A friend made a kind suggestion recently that in light of the recent Paste and Pitchfork articles about the death of indie, I should chime in and write some blog entries about that topic. This seemed especially important when I read the Paste piece and realized that if the writer had read my book, she might have come to some different conclusions. However, I am not in the mood to address this issue today. I will probably be in the near future, since my students are about to begin their unit on punk and indie in the 80s and 90s, but Fridays are not for book matters, or teaching matters.
Because my classes are compressed into Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, I treat Fridays like the Sabbath. I teach long days and have office hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays I grade and do prep. That’s right — my course work eats up six days a week. This is not to say I prep and grade for more than eight hours a day, but there is always some task, faculty meeting, recommendation, email, committee, etcetera to be dealt with. And I don’t even have tenure! (side note: a tenured professor told me once that post-tenure, all he did was “f*ck around”, and then he smiled like a smug reptile.)
But this is not what I wanted to write about either. Rather, I wanted to write about writing. I fear this a narcissistic exercise much like painting about painting, acting about acting, dancing about dancing, or f*cking about f*cking (the latter, however, kind of makes sense). Many books about writing as craft or writing as process have the icky after-sensation of accidentally seeing your mom naked. And it’s not like I came here to write on of those mushy gushy inspirational pieces where some well-meaning soul tells you to drink a certain herbal tea or take yourself on an “art date” to get inspired when your muse is stuck in reverse or whatever, but rather the opposite. Students often seem frustrated in my classes — not because I am (usually) a jerk (okay, I am sometimes a jerk), but because I cannot offer them some formulaic method for writing.
One student asked me last semester exactly how many sentences should be in each paragraph. Others want to know precisely how many quotes they should use, how many sentences of analysis per quote, and so on. Usually they come in writing five paragraph essays, and if I assign a five page essay I am often dismayed that it consists of five page length paragraphs. I do not blame high school teachers for this, or elementary school teachers, or any other teachers. I blame the crumbling edifice of public education in California. But my students have to learn to write sometime, or else they will not survive Berkeley. That’s why they get placed in my courses.
Over the years, I’ve test driven a number of different books and essays that purport to teach people how to write, and none of them have worked. Sure, you can cobble together good suggestions from different sources, but as for the magic formula for writing so many people seem to seek, I have yet to discover it. For me, it’s lots of strong coffee, friends to complain to, cats, crappy reality TV, baking, cursing a lot, psychotherapy, playing the Geto Boys “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” over and over. I do not write much during the semester, because my attention needs to be focused on others’ work, and in the summer when I have a little more free time, I can’t write unless I have a project at hand. At the moment I am in the scary in between moment of having finished a book proposal but not being sure whether it will be published. And in the meantime, that leaves blogging, emails, the occasional assignment for a book review or an essay. There’s no formula or plan for me when those things happen. I just marinate on a topic, research it, talk to people about it, think about it, and then one unplanned day I sit down and pound it out. This is not a teachable formula, so I’ve never been temped to ask people to pay me to learn it, because that would be ridiculous. Nor is it how I teach writing at Berkeley; I use a mishmash of sources and handouts and advice from colleagues, and over the decade I’ve been there I’ve managed to help hundreds of students pass my class. But that’s not “creative writing”; it’s academic writing, which is somewhat more teachable.
Sorry; I had to take a break and listen to the Geto Boys again. Anyway, you get the point. It’s not that I think creative writing can’t be taught at all; after all, I do have an MFA. It’s just that I sometimes mistrust the creative writing industry — the flyers I see for workshops that cost more than my rent, the books that purport to help you unlock your inner writer, the mugs and stuffed animals and pens and notebooks emblazoned with inspirational slogans and so on. It’s just clutter, not magic. When I got my MFA I received four copies of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as gifts, and while they were sincerely given, I just had to laugh. Rilke certainly has a lot to teach us, but it’s not in the advice he handed out — it’s in the poems. And that, I suppose, is the magic formula for learning to write. In the long run, you just have to read.