Our Stories

If we take The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House (Tin House Books) to be a representative gathering of critical wisdom from current American writers, what does it ultimately tell us about these writers' understanding of the purpose of fiction, their widely-shared assumptions? 

Unfortunately, in my view it tells us that their understanding of fiction's purposes is very limited indeed, their assumptions about its possibilties, its potential to surprise and to creatively challenge established conventions, very narrow and constricted. Almost none of the essays included in the volume even suggest that fiction ought to be challenging in this way, and some even explicitly express impatience with adventurous, unconventional fiction. Most of the essays--all of them originally delivered at Tin House's Summer Writers Workshop--discuss works of fiction as if they were products to be assembled from blueprints exploiting familiar devices, the writing of fiction as adherence to certain fundamental truths universally acknowledged.

Perhaps this is to be expected in a book presenting "craft essays." A "writers workshop" is centrally focused on "craft" as an element of fiction writing that can be taught (or at least talked about), and as working writers those participating in the workshop presumably do have advice to dispense at the level of craft. Perhaps it is too much to expect that writers themselves would feel comfortable emphasizing "art " over craft, since arguably the best most of them can do is hope that careful attention to craft will ultimately give rise to art. Distinguishing what is successfully artistic, which is a function of the experience of reading fiction, from the mere application of craft is the critic's job, not the writer's.

Perhaps. But in publishing a book like The Writer's Notebook, Tin House is putting its imprimatur on the "craft" approach, and one might presume that those writers who heed the kind of advice dispensed in the book might ultimately be producing the kind of work that could find its way into print in this journal. That this work would be safe, formally "sound" and stylistically "fine," would only conform to the mission of journals like Tin House, which, as far as I can tell, is to a) reinforce the existing structure of academic writing programs and workshops, providing their graduates with a place to publish, and b) associate themselves as much as possible with "quality" writing, which can't be just anything and everything and thus needs to be narrowed down to its embodiment in "craft," the boundaries of which are laid down in The Writer's Notebook.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Tin House or other high-profile literary magazines are actively hostile to adventurous or experimental fiction (sometimes an unconventional story or two can be squeezed into the mix), but the discussions of the nature of fiction and the writing of fiction in The Writer's Notebook assume a form that is relatively fixed, comprising such staple elements as "dialogue," "scene," and "character motivation," a practice that is subject to improvement through increased skill with these tools. Such a conception of fiction as a handy collection of pre-approved devices doesn't much encourage departures from standard practice or questioning of the place of these devices in composing works of fiction. (Why, for example, is "dialogue" to be expected in stories or novels? Shouldn't this be something that might be useful in some circumstances, when contributing to an overall aesthetic effect, rather than a convention all fiction must "get to" at some point?) It shouldn't be surprising that most issues of Tin House don't feature short stories that seem to be the result of such questioning of the short story as a stable, identifiable thing reproducible through the application of "craft."

Thus Tom Grimes informs us that "our stories are amorphous until we discover how time controls them. Every great story contains a 'clock,' an intrinsic timekeeper." "Determine whether or not your story has a 'clock,'" he concludes. "It can be a day, a week, a month, a season, etctera, but the story has to have it." If a story "has to have" a clock, then should one discover one's story doesn't really seem to depend much on timekeeping, on the sort of narrative "development" the passage of time provides, then apparently one doesn't really have a story at all. This seems a reductively literal insistence on "story" as the sine qua non of short fiction, when of course much modern/postmodern fiction has explicitly worked to undermine "story" as the essence of fiction. Not many of Donald Barthelme's stories, for example would be able to pass the "clock" test administered by Grimes. They're much too "amorphous."

Anna Keesey tells us that a "scene" is "fiction's fundamental unit." "Part of what makes fiction writing so difficult," she claims, is that "the writer must decide what's going to happen, to whom, and why, but is simultaneously loaded up with another set of decisons: who'll be telling the story, in what order, with what level of detail and at what speed of revelation." Here again is a recipe for conventionality in fiction, by which "story," ("what's going to happen") takes precedence and all of the other "decisions"--themselves highly conventional and formulaic--are made as ornamental on the primary illusion of narrative immediacy. "We see the action occur; we feel the time pass," as Keesey puts it later in the essay. Keesey acknowledges that writers like Woolf and Proust slow down the unfolding of scene--which Keesey calls "infolding"--but she can't see this as an implicit repudiation of "scene" except in its most perfunctory role as a framing device. She chooses instead to regard it as just an indication that scene "is superbly elastic." Why not just say that in some fiction "scene" is as irrelevant as "clock time"?

Even when otherwise acknoweldging the limitations of one or another conventional approach, as in Keesey's essay or Aimee Bender's essay on "character motivation," the writers can't seem to give up on the assumptions giving rise to the approach. Bender cautions against making "motivation" explicitly clear. Instead, she writes, it's acceptable "not really to know what's going on with your characters and to let the writing be a process of discovering that." This sort of "complexity" is truer to human psychology, after all. But what if "motivation" never becomes clear, or is not even necessary? What if "psychology" itself is irrelevant to a particular's writer's concerns? One gets the sense that this would not be acceptable, since it jettisons one of the underlying assumptions of mainstream literary fiction--it's all about "understanding" character--that supports all of the accompanying assumptions about "craft."

The only two essays in The Writer's Notebook that really do depart from conventional thinking, the only two essays that finally are about the art of fiction, are Lucy Corin's "Material" and D.A. Powell's "(Mis)Adventures in Poetry." Corin specifically abjures the impulse to "find the form to 'suit' your content, your material." Instead, she describes her own practice of regarding words as her "material," from which come other words that finally cohere into form. Her advice to writers: "you should look at the material you produce to find your material." This can include the visual arrangement of the words on the page, and Corin spends much of her essay comparing different kinds of arrangements of "material." The essay undermines much of the other "advice" to be found in The Writer's Notebook and is really the only essay in this book that makes it worth having. Powell posits that in poetry "often it's the inexact, the awful, the mistaken linguistic turn that manages to say the right thing because it unmoors us from our perceived relationship to the subject about which we're trying to write." "The subjects of poetry are always the same," he concludes, "so lend your ear to the language instead." "Dare to say the unsayable in a new way." If only as many fiction writers could find a way to heed this advice as, in my opinion, many poets already do.

Unfortunately, readers of The Writer's Notebook won't get exposed to much discussion of language as the fundamental "unit" of fiction. They'll mostly discover essays that invite the writer to say the same old things, the eminently sayable, in the same old ways, but to think of this as "craft."

Comments

[jseliger.com]

Unfortunately, in my view it tells us that their understanding of fiction's purposes is very limited indeed, their assumptions about its possibilties

I wonder if this because the writers in it are trying to be specific in their commentary: perhaps their is a trade-off between specificity and generality that makes those attempting the former more likely to be "narrow." You might be hinting in that direction with your comment, "Perhaps this is to be expected in a book presenting "craft essays.""

To me, the essays worked: they illuminated more of the "craft" part of writing than I think I'd known before, and I elaborate on why in my post about the book: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/24/the-writers-notebook .

[H. O'Nail]

The reductionistic approach to story writing which regards it as a set of techniques that can be taught and learnt (that’s what a ‘craft’ is, isn’t it?) is entirely consistent with its role as a teachable subject in courses, ‘workshops’, etc. An instructor in a course or ‘workshop’ can only teach techniques, no more. Therefore to feel satisfied that s/he is teaching everything that there is to be taught, s/he will have to believe that there is nothing else that needs to be learnt/acquired/developed. What the course teacher’s net can’t catch is not fish.
On the other hand, the aim of teaching is always to make students conform to some norm. It’s not only that a school can only teach techniques – a school will only teach the techniques it regards as appropriate and will dismiss as unacceptable anything that differs from them.
To expect any teacher-learner context to breed originality or to foster talent is a contradiction in terms.

[Steven Augustine]

"Unfortunately, in my view it tells us that their understanding of fiction's purposes is very limited indeed, their assumptions about its possibilities, its potential to surprise and to creatively challenge established conventions, very narrow and constricted."

I'm 500 pages into the (thus far) strongest new work I've read in ten years (Littell's The Kindly Ones) and the sickeningly provincial squeamishness, ignorance and book-burning glee on display in its shittier reviews indicate that it's more than Fiction's purposes (et al) but also its *rights* that are under attack. Lucky for Littell he was writing, as it turns out, for an appreciative (French) audience; they seem aware, largely, of the fact that the novel has a right to present its horrors as horrible; its subtle arguments without convenient keys and its jokes quite bitter if the world they lampoon is inarguably cruel. But Fiction's rights go beyond even that: they're total, in a near-inverse of the "rights" of the Actual (that's us). That *should* be the point; it *should* be liberating. Wrong era, however, for "liberating".

[Dan Green]

Steven: It's funny that you bring up The Kindly Ones. I'm reading it now myself and have had the same reaction to the earlier reviews I read: "sickeningly provincial squeamishness" is about right. I'll be commenting on the book at greater length when I've finished it, but your point about its transgressiveness is well-taken.

[Steven Augustine]

Dan: after the slapstick of reading 4-out-of-every-5 reviewers skim/misread Roth's relatively straightforward novella Indignation (important plot point reported incorrectly with such regularity that I began to suspect that some of the critics were basing their reviews on other reviews), how could I have expected close-readings of a densely-packed 984 pages featuring a protag that no reviewer can "care" about? Mea culpa.

[Casey]

But if we DO want to expand our understanding of fiction's nature and possibilities, why not include hour-long television dramas as "fiction?" And if we make that move, then Tin House isn't at all representative of the current state of things. Movies and television are our fiction.

[Steven Augustine]

"Movies and television are our fiction." Sadly true. Adding pictures and sounds to a narrative doesn't expand the possibilities of text, it shrinks them to technological limitations while shifting the Imagination from a central/active role to a voyeur's passive one (the little work remaining is a sympathetic reflex: projecting oneself into the action). While a book as it is read is not, literally, taking place on the page, a movie is, literally, taking place on the screen; even an illuminated text (Tenniel's Alice, eg) doesn't steal so much of the Imagination's fire as to render it almost superfluous. Film/video are valid forms but not interchangeable with Literary Fiction (neither was stained glass). Very different functions/experiences and those of us who will have the one replace the other, entirely, in their lifetime, will be cheated out of something.

[Frances Madeson]

Experimentation, Imagination and Liberation!

The three sides of the artist's triangular shield, behind which we keep our spark alive and glowing as best we can. All of these are, and have been, under sustained attack in this Voyeurism Revolution being perpetrated against us. Brain science cuts both ways. They know more than ever how to precisely manipulate us. LCDs, pop-ups, ring-tones—we are made to look whether we want to or not. And what do we get to look at? Posters depicting flayed bodies, vampires, and now, the deeply debasing, cougars. But our wants really aren’t the point, are they? It’s greed and power, concentrated like they never have been before. Our dispossession is their ultimate goal. Dispossession is well under way, and it seems to be okey-dokey with most Americans, maybe even some reading this blog.

I live in a city where the mayor who came to power, came with $4 billion of personal wealth. Now he has $16 billion (per Wikipedia) and there persists a view that he is not corrupt because he doesn’t need the money. That he used his power to overturn the term limits (thereby subverting the will of the voters twice expressed in public referenda) is not viewed as corruption. That he plans to spend over $200 million on his re-“election” campaign is not viewed as corruption. People are scrambling to get on his company’s payroll, one of the few secure sources of income left. He laughs in our faces; we are already ridiculous, that much easier to strip us completely bare. Yesterday I saw three different homeless men with clothes so tattered and filthy, they could only be considered clothes in any sense by previous association. These men don’t even bother begging. They’re over thinking there will be any relief, any justice. We are the kindly ones to them. I watch them well. They are our teachers.

Soon, the news will start reporting the annual tragedies (totally preventable) of families burning up in their beds because there’s no heat in their apartments and they slept with all the burners of the stove on. This mayor could personally buy every building that needed it a new boiler and not feel it, even for a second. But he is content to let the children in the city he lords over immolate. I’m talking about evil. Evil.

And if you think there is no connection between protesting (and brilliantly so, Daniel, thank you, and thank you, Steven, my heroes, Edmond, too) against the strict conformity of craft and these political realities, you are not thinking. Not at all. We are already living in a tin house, just the kind you might find in the sprawling slums circling most South American cities. I held my breath this Macarthur Fellowship season because surely Daniel Green should have been a recipient. But instead, they gave it to Deborah Eisenberg, whose crafted stories are often set in just such milieus.

[KK]

Re: And if you think there is no connection between protesting ... against the strict conformity of craft and these political realities, you are not thinking.¨

Not speaking for everyone, but as a lover of experimental literature, I kind of feel like it makes me feel less politically motivated, not more so. It makes me want to just focus on art and ignore reality.

[Frances Madeson]

KK:
Go with your intuition. One doesn't need to be free or even fed to make art. In fact, one of the homeless men I mentioned is always writing in a notebook. Maybe that's why I first noticed him. And then there's this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Never_Saw_Another_Butterfly

[Steven Augustine]

"Go with your intuition. One doesn't need to be free or even fed to make art. In fact, one of the homeless men I mentioned is always writing in a notebook."

Frances: that's one of the most concise and powerful (low-temperature) responses to a comment I've ever read.

[Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles]

i have a special loathing for the word "craft." It conjures up images of old washed up nevers with big glasses, mothy clothing, and piles of bad books that no one will ever read (which somehow got published)...and those horrible pictuers on university websites of an old person surrounded by young unkempt students (oh those young, wild artists! I bet they were just smoking some inspirational reef before coming to this potent discussion!) in some supposedly enthralling debate (which is about craft, which is utterly mundane and inimical to the concept of a vimy debate). It also remindes me of Joyce Carol Oates, which I would equate with everything I have said above.