A Few Burning Questions from Students

Earlier this week, I went to visit a creative writing class taught by my friend and highly-esteemed colleague Lauren Grodstein. Her students had read my novel Faith for Beginners, and I came to talk to them about the process of becoming a writer and writing that book.

The students came up with some interesting questions for me to answer. Two of them were questions I often get asked by readers, and yet each time I'm asked those questions, I feel somewhat surprised.

The first of these was, "How much of your book is autobiographical." (To find out the answer, you can go to the "bio" section of my site.) The thing that always strikes me about that question is that these days, the first question we ask a non-fiction writer, particularly if he or she has written a memoir, is "How much of your book is true?" It's as if we expect our non-fiction writers to be writing lies and our fiction writers to be writing the truth. In other words, we think that all writers are liars.

Of course, if Pablo Picasso is to be believed, all artists are liars, but it's been said that Picasso himself was a notorious fibber, so now we're getting all Star Trekky...

The other question was, "I don't know much about the Jewish faith, so I'm not sure if I'm getting everything in this book that I'm supposed to get." I've heard a number of readers, not just of my work but of fiction in general, say that to understand a work of fiction it should be universal or specific to their experience. To me it seems that the first condition is impossible, the second undesirable.

There is no universal experience. We all our individuated by our races, religions, nationalities, class levels, etc. However, many of us believe that to have a race, you must be black. Begin white means not having a race, which is therefore "universal." To have a religion, you must belong to a non-Christian religion. Being Christian is "universal." Being American, straight, and middle class, are all also universal. (I've heard that in a recent poll of Americans, 95% said they belonged to the middle class.) Being male is universal. Being female means you have a gender.

However, I wouldn't want to read fiction about the universal experience, which would seem to shave all the interesting edges off stories that make them unique. I also don't want to read fiction specific to my own experience all the time. When I read a book, one of the many things I hope for is the chance to get to know a world that isn't entirely mine. And yet somehow, by reading about the specifics of a world that is not my own, I find a way to relate to it, to imagine how my life compares to this new one I'm encountering on the page. That's why I love reading fiction that is set in such unfamiliar moonscapes as 1850s London (Bleak House by Dickens) early nineteenth century Russia (War and Peace by Tolstoy) or even imperial Rome (The Twelve Ceasers by Suetanious). I love finding out that I have more in common with British orphans, Russian aristocrats, and Roman emperors than I would ever have guessed before reading the books above.

As the student herself put it, "I'm not Jewish, but my grandmother, who's Catholic, worries about the same things as that character Helen in your book, so I could relate."

Exactly.

Another burning question I got this week, from a student in one of my own creative writing classes, was "Is writing a matter of hard work or talent?" This is a fantastic question, worthy of a blog in itself. I've never been a fan of the idea of talent because I've seen how much hard work goes into writing. Certainly I have never felt divinely inspired as I go along. I feel more like a coal miner, slowly hacking away at the page for years. However, I have also seen people diligently going about their work for years and get more and more frustrated with their writing, unable to produce work they're proud of. So what's the difference between someone who works for three years and then produces a book that gets published, and someone else who works a while and comes up with a manuscript to put in the back of a drawer?

I have no idea if you need talent, or if writing is something that can be mastered through hard work and study. But I do know that a number of talented people go nowhere because they don't put enough effort into their work and careers. So maybe the only thing to say about this question is, "Does it make any difference?" If you want to be a writer badly enough, in spite of all the difficulties of this career--and there are many--then go for it, and don't worry about talent. If it exists, it's out of your control whether you have it. But what is in your control is how hard you work to maximize the gifts you were born with, assuming that anyone is indeed born with any gifts. So work as hard as you can. Expect no rewards. Because no one should write for rewards. (The rewards you get for writing aren't worth it, except if you're Stephen King or John Grisham or Dan Brown, and we're not them.) You should write because you care so much about words and are so fascinated by the world of literature that you want to get into the game too, even when doing so seems difficult and discouraging and hopeless.