Monday, April 25, 2005

What Teaching Has Taught Me

The academic year is winding down, and I'm about to be deluged with student portfolios to grade. This has been my first full year of teaching creative writing to undergraduates, and I'm reminded of J. M. Coetzee's observation from his novel Disgrace:

“He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”

I'm not convinced my students have learned nothing, but I have surely learned as much from them as I have taught. Their questions have forced me to clarify my own ideas about writing. Their work reminds me of the infinite variety of forms writing can take. And their progress suggests paths for me to explore in my own work.

One example. At the beginning of this term, some of my students have been having problems with the use of time in their work. Their narratives can skid disconcertingly from present to past to future, sometimes within the same sentence. To study control of time and pacing, we took a look at the first chapter of Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions and timed the narrative to see how many sentences she used to move her story forward. (You can read an essay I wrote about this here.) One of the things we noticed was that by eschewing flashbacks as much as possible and folding the effects of the past into her present narrative, Tyler was able to build her narrative momentum and keep the reader hooked.

Gradually, I began noticing the salutary effects of this exercise on students' writing. Stories that were once confusing, distanced, dragging summaries suddenly came alive on the page, thrillingly. Characters we'd only heard about now breathed, felt, fought in front of our eyes. The prose seemed to clean itself up, as if of its own accord.

Glad to see my students' progress, I turned to my own work, the novel about Berlin I'm working on right now. I'd shown the first few chapters to a few friends who all agreed that as it went along it became more and more engrossing, despite a bumpy start. I re-read the first two chapters. What was going wrong?

Then I thought of the lesson I'd just taught my students about chronology. The present day action was getting dragged down by relentless flashbacks, flashbacks that I'd thought were necessary for the reader to appreciate the significance of the current story. So what if I did what my students had done and removed those flashbacks?

As an experiment, I opened a new file and removed every flashback I could find and laid them out in order. My new arrangement was a strong, swift Chapter One that introduced the present-day plot with little background, then a chapter two that contained the entire backstory as a separate, linear story, followed by a strong, swift chapter three that picked up where chapter one had left off and zoomed forward. It was an elegant solution to a difficult problem that might have taken me a lot longer to solve, if not for the lesson on chronology that my students and I had worked on together.

The other thing I've gained from teaching is a newfound love and appreciation for literary works outside of my main genre: fiction. As part of my Structure and Style class at Columbia, I was required to introduce students to poetry and playwriting. For my Fiction and Personal Narrative class at Barnard, I had to examine fiction as well as creative non-fiction. I've realized that I've been missing out on a rich variety of literary genres because I've focused my reading diet on fiction. Poetry has taught me about the power of language in distilled form, while playwriting has taught me how to tell a story wholly through dialogue, and non-fiction has helped me appreciate the rigorous art of shaping a narrative from true events.

This fall I'll be taking a year off from teaching, and I know I will miss the dynamic atmosphere of my creative writing classes, where rooms full of students have challenged, enlightened, and stimulated me this past academic year. I'd like to wish them all good luck and especially to say thank you, for all you've taught me.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Research? What Research?

Research seems like much too official a word for what I do as a writer to find out information I don't know offhand, but I can't think of a better term. Whenever I tell people I'm researching something for a book, I imagine they imagine me pouring over ancient texts in a library or scanning microfilms or strolling with university professors on ivy-strewn campuses.

I remember when I was traveling in Israel to research FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, and I described what I'd been doing to an Israeli I was interviewing, he said to me, "That's not research. That's going on vacation!" But then that's the beauty of researching as a fiction writer. It's the intellectual equivalent of taking a vacation.

Each writer addresses this issue in his or her own way. Some can spend years in libraries or archives or museums, but that's not what I do. Here's how my process works:

After I come up with an idea to write something set in a specific place, I'll make plans to go there. Before going, I might do some reading on the history of the city, country, or the particular community I'm going to be seeing. Usually it's a subject I'm already interested in and have been reading about anyway. While I'm in a bookstore, I might casually drift by the section devoted to the history of this place or the religion or bit of sociology I plan to tackle, leaf through a few books, maybe buy one. I might do a google-search, or I might not. I'll probably send emails to everyone I know asking if they know people who live there or know something about what I'm interested in.

Next, I'll visit the place I'm writing about. (Hopefully I'll have earned enough frequent flyer miles on my credit card to score a free flight.) While I'm there I will walk, eat, sightsee, participate in local functions, meet up with friends of friends. The only organizing principle is that whatever I'm doing has to interest in me. I'll keep a journal and keep track of everything I'm doing, every fleeting impression that comes to mind. I collect bits of scrap paper, advertising, free magazines, leaflets, newspapers, packaging, anything that could later give me some sense of the place. I'll take pictures too, not usually of tourist attractions so much as of local streets, city views, a restaurant, a park, an interesting block or public square. Local graffiti and bumper stickers are often very helpful. The most important thing I do is talk to people. The conversations I've had (or listened in on) have given me much more than anything I've gleaned from a book or an article.

So far, in my limited experience as a writer, I've found that this kind of traveling will lead to some encounter or question that suggests a story. And when I come home, usually several months after my return, I'll scribble down a first draft of that story as quickly as I can. In the case of FAITH, it took me a month or so before I was able to start writing. With the novel I'm working on now, set in Berlin, I waited half a year after coming home from Germany to begin.

When that first draft is done, I'll read over what I have and then and only then do I know what I have to find out. For example, with my current project, after writing my first draft, I realized I'd have to learn about physics, childbirth, missing persons cases and the Berlin police department, the German language and German classes for foreigners, immigration rules for Germany, Russian immigrants to Germany, American communists, Disneyworld, a city called Magdeburg, Albert Einstein, and the British royal family, Prince William in particular. (I think I've left a few things out.) A lot of people ask me which comes first, the writing or the research? I find that generally speaking, the two processes are mostly interdependent. In the case of the Berlin book, I traveled to Berlin, wrote a draft, then went back to find out the information I needed, came back and wrote some more, and may probably go back again one more time. Yet the most serious in-depth research could begin only when I had a working draft of my novel.

Although the amount of topics you have to familiarize yourself with can seem daunting, what's wonderful about being a fiction writer as opposed to a journalist or a non-fiction writer, is that the depth of knowledge required can actually be pretty shallow. This will depend heavily on your plot or the angle of your story, or if you're writing historical or science fiction (which James Wood argues are pretty much the same thing and I agree with him). Still, I don't like to over-research as if my Ph.D. depends on it because I'm writing novels, not operating manuals. So I read. I talk to more people, I keep my eyes open for articles related to what I'm doing. I check out things on-line. I tell my friends what I'm doing and nine times out of ten, someone will say, "Oh, I have a friend you should talk to!" or "I know the perfect book you should read." And I hunt down their leads. But I don't become obsessive. Reading too many books, scanning the Internet, and rummaging through libraries can turn up useful information, but more often than not it can lead to dead ends or down avenues that aren't relevant to what I'm working on. Then I end up wasting time researching that I could have spent writing or focusing on the works of fiction writers I'm looking toward for stylistic guidance. Also, sometimes the research can be so fascinating that I feel daunted coming up with my own fresh details. Tidbits from real life often seem so much better than anything I could make up and I feel stuck. These are the times when I'd prefer not to know everything, but rather just enough to get the shadings right. Then I can close my eyes and imagine myself as my character going through an experience and I find the details I need that way.

In other words, I usually research until I get bored. Then I go back to telling a story. After all, in the end, isn't that the job I'm really supposed to be doing?