1 and Oct. 10, focusing on genres outside their habitual favorites. In her victory-lap blog post, Klug writes of discovering new favorite authors she might otherwise never have encountered, and of her sadness on being reminded that “most Americans don’t read ANY books in a given year, or just one or two.” Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and “expanded my reading world.” So let me be the first to say it: Melissa and Kalen, you are the heroes.

Referenced in this article:

School Library Journal on the 10/10/10 Reading Challenge

Melissa Klug on completing the 10/10/10 Reading Challenge

Richard Bausch on the boom in how-to books for writers

Publishers Weekly on how independent bookstores can participate in NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month official website

The trick of a good ending, of course, is that it must capture and equal everything that has gone before. The line “He loved Big Brother” (from a novel that ends as masterfully as it begins) means very little until you understand exactly who Big Brother is. A first line or opening scene need only arrest a reader’s attention and stoke her curiosity; a final scene or paragraph is expected to provide that sensation so rare in real life: completion. The better the book, the more nuanced and persuasive, the more difficult this is. We want a novel to swell with a sense of limitless possibility at the start and in the middle, but we also want it to zero in to a point of inevitability as it ends.

For this reason, last lines, like first ones, often suffer from a bad case of Trying Too Hard. Any writer can swoop up from the particularities of character or story to assert a magisterial generality and come across as terribly grand. If you like the 100,000 words that come before it, this tactic sorta works. Yet so many endings sound a note of profundity without actually being profound. (I confess that, lovely as Fitzgerald’s famous last sentence is, it doesn’t strike me as any truer than his equally famous remark about there being no second acts in American life.)

Better the last line or final scene that’s more modest in its language yet still packs a wallop; the success of such endings, when they succeed, is fully earned. Take the closing of “The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides, one of my favorite novels of 2011. The last word, in a witty riposte to “Ulysses” (for this is a book that’s partly about other books), is “Yes,” but it has a very different import. Alas, only those of you who have already read the novel will understand what I mean.

The main drawback to swapping notes about favorite endings is the spoiler problem. The last line of Sarah Waters’ sublime 2009 ghost story “The Little Stranger” is like a key that unlocks the entire narrative, but I can’t tell you why in case you haven’t yet read it. Earlier this year, researchers demonstrated that readers enjoyed stories more when they knew in advance how they would end, but the belief persists that an untimely revelation of plot points will ruin the experience.

Even if we set such objections aside, when you wish to make the case for a particular ending, you still have to summarize the novel for whoever hasn’t already read it, and what summary is ever as good as the book itself? An exception, which can be related without giving much away, is the ironic last scene from Matthew Kneale’s excellent historical novel, “English Passengers,” a book, published in 2000, that captures the absurd hubris and brutal practice of colonialism in Tasmania. One of the supporting characters is a British scientist intent on proving the inferiority of nonwhite races by examining their skulls. By the novel’s last page, he is dead, and via a series of mix-ups, his own bones are displayed in an exhibition in a London museum, marked “Unknown male, presumed Tasmanian aborigine, possible victim of human sacrifice.” Yes, it’s essentially a joke, but one that distills the self-delusion of racialism in a single placard, and one that’s perfectly in tune with the novel behind it.

What are your favorite fictional endings, Salon readers? Share them in the comments thread below.

Further reading:

The Association for Psychological Science on how stories aren’t spoiled by spoilers

Salon’s review of “The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides

Salon’s review of “English Passengers” by Matthew Kneale

Salon’s review of “The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters

To hash this out, I invited Ben Marcus — a novelist and an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches fiction writing — to see “Seminar” with me and talk afterward about the ways writing workshops are depicted in the performing arts. His first novel was acquired by the writer, editor and teacher Gordon Lish, considered to be the inspiration for the character played by Rickman, and Marcus also attended one of Lish’s legendary seminars, conducted in private homes, like the class in the play. (Marcus’ fourth book, the novel “The Flame Alphabet,” will be published in January.)

We found Theresa Rebeck’s play amusing and pointed — right down to a reference to the bi-coastal literary magazine Tin House — despite the fact that it doesn’t bear much resemblance to any writing class we’d ever encountered. That, we concluded, might be for the best.

When characters are discussing writing in a dramatic work like “Seminar,” the things they say are so sweeping compared to the more detailed focus of an actual writing class. But what also struck me in this play is how the concept of writing and of being a writer is so intensely romanticized.

Also, the students have no ability to determine their own value for themselves. That’s the great conceit the whole play is riding on, that these people can’t begin to make a decision for themselves. That makes them funny, silly and ultimately vulnerable.

I noticed some of that with Gordon Lish. There were degrees of vulnerability around him. On one hand, it was easy for some people to blame him for his forcefulness, but with people who weren’t quite as vulnerable, I think that they thrived and got a lot more out of it. They got to listen to him talk inside and out about a piece of writing and to see that he could be deeply perceptive and that he cared about fiction more than anything else in the world.

The people who got caught up in the theater of winning his approval instead of, say, deriving their own system of self-worth, they didn’t seem to fare so well.

Would you say that some of the people who went to his seminars were like the characters in this play? Like a lot of writing students in movies and TV, they seem to be in the class for the sole purpose of getting a verdict on their work from some big-time authority figure.

In the students, I didn’t really recognize anybody I’ve ever seen. There are little bits here and there, but the thing I really didn’t recognize is the sort of blatant and publicly articulated desperation. There’s one character, the one who’s using his connection to his famous uncle, who is a very enjoyable stereotype. But anyone who behaved that way in front of any writing student I know — people would be horrified by that. Most people are self-aware enough not to behave the way that guy does.

But even if people don’t behave that way that doesn’t necessarily mean …

… that they don’t think that way, no. You could argue that it’s the play’s job to externalize that stuff because it’s funnier to see everybody acting on their demons and their craven desires. It’s more entertaining.

There’s stuff that, as the teacher, you don’t necessarily see. I once taught this class, maybe five years ago. It just never gelled. There was something strange about it. I just thought that I sucked because I couldn’t get them going. The semester ended, and I ran into someone who’d been in the class. That person then told me about this elaborate set of dramas that was going on among the students. There was a broken love triangle, someone who tried to kill someone else and they hated each other. It was just insane! I had no idea. They were consumed by their own drama.

Speaking of drama, the play takes the position that writing is a completely tortured experience.

Tortured and joyless, with no possible good outcome for anyone. One of the funny things that Alan Rickman’s character does is that he gives these predictions about everyone else’s future: This is what your life will be, in these funny monologues. The most talented one, who was writing the best work, he’s got a miserable future ahead, totally miserable. There’s no redeeming thing about it at all!

He’s going to end up like the Alan Rickman character.

A big difference that I would cite from Gordon Lish, is that he didn’t have any of the buffoonery of the Rickman character. He wasn’t self-important or grandiose, with the bragging, the travel and the overt sexual stuff. I think there was clearly a big ego there, but he was also very modest in person. His feeling was, “I will never do really great work, but maybe you will. If you think about these things, maybe you will. It’s too late for me.” The drama was about whether or not you could get behind his enthusiasms.

The thing he did that might be construed as abusive was that he was interested in pitting people against each other. Let’s say we have Smith and Dale: Smith might write something interesting and Gordon would say, “Dale, what’s your answer to that? How are you going to sleep at night knowing that your buddy here has written something so good?”

I think the pedagogical idea is that you might work harder if you feel competitive with your peers. Sometimes he would create competitions, but other times the students just weren’t biting.

What the Alan Rickman character does — his long, irrelevant, self-glorifying digressions about his adventures in various kinds of disaster tourism — well, maybe Gordon Lish didn’t do that, but I’ve certainly heard about a lot of writing teachers who do.

It struck me as a more old-fashioned, first-wave creative-writing model. The famous writer is trucked into the Midwestern university. He’s drunk all the time and he makes these pronouncements. You don’t even get your work read, but you sit at his feet and listen to these drunken tales and that counts as some kind of instruction.

I got my MFA about 20 years ago, a little more. Then, there wasn’t much of an established tradition of actual instruction. Now, 20 years later, if there are 12 students in the class, the students are getting back 11 copies of a submitted work, plus the instructor’s, with intensive line editing and one-and-a-half to two-page, single-spaced typed criticism — more criticism on this apprentice work of fiction than you get when you publish a book. This feedback machine has been created, giving students some pretty substantive criticism. That, I think, takes the spotlight away from the instructor as this Svengali figure who makes these pronouncements that are going to lead to some shattering revelation.

Enjoyable as those revelations are to watch on stage! Another thing you don’t see in the play is the idea that there are different types of literary traditions, each equally valid, the idea that good writing can be something other than opening a vein on the page. One of the characters writes a fake memoir about a transvestite Cuban gang member that completely deceives them all until she tells them with great amusement that she’s the one who wrote it. They all think it’s fantastic before that, but it’s still presented as a debased thing for her to do.

Well, she’s taking a sort of superficial bait by going for this supposedly gritty, real-world authenticity that the teacher wants. There’s a little bit of satire in there, right, because she can actually ape this form perfectly and she makes a successful piece of writing. It says something about how we value the personal stories behind the writers. If it’s a book about the streets, we want the writer to be …

… of the streets.

Yeah. You see that when you’re promoting a book. No one’s interested in talking about the actual book. They want to talk about the person who wrote it. What bad things happened to you that we can talk about? So the play does some funny satire about our desire for the “real” by also showing that someone can fake it. It’s just a style. It’s artificial and anyone can do it.

Then there’s the figure of the young woman who writes a lot about sex, and she’s very pretty and fully prepared to capitalize on that, and this generates a lot of bogus interest in her work. Now, that’s not an unfamiliar kind of writer, but sometimes the writers who fit that profile are actually really good writers as well.

They are.

They’re more mediagenic, and many people resent them for that, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be talented, too. In the play, that character is sympathetic, very grounded. But she’s also a slapdash person who isn’t committed to doing good work. She’s likable, but she’s supposed to be a contemptible writer.

She didn’t have any gravitas at all. But then gravitas is often an awful thing to encounter when you’re teaching. It doesn’t correlate to anything. When it’s attached to really poor work, it’s torture.

Each of the students had to play a certain type, right? They all play really well. There is the glib, competent, self-promotional one. And there’s the sullen genius who refuses to show his work to anyone — but that’s where it all starts to fall apart. He, in the end, is immune to the praise that he’s so covetous of.

It’s meant to show his integrity, I guess.

Yet he was still there, still soaking it all in.

He’s the character who dissents from the seminar and has a distance from it in a way that the audience shares. He’s a skeptic about everyone else’s shtick, recognizing it as shtick, which is what the audience is doing, too.

It’s funny to see these types, but it would have been funnier if their writing didn’t correspond to their type in such an obvious way. Because, too often, the self-important, brooding genius type — that guy is bad. He’s so bad.

Yes! In real life, the guy who is melodramatic and idealistic and angry about the importance of writing, and just so grandiose about it, is also the person who lacks the subtlety or wit or humor or perspective to be a really good writer.

There’s really the biggest myth of all that’s propagated by the play, which is that somebody’s persona has a lot to do with the quality of their writing. That’s just never true. Sometimes, it’s the dull, plain person who turns in totally killer, electrifying writing. Sometimes the really dynamic, witty, amazing person just dies on the page after the first sentence. Or, sometimes the really talented person is just a complete sweetheart. Just a really nice person. The whole notion of equating somebody’s personality with what they’re capable of creatively just falls apart very, very quickly.

One of the characters takes a job as a ghostwriter, and that’s treated as a fatal deal with the devil. Once you take a step in that direction, you are doomed as an Artist. She couldn’t possibly learn anything from it. That doesn’t take into account how Hemingway’s early work as a reporter affected his fiction, let alone the fact that a number of revered novelists — Don DeLillo, Peter Carey — started out working in advertising.

It’s really a portrait of a certain kind of idealism that you can only have before you’ve done anything. It’s of a certain age and a certain stage.

But if you’ve never gotten past that stage, or have only seen it from the outside, it might seem like the way all writers are. Which is why the play convinces its audience, perhaps.

Everybody was laughing.

Laughing in a very knowing way, too! I get the impression that the image many people have of writing classes comes from this sort of depiction.

What’s funny to me is that, as far as I know, instruction in some of the other art forms doesn’t seem as available for satire and derision. Why aren’t we making fun of people making mud sculptures and the pretensions of teaching in the visual arts world?

That’s especially puzzling because when it comes to visual arts, you can actually show the audience what the characters are making.

And, oh my God, it’s even worse. I’ve seen it firsthand. They say things that, if you wrote them down — there’s nothing there. The kind of faux theory shit that comes up is so crazy and meaningless. It should be made fun of so much more! And yet, we don’t treat the formal study of painting as if it were a joke. We don’t question that someone might want to go to art school.

Or music school.

Boy, that just seems like it would be the last subject for comedy, right? A music class in graduate school. And yet, when it comes to writing classes: “Ha, ha, ha! What morons! They think they can get together and talk about writing!”

What is that? There’s the whole “Writing can’t be taught” thing. I was once at a dinner, and at the other end of the table there was a gray eminence writer, whom I won’t name, who said, when asked if he taught, “Writing can’t be taught.” And I, a smartass 20-something, leaned over and said, “You mean you can’t teach it.” Because how does he know? That’s like me announcing, “Cello can’t be taught!” because I can’t teach it.

I think a lot of stuff does get taught and it can be talked about. I think writing is a craft. Language is the medium and you make things with it. But, you’re right. This play isn’t for people like me. It’s for people who have a vague idea about what goes on in a writing class. It’s a rough enough sketch, and it’s funny enough. It would be dour to demand realism from that play. It would be ridiculous. It would just take the entertainment away. I would never go to a play that was accurate about teaching. My God!