by
Chad Harbach
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The thing to lament is not only that we have a bunch of novels about harpoons and dinghies (or suburbs or bad marriages or road trips or offices in New York). The thing to lament is also the dead end of isolation that comes from describing the dead end of isolation—and from using vibrant literary communities to foster this phenomenon. In our workshops, we simply accept it as true that larger structures of common interest have been destroyed by the atomizing forces of economy and ideology, and what’s left to do is be faithful to the needs of the sentence.
To have read enough to feel the oceanic movement of events and ideas in history; to have experienced enough to escape the confines of a personal provincialism; to have distanced yourself enough from your hang-ups and pettiness to create words reflecting the emotional complexity of minds beyond your own; to have worked with language long enough to be able to wield it beautifully; and to have genius enough to find dramatic situations that embody all that you have lived and read, is rare. It’s not something that every student of creative writing—in the hundreds of programs up and running these days—is going to pull off. Maybe one person a decade will pull it off. Maybe one person every half century will really pull it off.
aaaahhhh
My first workshop with her was a revelation. I’d put up my application story—most of us did at some point—with the idea that it was the best I had. She saw straight through it, the way it was a mix of the autobiographical (I really had been in a coven in high school, with my high school boyfriend) and the fantastical (I did not ever help the police find lost children with clairvoyant dreams). I had tried, crudely, to make something out of a Dungeons & Dragons group I’d been in back in high school, but I hadn’t done the work of inventing a narrator who was whole and independent of me. Deborah drew lines around what was invented, and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what we invent, we control, and how what we don’t, we don’t—and that it shows. That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and that the problem stems from the way we’ve already invented so much of what we think we know about ourselves, without admitting it.
not totally sure what i should take away from this tbh
[...] workshops: you meet people there you’d never meet otherwise, much less show your work to, and you listen to them talk about your story or your novel. These are not your ideal readers—they are the readers you happen to have. Listening to their critiques forces you past the limits of your imagination and also your sympathies, and in doing so takes you past the limits of what you can reach for in your work on your own. A fiction writer’s work is limited by his sense of reality, and workshop after workshop blows that open by injecting the fact of other people’s realities.
We moved to my next profound question: What do you know that no one else knows? My premise was that good writing depends on a kind of specialized knowledge—whether of some process, or some relationship, or some situation or event. If people would just tell us what actually happened! We would know so much; we would learn so much. Of Kafka’s commitment to telling the whole truth about himself and his life, Elias Canetti wrote: “A human being who offers himself to knowledge so completely is, under any circumstances, an incomparable stroke of luck.” We do not have to be Kafka—but we can at least tell one truth, or two, about our lives. As the editor of a literary magazine, I had read so many “stories”—fiction or nonfiction, it didn’t matter. They were made-up, and the more made-up they were, the more conventional. Where truth was left out or kept general, cliché filled the void. The mistake made over and over was to search for the “universal,” when (this is itself a cliché, maybe, but still) it was the specific stuff that readers wanted to know. But of course it’s not so easy to figure out what the specific stuff is. One’s life contains so many things; how are you to know which of these things is distinctive?
These women were a far cry from my overweight Latino undergrads in Target jeans. Their sandals looked new and expensive. One was probably a lawyer, another the head of an NGO, another a shrink. These women had money and time to explore their creative sides. I was worrying about my sixty-five bucks. The sweat trickled down my temples, collected between my breasts. I could feel my hair frizzing.
“What’s your discipline?” one of them asked.
“I’m a fiction instructor. I’m Diana,” I said, then added, “Wagman.”
“Oh right,” another responded. “You’re the screenwriter.”
It was the first time the screenwriter was said to me in that disparaging tone, but it would not be the last.
Fucking MFA programs. The students were arrogant because they had been accepted by this fancy program. They were also desperate to believe they had done the right thing—that being there would help them, change them, save them in some way. That very first evening, in the introductory meeting, I could smell it: the students’ raw desire, overpowering my own.
I was never a creative writing major, or even an English major. At my state university—the only place that would take me—I majored in drugs, easy virtue, and skiing. Waitressing was a big part of that, too. I’ve taken exactly one writing workshop in my life. I started another but dropped it because I was having an affair with the instructor. I finished my BA in seven years. Then I went to film school because I love movies and I hated my job as a picture framer. I now have an MA that I am well aware is not a terminal degree, from a university not known for its film department. I write by ear, from reading and from my gut. Still, I’ve sold short stories and essays, and those three novels received some good reviews. My second book won a medium-size award, but at this pastoral fucking MFA program all anyone mentioned was my one unsuccessful straight-to-DVD movie. I was “the screenwriter.”
That first night in the damp, unair-conditioned faculty women’s housing, I puked up my anxiety in the shared bathroom. I was hoping this job would make me a real writer. I would know the right people; I would become part of that rarefied world; I would receive invitations and emails from accomplished novelists and New Yorker contributors. We would share ideas and opportunities. We would be friends. My face hurt from smiling so much. My brain hurt from trying to be witty. I washed lots of dishes in the faculty communal kitchen, but the women weren’t friendly and I think I made the straight guys nervous. I decided to give up my high heels and wear the flip-flops I had brought for the shower. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to be cool.
[...] What was missing from the older literary forms, in other words, wasn’t social justice, but the passage of time—a dimension the novel was specifically engineered to capture. The novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn’t yet been fully described, possibly because of his race or class, but more broadly because he didn’t exist before, and neither did the technology for describing him. The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of preexisting literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against. In this dialectic, the categories of outsider and insider are in constant flux. For an outsider to become an insider isn’t ironic or paradoxical: it’s just the way things work.
Ironically, a preoccupation with historic catastrophe actually ends up depriving the novel of the kind of historical consciousness it was best suited to capture. The effect is particularly clear in the “maximalist” school of recent fiction, which strives, as McGurl puts it, to link “the individual experience of authors and characters to the kinds of things one finds in history textbooks”: “war, slavery, the social displacements of immigration, or any other large-scale trauma”; historical traumas, McGurl explains, confer on the novel “an aura of ‘seriousness’ even when, as in Pynchon or Vonnegut, the work is comic. Personal experience so framed is not merely personal experience,” a fact that “no amount of postmodern skepticism … is allowed to undermine.” The implication is that “personal experience” is insufficient grounds for a novel, unless it is entangled in a “large-scale trauma”—or, worse yet, that an uncompelling (or absent) story line can be redeemed by a setting full of disasters.
This is the kind of literary practice James Wood so persuasively condemned under the rubric of “hysterical realism” (“Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister”). Diachronicity is cheaply telegraphed by synchronic cues, and history is replaced by big-name historical events, often glimpsed from some “eccentric” perspective: a slideshow-like process, as mechanical as inserting Forrest Gump beside Kennedy at the White House. As Wood points out, the maximalist fetishization of history is actually antihistoric: the maximalist novel “carries within itself, in its calm profusion of characters and plots, its flawless carpet of fine prose on page after page, a soothing sense that it might never have to end, that another thousand or two thousand pages might easily be added.”
Call me a utopian, but I believe every entrant to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award would chuck the contest, the reality-show format, and all the tips on how to hype your book for a sense of cultural belonging. The Amazon “community” suggests a world in which everyone can publish a book, within a public space that may lead you belatedly to a special destiny. Of course, this community isn’t unionized, socialist, or cooperatively owned: far-reaching powers of inclusivity (a community anyone can join) often seem synonymous with far-reaching powers of exclusivity (be with Amazon or be alone). For the time being, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel seems less a promotion for the entrants than for the corporate sponsor, and the winner each year, no matter who wins the contest, is Amazon.com. This hints at a publishing revolution, though like many revolutions before it, it doesn’t look to be the one the revolutionaries truly needed, or sometimes thought they were fighting for. +
Mostly it sucked because there had been a moment in my life, I suppose as a younger person, when I knew that I aspired to be a writer. This is not the same as feeling at home writing, or feeling the need, the compulsion, to write, which I also felt. But there was this moment when I spied an image of myself as a writer, whole and intact and accomplished, and recognized that image as me—as who I needed to be in order to be me. As to the question of exactly what that image looked like, I really do think it involved coming home to Milwaukee and reading at Harry Schwartz, and my parents there proud, and the teachers who supported me and cared for me and encouraged me when I was completely and utterly alienated from my peers being there, and then maybe some of those peers as well, and me harboring no ill will toward them but instead being very charitable and forgiving in my success. And instead you find yourself in this beat-up old building in the middle of nowhere Los Angeles with no heat and holes in the walls and cracks in the windowpanes, teaching two days a week at a community college in Orange County and the rest of the time writing less to accomplish something than to avoid failing at it, and you see that image fading, and as it does being alive starts to feel haphazard and purposeless, not like destiny but like some unfortunate accident that has befallen you for no good reason at all.
:(