Installment #13
Chapter Three
The Writing Lesson
His chronically precarious financial situation and current lack of an
American publisher notwithstanding, for years Fugue had enjoyed an
international reputation. He was considered a cult author, an
appellation both pejorative and praise arising primarily from a series
of detective novels he had written featuring a protagonist who was a
college professor with a doctorate in criminology, a martial arts
expert, an ex-circus headliner and a private investigator who just
happened to be a dwarf. His was a body of work both fans and critics
agreed was not only decidedly offbeat but unfailingly bizarre. He was
especially popular in France, where all of his books published there to
date were kept in print, but his success in one European country could
not financially offset a lack of significant interest in the United
States, where all of his books had been out of print for two years
before he finally ran out of money and went back to work for a second
time with the shattered children at Little Ark.
He was often asked to speak to groups ranging from elementary school
pupils to high school English classes to civic organizations to
university students, for whom he offered a two-day seminar on the
business of writing. Over the years he had developed for these occasions
a body of material on which he could draw to deliver workshops and
lectures lasting from fifteen minutes to a weekend, the length of his
performance depending upon the age and interest group, the setting, or
the academic level and requirements of his audience. At the heart of
most of his talks was his contention that there are four basic
ingredients in the complex and delicate genetic and spiritual soufflé
that is a successful writer of fiction. Lacking any one of them, the
artist will fail to rise.
Begin by greasing the brain pan with a gene paste of talent, Fugue tells
his older audiences, a recipe direction so obvious as to seem absurd
were it not for the fact that talent is such a ghostly measure in a
writer. In fact, the absence at any age of a clear indicator of talent
is what makes fiction writing, the darkest and most difficult of the
arts, different from all other creative pursuits. The talent for writing
publishable fiction, whether popular or literary, is virtually always
hidden from plain view in its early stages of manifestation; even if it
is present, it must be painstakingly and patiently birthed by the
individual, at considerable personal cost.
Fugue will point out that there are three fields of human endeavor that
produce prodigies, namely chess, music, and mathematics. For those
wishing to pursue a career in these fields, failure to perform at or
near a world-class level by the time one is a teenager is a clear
message that one should think of training for other gainful employment.
But there are no writing prodigies. On the contrary, even the dormant
presence of nascent writing talent is most difficult to discern in
children, while talent in all of the other arts, and in sports, is
readily glimpsed in the early stages. Frequently in elementary school,
and virtually always by middle or high school, almost everyone in a
community knows who is a good athlete and who has a flair for acting,
singing, dancing, drawing, playing a musical instrument, or even
balancing a plate on the end of his nose. These talents shine, often
brightly, in some children, and their gifts are quickly validated and
strongly encouraged by teachers, parents and peers. Elite classes,
sometimes entire schools, are organized to nurture the talents of these
gifted children. For talented athletes, scholarships beckon, and beyond
school perhaps even a career in professional sports. Sophisticated
training is available at every level. There is constant feedback from
teachers and other students, and there is ample opportunity for the
talented in the other arts and sports to compare their abilities with
those of their gifted peers. The option of pursuing a career based on
these talents can be weighed for years and at many stages of development
that others may observe and evaluate. A student may enter any one of
thousands of programs geared to train the professional. Those who do
formally train but who do not have sufficient talent or will to
withstand the abundant competition for livelihoods in sports and the
arts will be weeded out early.
Educational pedigrees can have considerable value; a degree from
Julliard will almost certainly earn an aspiring cellist an interview and
audition, and maybe even a chair, with a symphony orchestra.
The seed of a fiction writer in a child, if such a thing even exists at
a young age, receives no such warmth, light, or nourishing showers of
encouragement. This seed, embedded in hard ground, does not germinate
easily, and its flowering is always fraught with difficulty. It must be
a hearty and self-sufficient plant, for its early stages of growth are
almost always unattended. While the best and measurably brightest
students usually excel at English composition, it is not necessarily the
best and measurably brightest who will become professional writers; high
profile academic achievers are much more likely to become trained
professionals, doctors, lawyers, academicians, dentists. Life itself is
the only training ground, experience the only exercise, for a fiction
writer, and any attempt to formalize this preparation into a curriculum
is largely an exercise in futility. While a degree from a good music
school will usually get a musician some measure of courteous attention
from prospective employers, studying for a degree in "creative
writing" can, more often than not, actually damage a budding writer's
skills insofar as he or she may be encouraged to write the kind of
painless, pointless and plotless fiction favored by academics and
published in academic journals read mostly by other academics. A degree
in fiction writing is not only worthless outside academia, it may be
considered by editors who are implored to consider it as a credential to
be the badge of a dilettante. An aspiring novelist or short story writer
who takes too seriously the views and advice of professors who teach
rather than write for a living is someone who has not yet grasped the
most basic lesson of professional writing, namely that the only person
whose opinion of their work matters is an editor, and the only useful
"grade" for their work a check or rejection slip. The opinions of
friends, relatives and writing instructors may or may not inflate the
ego, but they are assuredly irrelevant to the goal of seeing one's work
in print.
In an effort to amplify his contention that writing is different from
the other arts, a talent for it more difficult to identify and nurture,
Fugue equates fiction writing with awake dreaming, a kind of controlled
madness that is an outgrowth of a natural tendency toward eccentricity.
Madness, controlled or not, dreaming and eccentricity are qualities that
are usually punished, not rewarded, by most public school systems, which
are in the business of leveling the emotional landscape of its products
so that they will fit smoothly into society. Consequently it is not the
child at the front of the classroom who is most likely to one day earn a
living weaving tales, but the one in the back who is constantly
admonished for staring out the window. The cues and signposts and
encouragement that exist for those talented in the other arts are simply
not there for the child who will eventually be driven, not trained, to
write fiction as an adult. Indeed, Fugue expresses doubt that the
writing of publishable fiction can be taught at all. He doubts that
people can be trained to successfully create alternate worlds that
entertain, amuse, terrify, enrage, sadden, and even radically change
lives with nothing more than words.
He suspects that writers, thought conjurers, are grown, cut deeply in
the heart's trunk by pain, then tortured by experience and need into
their final shape, like bonsai trees. He advises students listening to
his lectures who are serious about writing fiction and who are thinking
of studying for a degree in "creative writing" that they would be
better off majoring in something else, like cosmology or hotel
management. For aspiring writers in college, of far more importance than
their major area of study is the need to look ahead and prepare for a
career that will afford them a living, a "day job" that will pay their
bills but is not too time-consuming, because it will undoubtedly be many
years and millions of words before even the talented among them are
published. Their self-confidence will be constantly under attack
because, for years, the only feedback they are likely to get will be
negative, in the form of rejection slips. A growing pile of rejection
slips could be an indicator that you simply don't have the necessary
talent and you've made a bad investment of your time and energy, but
this is not necessarily the case. Rejection slips could just as well
mean only that your talent has not yet grown the muscle that is
necessary to write publishable fiction, or that your material is not
quite right for the markets to which you have been submitting it.
Fugue believes that a writer can track his or her progress toward
publication through the types of rejection slips received. He divides
rejections into 3 categories---A, B, and C.
A "C" rejection is an anonymous, boilerplate form slipped into a
manuscript, sometimes after the perusal of only a page or two, by an
editor who has found the work unacceptable for any of dozens of reasons,
including possibly a headache or dyspepsia on the day that particular
manuscript rose to the top of the pile of unsolicited work on his desk.
A "B" rejection is a "C" slip with some smudge of humanity on it,
like the word "sorry" initialed by an editor. Such a personal touch
should be taken as a sign of encouragement; the story was close to being
accepted. Steps should immediately be taken to identify the editor whose
initials those are, and then another story sent to that particular
editor, perhaps with a brief cover letter reminding that person that she
or he had offered encouragement on a previous submission.
A class "A" rejection is a letter from an editor who, while still
rejecting the manuscript, thought enough of the story to take time to
communicate personally, often at length, and sometimes even citing
specific reasons why the work was rejected. As with class "B"
rejections, another story should be written and submitted to this
sympathetic editor as quickly as possible. It is a sad fact, Fugue
points out, that many aspiring writers work fruitlessly for years
without receiving so much as a class "A" rejection. On the other hand,
publishing history in America is replete with true tales of books like
Gone with The Wind that were rejected dozens of times before being
accepted by a publisher and then becoming a best seller earning their
authors fortune and fame.
Fugue's point is that, while publication is obviously a validation of
talent, getting a piece of fiction, novel or short story, into print is
so difficult even for those with proven talent that it is a waste of
time and energy for an aspiring writer to worry about whether or not he
or she has that all-important gift. If the writer wants publication
badly enough and is still laboring away after a period of what may be
many years and for his efforts is collecting only a stack of rejection
slips, the odds are good that he or she does have talent, and it is
still manifesting itself in this formative stage as an unquenchable
desire and need to write. Desire and need are the two most common of
many masks the shy gift of writing talent may wear before it has
developed the strength and confidence to allow itself to be introduced
to the public.
In Fugue's own case it had taken him seven years of steady work, four
hours of writing five days a week wrapped around a day job of teaching a
Special Education class of educable mentally retarded children, three
long novels, dozens of short stories, articles and poems, before he ever
published anything---a short poem in a literary journal, for which he
was paid $1.00. In those seven years he had collected enough rejection
slips to completely paper the walls and ceilings of a living room and
bathroom in an apartment he had been living in between marriages. This
had not amused his landlady, who had considered the yellowing sea of
scraps of paper a fire hazard, but he supposed he had stuck up the
rejections as an act of defiance, a challenge to himself not to give up,
and a reminder that he could think of nothing else in life he wanted
more, no accomplishment more prestigious and exciting, than to see his
work and name in print and be a published fiction writer. And he had
finally done and become just that. In a society where the median income
of published authors is well below the poverty line and only a handful
of writers are able to earn a living solely from their work, he had
spent long periods of time, punctuated when he ran out of money by
gainful employment in places like Little Ark or in the world of night
that had almost destroyed him, among the elite 5% of authors who can
support themselves with their stories.
If you want to be a writer, Fugue tells his audiences, write; if you
want to write badly enough and can stay the obstacle course of crushing
disappointment and frustration and fatigue, you probably have talent.
Don't worry about it. Trust your desire, as he had.
