Last night, I finished attending a short continuing education class at UWM: Read to Write! It was the sort of class I like—learning through experience–and I found the instructor to be both pleasant and helpful. To his credit, he was well-able to tolerate my tendency to wave my arms and rant senselessly, so he is certainly worthy of praise and respect.
Now, those who are well-acquainted with me know that I don’t really consider formal education in creative writing to be something I’m going to be able to pursue, so it might surprise those folks to learn that I decided to take the class. I continue to contend that those who possess the gift of outsider art may be destroyed by being forced into the academic mold, and that any author who decides to take up formal training has got to consider this when making the decision*. What I don’t often reveal is my own belief that you simply cannot train brilliance into everyone who dreams of the life of a celebrated author; for most people in that situation, pursuing a BFA or an MFA in creative writing is just a path to disappointment and crushing debt. **
That said, I’ve been stuck for a seriously long time, and pushes that don’t involve falling off of cliffs are not unwelcome. I’m perfectly able to recognize this, and I’m perfectly willing to move into the path of the push. Unfortunately, I didn’t really get the help I needed, not in the ultimate sense of what I wanted, and so I am left feeling a little lost.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I’ve had very real, very detrimental writer’s block for the past 15 years***. On the face of it, this is an extravagant stretch of truth, for I have written vast quantities of zero-draft work, and articles for newsletters, and poetry, and, of course, the essays/memoirs/stories that are mixed into all the dreck that makes up this blog/vanity site. I’ve amused myself with sock monkey stories, and even gone so far as to pop a retelling into a local fiction contest, but those, too, don’t count as successes, merely as glimmers of hope. They have all been things to keep me busy, to disguise failure, for when the words went away, they left a great black hole that would have ruined me had I stood on the edge and looked down. When the unembellished truths are told, I have not gotten a completed beginning, middle, and end of a piece of fiction onto a piece of paper in … in… well, it’s actually more than 15 years.
For this class, I did. Mind you, it’s draft 1.1 rather than draft 0, but, without doubt, getting to draft 1.1 is a success. My 5 pages were to be turned in on 6 July, and I sat down on the morning of July 5th and let it all come out. I showed it to Michael, who immediately understood what was happening in the story. Confident that I at least had a draft that presented the elements I would eventually refine, I sent the story in that night and spent a week waiting for my turn at the critique stand.
At first, just looking at the body language of the readers, it was very clear that I had hit one aspect correctly; it had been my intention to provoke anxiety and tension in the reader, and, boyo, I hit that mark. I almost laughed out loud when I realized that. There were comments about word choices and points that could be removed, all to be expected, and all fair. But what really disappointed me was this: virtually no one picked up on the central ambiguity. The story is set up to show you what the primary character believes to be true but leave the reader to wonder if it’s actually a correct interpretation of events. Not a soul amongst the classroom readers addressed this. Anyone who had anything to say about the ambiguous cues understood it to be a failing in my ability to understand and describe the behaviors of the female protagonist.
I could weep. This is a harsh thing, to finally break a bad, bad stretch only to find that you have utterly failed to convey a crucial plot point.
Now, here is the most difficult part: I can’t let myself get caught in self-slaughter over this failure, as that is a component of writer’s block. If I stare at that fact, I will soon enough find myself staring back into that empty hole and writing endless amounts of zero-drafts. I’m finding it difficult not to castigate myself into wordlessness; this is, perhaps, the last thing that my fears can steal from me.
And that, my friends, my sunshines, is the dance. Somehow, I have to wrest the baton from the conductor, change the melody the pit orchestra plays, and pirouette across a razor’s edge.
—————————————-
*Of course, this depends on whether or not any given author is sufficiently able to distance himself enough to recognize that he is, or is not, creating fantastical and important works of outsider art. Which, in turn, begs the question: if the author is capable of that sort of discernment, is he really an outsider? That, however, is a pleasant argument for another day. Suffice for this moment is my reluctant honesty: I consider myself merely an amateur with potential, and never mind those minor publication credits.
** Or maybe it’s a path to books of the The DaVinci Code sort. *Still* my favorite target whenever I need a book to take potshots at! A more undeserving bestseller has never crossed my desk. I never thought I’d find anyone I believe more laughably overrated than ol’ Ernie Hemmingway, but then along came Dan Brown. Yay! Thank you, Dan Brown!
***(There, I wrote it down, I must face its truth. Putting it down actually makes it very real for me, rather than just a bit of hyperbole used to express the depth of my frustration. Fifteen years is a horribly long time to not do the thing you love.)