I once had a student in an advanced-fiction workshop at Ohio State University march out of my classroom on the second day of instruction and straight into the chairman’s office, where the student charged me with malfeasance for refusing to share with him the secrets to getting published—the secrets that all professional writers know, he claimed, and conspire to withhold from everybody else.
To prove that I am no longer part of that conspiracy, I am now prepared to reveal everything I know about becoming a published writer. Feel free to share these prerequisites with your students. Claim them as your own, or blame me, whichever you prefer.
Step 1: Be born strange, weird, abnormal, or any combination of those.
Or have an embarrassing physical flaw, or a big brother who beats you up every day, or a sexually enticing neighbor whose tantalizing ways fog and warp your prepubescent thoughts. The result of any such influence is that you will grow up with a cockeyed view of the world and your place in it, a perception that will cause you to disavow traditional American values, maybe force you to seek solace in amorphous notions of beauty and truth, or in the soothing music of language, or in the need to create and control your own imagined universes rather than the demented universe you have been forced to inhabit. This will make your family seem like strangers to you and will foster in you an indefinable longing, which you will attempt to ease through sex, shoplifting, and, eventually, creative writing.
Step 2: Read everything you can get your hands on.
This is essential for a couple of reasons. First, the act of reading actually expands your brain. More neurons, more synapses, more bridges between the two. You become a better speller, grow a bigger vocabulary. Also, reading makes you a better writer without your having to work at it. You absorb the rhythms, you assimilate the syntax. Eventually Styron and Donleavy and Welty and Didion and everyone else you read will infiltrate your blood, tweak your central nervous system, and restructure your DNA. Unfortunately that will turn you into a pompous ass for a while, as you attempt to correct everybody else’s bad grammar. But that, too, has a benefit: An occasional smackdown will enhance your sense of alienation and freakishness.
Step 3: Live life.
Get out there in the traffic. Visit third-world countries and drink the water. Fall desperately in love. This, I believe, is what Vonnegut meant when he said that no writer under 25 is worth reading. (If, indeed, he ever said it.) Few have experienced enough tragedy and sorrow to have anything meaningful to write about. Better to emulate Hemingway and Peter Matthiessen and Isak Dinesen and their ilk than Emily Dickinson. Get out of the ivy tower and into the poison ivy. Learn something besides office envy and literary theory. Learn human nature. Learn nature’s nature. Learn how those natures intersect and diverge. Have children. Tattoo Henry Thoreau’s aphorism on the inside of your wrist: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” And do all this without resorting to palliatives. They will numb you to the soul-knitting potential of life’s blows. Rehab is for actors, not writers.
Keep your senses raw and your third eye open.
Step 4: Become a human tape recorder.
Pilfer from overheard conversations, newspaper articles, your neighbor’s diary, if it happens to fall open in your hands while she is busy stirring the spaghetti sauce. Collect gestures and mannerisms. Carry a notebook wherever you go. Record bits of description, the smell of a baby’s hair, the way a canary of sunlight falls on your neighbor’s hand while she is stirring the sauce and you are stealing a peek at her diary.
Good writers borrow; great writers steal. Fitzgerald said that, having stolen the observation from T.S. Eliot, who lifted it from Picasso, who probably pinched it from Flaubert.
Step 5: Embrace poverty.
Let’s face it, nobody reads anymore. Not enough people, in any case, to adequately support all the writers in need of support—especially when Stephenie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King and the estate of Stieg Larsson are sucking up nine-tenths of all the revenue generated from books.
The only practical escape from poverty for a writer is through another profession. Medicine is a good choice because it throws you smack-dab into the face of human frailty. And there is already something of the physician in a writer, in that we use our craft in a desire to heal; and something of the psychologist in a writer, in that we write to study and know the human psyche; and something of the metaphysician in a writer, in that we write to probe and part the membrane between the knowable and the ineffable.
Law can be advantageous in that it grants an entree into a class of individuals even more disrespected than writers. And there is already something of the lawyer in a writer because we aim to levy justice upon our characters and to make of our worlds an orderly place.
The worst possible choice, academe, is the one most writers choose. While it might be true that a writer does not have to fear too much affluence as an academic, one should fear the potentially sedative effects of tenure, the insistence on conformity, and the vocabulary-devouring contagion of words such as “pedagogy,” “discourse,” “multicultural,” and “gender-biased.”
Step 6: Learn as much craft as you can, especially the craft of learning to ignore everything you’ve learned.
Here I am tempted to quote Doctorow, who said that teachers and the taught are to be avoided, or Flannery O’Connor, who said that writing programs do not squash enough writers. Instead I will advise only that one should learn just enough but not too much. The few basic guidelines of what makes for a good story—a sympathetic character engaged in an interesting conflict that escalates in dramatic tension and personal risk until it culminates in a satisfyingly unpredictable resolution—are really the only things a budding writer needs to know. And even that is just a suggestion.
Step 7: Cultivate discipline.
I’m not sure why this is so important, but when I was 21, I read Hemingway’s admonition about the necessity of discipline, and I bought into it as the divine gospel. Subsequently, discipline has worked well for me in terms of productivity, with the only negative side effects being a divorce and the ruination of two serious relationships.
That aside, discipline is a good thing. But don’t overdo it. Don’t sacrifice love for writing, for example. You want to be creative? There is nothing more creative than loving somebody. And nothing will make you a better writer.
Step 8: Remain keenly aware of your own imperfection.
I think it was Nabokov who said that a writer’s job is “to enchant,” and Isaac Bashevis Singer who observed that “a good writer is basically a storyteller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.” Learn to tell a story that holds a reader’s attention from first page to last, maybe squeezes out a few tears and giggles, or else, as my steelworker daddy advised (alas, in vain), “learn a trade.”
Writers, I was surprised to learn when I became one, are not the people with all the answers but the people with all the questions. You have nothing to teach anybody. Just move me. Show me a heart in conflict with itself, as wise old Willie Faulkner advised.
Step 9: Wake up and dream.
It was Samuel Johnson who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” In other words, have a dream and go for it, but be realistic about your chances. Know what genres of books are being purchased out there in the shrinking literary marketplace. Know what you hope to achieve from your writing and that whatever your goal, your chances are slim as a matchstick.
Know that disciplined, persistent writers beat those odds all the time.
Know that writing is not as easy as you think it is, and that the more you learn, the harder it gets.
But know also, as you maybe already do, that there is nothing more fulfilling than a beautifully wrought sentence.
And know that creativity, the exercise of your imagination, is not only a noble pursuit, it is the nearest we can come on this planet to understanding God.
Step 10: Finally, stay hungry.
The hunger that drives us to search out new dishes in new restaurants, for example, is the same hunger that has us struggling for new ways to depict old verities, the same hunger that we feel as we trace a lover’s spine, the grief we sense in the honking of geese heading south, the longing to know, to experience, to understand and hold and write down and conjure up all the images and sensations, the collisions and collusions of human desire ... all the frailness and fragility that shatters our hearts and makes us whole.
The first nine steps will accomplish nothing if not fueled by hunger. Never lose it.