My niece recently asked me to read her college application essay, which began, "As a triplet, I..." You may have noticed the way many of us tend to begin every opinion we offer with qualifiers like, "As a woman, I..." "As an African-American, I..." "As a Jew, I..." "As a left-handed lesbian of indeterminate color who enjoys finger-painting in a wheelchair with survivors of sexual assault and tsunamis, I..."
Where does this impulse to bolster an argument by tying it to the author's identity come from? One explanation is that in the age of reality TV and the internet blogger, we've become increasingly convinces of the fallacy that empiricism is the firmest basis of truth. In other words, the best way to know something is by experiencing it.
I remember when I was a composition instructor, I asked my students to write an essay about a time when they'd changed their opinion. What was the opinion and what made them change their mind? I got back a series of essays that ran something like, "I used to think drugs were okay, but then I got addicted to them and realized they weren't." "I used to think science was boring, but then I won a national merit award for my science project and I realized it wasn't." My favorite was, "I used to think pre-marital sex was wrong, but then I got a girlfriend and I realized that it was okay."
Perhaps we've become a nation of empiricist philosophers, but somehow I doubt it. It seems to me that the "experience" part of the equation is less important to us than the "my." We are endlessly fascinated by our own lives, particularly if we belong to a younger generation brought up in an educational system that puts a premium on self-expression over empathetically understand of someone else's plight.
Nowhere has this lesson been driven home more firmly than in literature classes. It's become almost axiomatic that in order to teach a novel, poem, story, or play successfully, it has to relate directly to students' lives. Got a roomful of African-American students? Teach them Toni Morrison, Ernest J. Gaines, and Rita Dove. Jews? Give them I. B. Singer, Philip Roth, and just to be daring, a touch of Jonathan Safran Foer. Hispanics? Garcia Marquez ought to work (never mind that he's South American, not Caribbean or Mexican), and then some Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz. The list goes on.
Similarly, writing students are encouraged to mine their own rather limited experience of the world in search of nuggets to write about. Recently I taught a class called "Fiction and Personal Narrative," in which students could submit works of fiction or non-fiction. The students were wonderful writers with great imaginations, but the one question that seemed to stump them again and again was when I'd ask them, "So is this a work of fiction or non-fiction?"
Of course when I was a writing student, and I and my fellow students were no wiser. Our instructors always reminded us that we had to remember the works we were reading were fiction. We were not to assume any story was autobiographical. That state of affairs lasted for about two seconds. Almost immediately after getting our first few batches of stories, I remember we'd whisper to each other in the hall, "Oh, I didn't know he was a drug addict who lived in a shack in New Orleans with a stripper." Or "Wow, I guess she had some unresolved issues with her mother that she's been taking out on her boyfriend." Or "Isn't that funny? I never would have guessed she came from an Orthodox Jewish home and rejected her faith to pursue a career as a writer."
No wonder memoirs are so popular these days. In a way, they seem more honest than fiction writing of this style. After all, what's fiction really? Just non-fiction with the names changed.
When I was starting out, I'd veer between autobiographical and more imaginary modes. Before I wrote my Prague stories, I was working on a series of fantastical tales like "Gay God," about a gay bar where a magical spirit lived above the ceiling and maliciously and capriciously set up couples or broke them apart. A teacher of mine liked my cleverness and imagination, but challenged me to add more feeling to my work. That's when I began delving into autobiographical sketches, inspired by people I knew in Prague. And yet, the two stories that seem to resonate most with readers are ones that also seem to have little direct connection to my own life. One's about a middle-aged couple visiting a concentration camp. The other's about two Czech boys searching for the missing head of a famous statue of Stalin.
It's funny that no one asks me if either of these stories is autobiographical, yet both borrow large chunks of experience and emotion directly from my own life. On the flip side, when I tell people the plot of my new book, about a Jewish mother and her drug-addicted gay son who go to Israel, the first thing they want to know is, "Oh, so did you go to Israel with your mother?" (For the record, the last time I went to Israel in the company of my parents was when I was a pre-adolescent, long before my numerous stints at Betty Ford in the company of Liza, Liz Taylor, and all the rest. And as a survivor of drug addiction, I resent the implication that etc. etc...)
With the book I'm writing now, I'm determined to get out of my own head, learn about experiences radically different from mine and identify with them anyway. For example, I'm currently reading Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a non-fiction tract about the roots of terrorism, written by a Muslim academic born in Uganda. I've also been checking out homeland security journals online, Communist newspapers, and maternity magazines. As I read, I'm continually impressed by how little I really know, how much knowledge is necessary to even begin to glimpse our complicated existence. As Horace says (and I only know this because it's the quote of the day on my desk calendar as I write this), "To know all things is not permitted."
So, as a pregnant Muslim Communist homeland security expert, I urge anyone who's reading this to forget yourself. Try on a new hat for a day. Use the great divine gift of the imagination to see what's on the other side of those identity blinders you've been encouraged to shackle yourself with all these years. See if you don't learn how small you are.
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Thursday, August 04, 2005
On Giving Advice
August 4, 2005
My father has become somewhat of a legend in our family for his famous, oft-repeated proverbs, with lessons for handling almost any life crisis. My father on travel: "Best thing to do is stay home." My father on trying new things, "I've never been boiled in oil, but I wouldn't want to do that either." My father on hair stylings: "The longer the hair, the shorter the brains." And my father on giving advice: "Never give unsolicited advice. Either the person ignores you, or he follows your advice and it doesn't work out and then he calls you pisher." What about solicited advice? "Never give that either, for the same reasons."
My father might be horrified to learn that in the past year or so, I've been asked for advice on writing and publishing with surprising frequency for advice. Some of these petitioners are strangers who've contacted me through friends or the Internet. Others are friends or colleagues I didn't even know were writers. So far the requests have been steady, not quite a deluge, and I try as often as I can to say yes, yes, and yes. I know some writers find it bothersome to share what they've learned with aspiring up-and-comers, particularly at a time when it seems that more people are interested in writing books than buying them. (See my blog of June 5, 2005).
Yet it's crucially important that as we move up the ladder, to whatever small degree, we extend a hand down, across, or even up to our fellow-sufferers. An important part of being a writer is to give and get feedback with an audience more intimate than a book critic, more informal than a teacher, more generous than a classmate in a workshop, more idealistic than an editor or agent.
And yet, as I read and dispense stories of my limited experience with publishing, I often wonder what if anything I can provide that's of any use. I recently read an insightful essay by Lynn Freed in Harper's about the occupational hazards of creative writing, in which she confesses to feeling "like a fraud... I have just realized the novel on which I have been laboring for 18 months... is hopeless... Every sentence in it a lie. Who do I think I am... Balzac?"
I know what she means. I'm not like a manuscript doctor who can prescribe a cure for unfocused characters or a weak sense of plot. I'm not even sure I can diagnose an illness. I can only give my honest impression of what I read and why I responded to it in the way I did. But who's to say my impression is valuable? I can safely comment on rules of grammar and syntax, but creative writing cannot be said to have rules so much as techniques or tools. Each new story or play or poem presents its own specific and unique problem to be solved with whatever tools can get the job done. Once the writer has solved that problem, she then has to start from scratch again with each new work she attempts. (Or else churn out the same work over and over, which is not a solution either.)
Sometimes I get asked to read something that baffles me completely, not only in terms of what next steps should be taken, but also the artist's own intention. In these cases, I can only pose questions. Why did you choose these words? Who are these people you're writing about and what do they want? What does the experience of reading this provide to the world?
These are questions for the writer to answer, not me. Anyone thoughtful is as capable as I am of posing questions like these. Alternatively, these questions can be found in the growing number of books on the craft and business of creative writing that get published each year. Yet maybe advice isn't all that we as writers are seeking from each other. Maybe what we want isn't so much an answer as the experience of talking to and being heard by a peer, to get some reassurance that we're not alone. The human contact itself provides more comfort than any wise words.
The trouble is that in the creative process, we are alone. No one can show us a way out or give us a leg up. We have to find our way by ourselves. Even when trying to find an agent or an editor to buy a poem or a story, we have to do most of the grunt work on our own. No one else can make the inevitable process of rejection any easier. The false comfort of companionship lasts only so long before the same knotty problems of word choice and characterization stare us in the face. They demand our attention, which regrettably, can only be given in solitude.
My father has become somewhat of a legend in our family for his famous, oft-repeated proverbs, with lessons for handling almost any life crisis. My father on travel: "Best thing to do is stay home." My father on trying new things, "I've never been boiled in oil, but I wouldn't want to do that either." My father on hair stylings: "The longer the hair, the shorter the brains." And my father on giving advice: "Never give unsolicited advice. Either the person ignores you, or he follows your advice and it doesn't work out and then he calls you pisher." What about solicited advice? "Never give that either, for the same reasons."
My father might be horrified to learn that in the past year or so, I've been asked for advice on writing and publishing with surprising frequency for advice. Some of these petitioners are strangers who've contacted me through friends or the Internet. Others are friends or colleagues I didn't even know were writers. So far the requests have been steady, not quite a deluge, and I try as often as I can to say yes, yes, and yes. I know some writers find it bothersome to share what they've learned with aspiring up-and-comers, particularly at a time when it seems that more people are interested in writing books than buying them. (See my blog of June 5, 2005).
Yet it's crucially important that as we move up the ladder, to whatever small degree, we extend a hand down, across, or even up to our fellow-sufferers. An important part of being a writer is to give and get feedback with an audience more intimate than a book critic, more informal than a teacher, more generous than a classmate in a workshop, more idealistic than an editor or agent.
And yet, as I read and dispense stories of my limited experience with publishing, I often wonder what if anything I can provide that's of any use. I recently read an insightful essay by Lynn Freed in Harper's about the occupational hazards of creative writing, in which she confesses to feeling "like a fraud... I have just realized the novel on which I have been laboring for 18 months... is hopeless... Every sentence in it a lie. Who do I think I am... Balzac?"
I know what she means. I'm not like a manuscript doctor who can prescribe a cure for unfocused characters or a weak sense of plot. I'm not even sure I can diagnose an illness. I can only give my honest impression of what I read and why I responded to it in the way I did. But who's to say my impression is valuable? I can safely comment on rules of grammar and syntax, but creative writing cannot be said to have rules so much as techniques or tools. Each new story or play or poem presents its own specific and unique problem to be solved with whatever tools can get the job done. Once the writer has solved that problem, she then has to start from scratch again with each new work she attempts. (Or else churn out the same work over and over, which is not a solution either.)
Sometimes I get asked to read something that baffles me completely, not only in terms of what next steps should be taken, but also the artist's own intention. In these cases, I can only pose questions. Why did you choose these words? Who are these people you're writing about and what do they want? What does the experience of reading this provide to the world?
These are questions for the writer to answer, not me. Anyone thoughtful is as capable as I am of posing questions like these. Alternatively, these questions can be found in the growing number of books on the craft and business of creative writing that get published each year. Yet maybe advice isn't all that we as writers are seeking from each other. Maybe what we want isn't so much an answer as the experience of talking to and being heard by a peer, to get some reassurance that we're not alone. The human contact itself provides more comfort than any wise words.
The trouble is that in the creative process, we are alone. No one can show us a way out or give us a leg up. We have to find our way by ourselves. Even when trying to find an agent or an editor to buy a poem or a story, we have to do most of the grunt work on our own. No one else can make the inevitable process of rejection any easier. The false comfort of companionship lasts only so long before the same knotty problems of word choice and characterization stare us in the face. They demand our attention, which regrettably, can only be given in solitude.
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