Office Hours

"The Artist and the Teacher," or, Maybe, "The Artist vs. the Teacher."

Q.

I have been reluctant to ask this question for fear of perhaps hurting your feelings, but today, with your Freakification email, I think you gave me permission, because I think you started to answer my question before I even asked it.

How might one resolve the stark difference between your teaching and your writing? Or the difference between the Artist and the Art?

I discovered you by listening to you talk about writing and life and compassion and personal expression. I was hooked. I have been a StoryClub member for about a year now and, like so many others here, I have become a huge fan. So much so that I feel a bit like a groupie, or even a cult member? I can’t wait to read your analysis of Chekhov or or watch as you dissect Cat in the Rain, or participate as the rest of us get lit up by the process you ignite. If I see your email in the inbox, it becomes an instant priority. I described this to my wife as being like discovering a professor in college by taking a course just because it fit your schedule, with low expectations for the outcome, then ending up changing majors because the professor was so passionate, so articulate and so candid about their own experience in the world of their chosen field.

Then I read a few of your books and was, well, not too into it.

I have now read Lincoln in the Bardo, Tenth of December and Liberation Day, and I am shocked by how little I connect with the stories. It’s a bit like you teach us to do life figure drawing or play folk guitar, then you turn around and paint abstract expressionism or play deliberately disjointed jazz. I get it, I think, that when you teach, you must start us at the beginning, but when you do your own thing you explore ever higher levels of complexity and abstraction. It’s obvious that you are deep into your practice and doing your art at the expert level. But it’s weird for me because I want to love everything you write as much as I love listening to you talk about writing and being, but the twists and turns and the frustration of expectations in the writing leaves me chasing after you, trying so hard not to get lost that I sort of lose the thread - I am no longer reading, or swimming through your fictional world. I am struggling to stay afloat (Though I must admit, the stories do stick in my head and I keep working on the puzzles presented, which I have now learned is perhaps your freaky goal…)

As I write this I am reminded of Grasshopper in the old Kung Fu stories, “Master, why do I not understand these things that you do?”

Thanks again for this StoryClub gift you are giving to us all. (Yeah, I know we pay, but it’s a proverbial drop in the bucket for the incredible gift of time and insight that you share)

A.

First, let me thank you for the frankness and honesty of your question and assure you, and everybody else in Story Club that, on the artistic front, my feelings are not easily hurt.  I don’t always love my work either and it often puzzles me.  And I’ve heard every possible complaint about it imaginable.  So…no worries there, at all.

Yes: it’s very possible that the way I practice my art and the way I talk about it might feel out of step from the outside – but they don’t feel that way to me.  I really do write (or try to write) according to the principles I espouse in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I mean – I “discovered” those principles via my work and then that book was just my honest attempt to articulate them.

That is, whether it’s evident or not, while working, I am always thinking about (or, more accurately, “feeling my way toward”) escalation and efficiency and cause-and-effect and all of that.  This is true no matter how weird or post-modern or sci-fi the story is.  It’s just as true for the weird ones as for the ostensibly realistic ones. 

I am trying to make one section lead to the next; to suss out what the story wants from me; to eventually get some sort of understory to reveal itself; I really am proceeding by “improvisation plus iteration.”

But a composer can study and write about Bach and then use those same principles to do something all his own, that “runs on” the same basic principles but outwardly behaves very differently. 

It may also be that I am just working from two different “personas” or “voices” in these two modes and that you prefer my professorial mode to my creative mode – which is, of course, fine by me.  At least you like one of them. 😊

All I can really say is that I promise those principles are at work in my stories.

Maybe, for some future post, I’ll take apart one of my own stories and try to show you how cause-and-effect and rising action and specificity and narrative logic are at work there – at least, according to me.

Now, as for you being “not too into” my work….let me just say that you’re not alone.  From the very beginning my stories seemed to evince strong reactions in readers.  One of my earliest “reviews” were two harsh things in the Letters to the Editor portion of Harper’s Magazine, after they’d run my novella “Bounty” as a folio.  Also in that edition was an essay on the fallen state of American fiction; one letter writer thanked the magazine for supplying such a vivid example of that fallenness, in my novella.  Another suggested I get out of my “ivory tower” and try working for a living, which was a hoot, because, while writing the novella, I was working full-time as a tech writer at a company in Rochester.  The New York Post, pointed out, rather gratuitously, that I was “no Orwell.”

But then, when the book came out a couple of years later, there were a number of positive reviews, equally passionate (along with, of course, a few more passionate negative ones).

Sometimes I think the goal in writing a book is to “create energy” – God save us from a raft of tepid reviews or (very possible in today’s publishing climate) no reviews at all.  If people are talking about a book passionately, that’s a good thing – we might even use that as one measure of a book: does it inspire strong passion, differences of opinion?  Does it delight some people and disappoint or even piss off others?

And, if so, how can we, as artists, make that all feel OK for ourselves?

When I was doing this recent tour, I became aware of a few things about my stories that some people find off-putting.  Each of these “issues” is a direct result of strongly held esthetic beliefs that it took me a long time to discover that, I am going to claim, are not (for me) negotiable.

I think, for now, I won’t “answer” these complaints, just list them:

First: people sometimes say that they come into a story of mine, are immediately confused about what is happening, and never catch up, and (not surprisingly) they find this distancing and annoying.

Second: Some people don’t like the frequent swerving-to-the-dark – the way I put my characters through truly hard things or seem to bias my fictive worlds in the direction of chaos or difficulty or infuse these with a sort of “life is shit” feeling.  (I don’t agree with this assessment but have heard it.)

Third: Some people give it a good try and just don’t see the point of it all – they don’t see what all the fuss is about.  Often, it seems to me, this is based on a certain disconnection they feel with respect to the work I’m trying to do on the language level – a failure to connect with the piece’s intended tonality.  That is, readers who like my work are hearing one thing, and people who don’t like it….aren’t.

Fourth: With Lincoln in the Bardo in particular, people who bailed often told me that they couldn’t get a story to cohere from the succession of first-person monologues – the necessary mental movie never kicked in for them.  Other people could read the monologues and supply the implied physical action and so on.  I suspect this has something to do with there being (at least) two different modes of reading, on a neurological level.  Some people, as they construct scenes in their heads, need a little more literality from the author; others can proceed without the “seen from outside” clues.  (For some people, the audiobook lands better than the printed book; hearing the different voices brings it alive for them.)

This fourth point might pertain to some of the stories as well: I do very little scene-setting or physical description. A lot of the language is dedicated to inner monologue and I’m not doing much interpretation for the reader and have an innate aversion to reinforcing ideas too overtly. My early love for minimalists like Hemingway, Babel, and Henry Green incline me to prefer under-telling to over-explaining.

Again, I won’t try to “answer” these, except to say that I’m aware of them and that, in each case, the feeling as I’m writing is that I’m sacrificing one thing in order to get another.  (In writing, maybe, you can’t have it all – you have to choose an excess.) I know, for example, that some people are left behind by the strangeness of the beginning of Lincoln in the Bardo, but I also know that I wanted to be true to the point-of-view of the characters, none of which know that they are “ghosts” in a “graveyard.”  So, I sacrifice some accessibility there, in order to “get” a higher level of narrative truth.  And then I hope that this method of reading will be taught to the reader as she reads along and that, by the end of the book, it will allow her to experience the narrative there in an entirely new way.  And so on.

There are probably a bunch more reasons people don’t connect with my work, and I will happily brace myself for your Comments.  😊

But one point I want to make here is that…well, I’ve had a great life in writing.  Many honors and good reviews and all of that and so many readers who do get it. And I don’t think a writer gets all of that without leaving some people cold.  That is, the reason a writer gets a certain reputation is because there is something bold in the work – that writer has a set of those “strongly held esthetic beliefs” mentioned above, and those beliefs, enacted emphatically into the work, create a feeling of excess in the product, and this excess is going to attract some readers and repel others.

At this point in my life and career, a real goal for me is to continue to be intense.  I don’t want to do a slow fade or repeat myself any more than is organic, or be dull, or get preachy.  And to achieve this “stay intense” goal, I feel a need to double-down on those “strongly held esthetic beliefs” (while expanding upon them and finding new ones, of course) and often find myself reminding myself of the immortal words of Ricky Nelson: “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”

In a certain way a writer is, maybe, writing for people who read the same way he does.  If I aim for that group, I am going to get the most power, when things are working.  But I may then more definitively lose the people who don’t read the way I do. This strikes me as just, you know, the basic reality of a work of art.  Or, we might call it, the cost of doing business: if I’m going to wow this group of people, I might have to leave this other group of people cold (and/or shaking their heads in confusion).  (I don’t love this idea, and want to be able to speak to everyone but, given the limited nature of my, or any, talent….)

If we try to include everyone, we might get everyone…but not very passionately.  Whereas, if we swing for the fences, those that we do get…we really get.  We will have done something excessive but true and added that to the holy lexicon of excessive but true things that have been said about the world.

If you’ve heard me interviewed, you’ve likely heard me quote Flannery O’Connor: “A writer can choose what he writes but he can’t choose what he makes live.”  That’s really the whole truth of it.  To get my stories to come alive, I have to proceed the way I do, favoring the things I love to do and can do well, suppressing the things that I’d like to do, or wish that I could do, but that don’t come off well.

And the result is…what the result is.

I’ve written enough bad stories, that never saw the light of day, to know what I have to do to get a story “to live.”

One of my most treasured mantras while writing is this: “A story doesn’t have to do everything; it just has to do something.”

I want to close by wishing you a very happy and merry holiday season - very grateful that we can all gather like this every week…