Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Joy of Not Knowing Everything

I am in the not unique position of both teaching and practicing creative writing. An obvious questions emerges: Do I practice what I preach?

Almost every day when I sit down to write, I feel a heavy nostalgia for the days when I was in school and I had fellow students and mentors I could pull aside and ask for help whenever I felt stuck. (Of course at the time it didn't feel like nirvana. In fact, I felt anxious to get out of school and become a Published Author as quickly as possible.)

But then it occurred to me: I am a teacher. In numerous classes, I disseminate advice, exercise, quotes from famous writers on writing, anecdotes of my and other writers' experiences, all to encourage students. Yet there are times when I need a little encouragement too, and I'm currently writing without a teacher to guide me.

So why not be my own mentor and encourager-in-chief?

I began by doing some of the exercises I give others: character quizzes, freewriting on a theme, setting questionnaires. I plucked several of the craft guides on my shelf, which I bought to help me guide others, and reread the sections on character. As I read fiction by others (I've just finished three extraordinary new books: The Believers by Zoe Heller, Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill, and Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre), I paid special attention to the way the writers constructed their stories, characters, and settings, even though I don't have a class to report back to about my findings.

The most important lesson of all that I've learned through teaching is to forgive myself for my mistakes, for my utterly wretched passages of ugly prose, for my laziness at times, for my stubbornness in refusing to confront a sticky paragraph or troubling feeling on the part of a character. Though we as writers have to play God, we are not God. Maybe it's that rude disjunction that makes every writer I know feel like an impostor.

Nowhere do I feel more like an impostor, however, in the classroom, where I sit mandarinlike at the head of a table and tell other people what they ought to do. In reality, there's so much left for me to learn about this business. And that comforts me, because in that knowledge gap, I know, lies the potential for my greatest achievements, the ones of which I don't yet know that I'm capable.