Call and Response

I write fiction because I am a bad poet. When I was much younger (in my mid twenties—so, young but not terribly young), I stumbled into fiction only after I got lost and wandered for years in the maze of poetry. Which is to say that when I admitted to myself I was no Rilke, no Rumi, no Mark Strand, no Mary Oliver, no e.e. cummings, only then did I notice the clear strands of narrative woven through the bent architecture of my ramshackle poems. I quit thinking of myself as a poet and became a fiction writer. And fiction felt good. It suited me in a way that poetry never had. I knew in short order that fiction was my calling.

Torre del Mangia, Siena

Yet I still turn to poetry when I want to kick myself into fiction writing mode. Perhaps I feel compelled to somehow relive the journey that brought me to fiction. Perhaps I have to blast my ears with poetry before I can properly hear the calling of fiction. More likely, though, I have learned to use the jolt from a good poem to jumpstart the engine of my fiction. (Clearly I need no prodding to start wildly mixing metaphors.) Whatever the reason, this works. When I don’t know how to open a story or get started on another long day of revision, I reach for a poem. I steer clear of fiction. When I read a gripping, unsettling story, I want to write a story just like it. A good story triggers my impulse to imitate. A good poem compels me to write my own gripping, unsettling story in response.

At the risk of echoing the prejudice Charles Baxter reveals in the passage I quoted on Wednesday, I will generalize. Fiction writers take time to lay out the subtle intricacies of their art, and poets—at least the poets I read and love—seem to be more consistently and immediately in touch with the extraordinary, the intense, and the fantastic. No doubt, there are countless exceptions. What matters is only this: Reading poetry works. It works for me. It focuses my thoughts and energizes my intentions. Poetry calls, and I respond with fiction.

For you, this may not work at all. If you want to write—if you have no choice but to write—then listen for the bell that calls to you, and answer it. Find what works, and do it.

Now write.

Charles Baxter on The Writer's Life

Hello, and welcome to The 39th Draft. From the cozy, air-conditioned thrum of my office, I inaugurate this blog for young* writers—such as it is, such as it will be—with an offering of two passages excerpted from Charles Baxter's "Full of It"—a letter to a young writer, collected in Frederick Busch's excellent and damn near indispensible anthology Letters to a Fiction Writer (numbers and emphasis, mine):

1.

Women and men who have decided to be fiction writers have a certain fanaticism. Sometimes this fanaticism is well concealed, but more often it isn’t. They—you—need it, to get you through the bad times and the long apprenticeship. Learning any craft alters the conditions of your being. Poets, like mathematicians, ripen early, but fiction writers tend to take longer to get their world on paper because that world has to be observed in predatory detail and because the subtleties of plot, setting, tone and dialogue are, like the mechanics of brain surgery, so difficult to master. Fanaticism ignores current conditions (i.e., you are living in a garage, surviving on peanut butter sandwiches, and writing a Great Novel that no one, so far, has read, or wants to) in the hope of some condition that may arrive at a distant point in the future. Fanaticism and dedication and doggedness and stubbornness are your angels. They keep the demon of discouragement at bay. But, given the demands of the craft, it is no wonder that so many of its practitioners—women and men—come out the other end of the process as drunks, bullies, windbags, bespoke-suited merchants of smarm, and assholes. The wonder is that any of them come out as decent human beings. But some do.

A writer’s life is tricky to sustain. The debased romanticism that is sometimes associated with it—the sordid glamour of living in an attic, being a drunken oaf or a bully, getting into fistfights á la Bukowski—needs to be discarded, and fast.

2.

It seems a shame to say so, but the hardest part of being a writer is not the long hours of learning the craft, but learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul. There are many such nights, far too many, as you will discover. I hate to be the one to bring you this news, but someone should.

Part of the deal of having a soul at all includes the requirement that you go through several dark nights. No soul, no dark nights. But when they come, they have a surprisingly creepy power, and almost no one tells you how to deal with them. You can do illegal drugs or take psychoactive pills, you can have affairs or masturbate, you can watch movies ‘til dawn, but that only produces what doctors call “symptomatic relief.” In these nights you confront your own doubts, lack of self-confidence, the futility of what you are doing, and the various ways in which you fail to measure up. Feelings of inadequacy are the black-lung disease of writing. These are the nights during which the Fraud Police come to knock on your door.

Psychologists have their own name for this set of feelings. (They have clinical names for most of our emotions by now.) They call it “imposter-syndrome.” Imposter-syndrome is endemic to the art of writing because gifts—the clear evidence of talent—are not so clearly associated with writing as they are with music and graphic art. Not everyone has perfect pitch, not everyone can carry a tune, not everyone can draw or create an interesting representation of something on canvas. But almost every goddamn moron can write prose.

Furthermore, anyone’s apprenticeship in the writing of fiction has several stages, at least one of which involves an imposture. To be a novelist or short story writer, you first have to pretend to be a novelist or a short story writer. By great imaginative daring, you start out as Count No-Count. Everyone does. Everyone starts as a mere scribbler. Proust got his start as a pesky dandified social layabout with no recognizable talents except for making conversation and noticing everybody. So what do you do? You sit down and pretend to write a novel by actually trying to write one without knowing how to do it….

The trouble is that the first stage—of pretending to be a writer—never quite disappears. And there is, in this art, no ultimate validation, again because it’s not a rule-governed activity. The ultimate verdict never comes in. God tends to be silent in matters of art and literary criticism.

A young writer could do far worse than investing a few bucks in this book.

Now write.

* Chin up! "Young" in this case means anyone, of any age, who is new to writing, returning to writing, or simply engaged in the ongoing and often quite difficult journey of the writer.