auto(bio)graphy: learned/taught
Feb. 4th, 2005 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI'm cleaning out my inbox, including the threads from Words in Common that aren't current. (They're all over on Yahoo anyway; it's not like I'm archiving the only record of the conversation or anything.) But I wanted to put this where I could find it again.
If you want to read it, you're welcome to; tho' it is long and fairly narcissistic, it did help me work out some things in my head that needed working out.
Writing cannot be taught, it can only be learned. Discuss.
I'm sure there are a thousand different ways to read that koanly little thing, but for me it did in fact hit a nerve because I've been thinking about all the things I refused to learn as a teenager and have since taught myself.
Number one being humility. ::sigh::
I started writing when I was twelve. Yes, just like that, like falling down a well. You can do that sort of thing when you're twelve. And I almost mmediately decided I wanted to be a writer. No, sorry, let me punctuate that properly: I decided I wanted to be A Writer (::fanfare of trumpets::). I was a very bright and over-motivated little pixie, and I was used to being good at anything intellectual I turned my hand to (not so much with the physical, since I'm clumsy and near-sighted, but that's a different story). And since I was growing up in a smallish town in Tennessee before the advent of the internet, and I was growing up sheltered (middle-class WASP bourgeoisie all the way, baby), I didn't have much of a chance to find cons or writing groups or mailing-lists or anything.
I developed some pretty entrenched habits of thought.
One of those I don't regret, which is the passionate conviction that genre fiction is just as worthwhile and serious and valuable as "mainstream" fiction. And considering how many writing instructors and how-to books I've found since then who have said, either overtly or obliquely, that genre fiction is crap, I'm glad I didn't know about them when I was young and impressionable. Because I don't think they would have changed what I wrote, but they would have made it much harder for me to believe anyone else had any reason to take me seriously. And I have a hard enough time with that as it is.
But I also developed some habits of thought that I have since come to realize were counter-productive. One was the idea that I was a particular kind of writer and thus I could only work in a particular way, and there was no point even trying to do anything differently. I thought "craft" was an offensive word and that trying to analyze one's writing or one's writing process was like pinning luna moths to cork boards. I was too "sensitive" for criticism (which was actually true, I used to cry whenever anyone gave me a critique, but I also
romanticized it as part of my Artiste-Self). I had an elaborate system of self-rationalization set up, positing (iirc) two kinds of writers, the "organic" and the "clockwork," and although I paid lip-service to the idea that the two kinds were equally good, I'm afraid there is no doubt that some animals were more equal than others. In my heart of hearts, I believed that "organic" writers were superior to "clockwork" writers because they were more honest and they were true to their art and, hello, pretentious much?
(In case you were wondering, "organic" writers were the ones who only wrote when they were inspired and never knew what was going to happen next. Which, hey, was exactly my M.O. at the time.)
Now, I'm not making value-judgments about people's processes. You do what works. What I'm saying is that I had a process, and I built up a structure of theory and self-esteem around it such that I locked myself into a very very small box. And when that process quit working for me ... I was still locked in a very very small box. And that's not a good time.
So I was aggressive and pretentious and supercilious as only very bright teenagers can be. I was, to be blunt about it, a bitch, and I was a bitch because I was convinced I was right. And, to make things worse, when I got to college and began to find other people who were intelligent and wanted to be writers, it didn't take much acuity to realize that they weren't as good as I was. Somebody said somewhere that everybody gets one thing about their craft for free. For some people it's plot and for some it's characterization or the really groovy sensawunda ideas that make an sf story click. Mine, I think, is prose style. I can put a sentence together and make it do damn near anything I want. (*ahem* there's a little of that teenage arrogance in action) And I coasted on that for a really long time.
Until I noticed I wasn't finishing anything. Dead end after dead end. And my rationalization system, well trained and highly developed, jumped in with some more caltrops and boiling oil. I'm not a short story writer, I said. I'm a natural novelist. (Which deals with one objection: I don't have anything finished because I can't write short-form.) I have to wait for inspiration, I said. My brain will tell me when it's ready to, I said. (Objection the second smashed to the earth: I don't have anything finished because I'm not *ready*. Tangentially, one of the professors in the department where I got my Ph.D. used to tell her advisees that there was no sense worrying about when they finished their dissertation--they'd finish it when they were ready to. There are reasons I did not ask this woman to be my director.)
And the really horrible thing? It worked.
Partly, this was because I was a full-time student, so I actually *didn't* have time to write every day. And partly, I think, this was because I did still really and truly want to be A Writer, and so I was still working at it. Haphazardly, but working.
And I finished a novel. Went off to grad school. (Learned a lot about how to recognize pretentious wankery when I saw it and learned to dislike it very much in myself.) Sent the novel to an agent I'd heard about. He said he'd be willing to represent me, if I could revise the novel into better shape, and he also gave me two pieces of advice which mark the shift, for me, from "I wannabe A Writer," to "Writing is my career."
1. Go to cons.
2. Publish short fiction.
Neither of these pieces of advice, in and of themselves, would have done it, but they put my feet on the right road. I still thought I couldn't write short stories, but I went to cons. And here's where the wild luck weasels came and war-danced for me, because I went to Wiscon and met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elisem and did her Artist's Challenge with a necklace named "Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans' Day."
I met the challenge. I wrote a short story. In about a week. (And lest this seem too Cinderella-y, let me add that I still haven't sold it.)
And then I wrote another one.
And I began to seriously rethink my conceptualization of myself as a writer. Nobody could *teach* me the need for discipline, because I wasn't listening. I'd turned the volume way up on my own personal myth of Being A Writer. And I had to turn it all the way down before I could learn anything at all. I started to find community, and other writers who were as good or better than I was, and learned how to take criticism, and basically took everything down and started again.
And kept writing. And slowly started selling things. And now I'm actually a pro, and I'm looking around going, Wait! When the hell did that happen? Because somewhere along the way it quit being about being A Writer and just became about writing and submitting, keeping my head down and doing the job.
Also, rejection letters are very hard on the ego, but they teach you you're not as cool as you think you are, and that's a good lesson. Also, you have to be very business-like about rejection letters. You get them, you wince, you turn around and send the story out again. And because response times for short fiction markets are so freaking long, you'd better keep writing, because the more things you have out at once, (a.) the more likely it is that something will sell, and (b.) the less you obsess about any one particular story at any one particular market (and, of course (c.) the more likely it is that you will have more than one rejection letter staring you in the face when you open your mailbox on a cold and snowy Friday morning in January). Submitting short fiction taught me a lot about brute persistence, which is 95% of being a pro writer (because of submitting and resubmitting and rewriting and resubmitting and on and on and on) and 90% of being a writer, full-stop (because of finishing things and improving one's craft and all the rest of it).
Being a writer, I said tomatociquala once, is beating your head against a brick wall until the wall falls down.
So I learned. The hard way. By myself. I wish, goodness knows, that I could have been *taught* some of these things. But creativity is so damn subjective, and what works for one person is anathema to another, and when you're arrogant and stupid as I was when I was seventeen, you hear one thing you don't agree with and promptly stick your fingers in your ears and start singing "La Marseillaise."
I guess the moral of my story is, Don't build a box and lock yourself into it. Because there's a lot of things I would have told you ten years ago I couldn't do, and now they're just part of how I work.
Process is fluid. That's why it's process.
If you want to read it, you're welcome to; tho' it is long and fairly narcissistic, it did help me work out some things in my head that needed working out.
Writing cannot be taught, it can only be learned. Discuss.
I'm sure there are a thousand different ways to read that koanly little thing, but for me it did in fact hit a nerve because I've been thinking about all the things I refused to learn as a teenager and have since taught myself.
Number one being humility. ::sigh::
I started writing when I was twelve. Yes, just like that, like falling down a well. You can do that sort of thing when you're twelve. And I almost mmediately decided I wanted to be a writer. No, sorry, let me punctuate that properly: I decided I wanted to be A Writer (::fanfare of trumpets::). I was a very bright and over-motivated little pixie, and I was used to being good at anything intellectual I turned my hand to (not so much with the physical, since I'm clumsy and near-sighted, but that's a different story). And since I was growing up in a smallish town in Tennessee before the advent of the internet, and I was growing up sheltered (middle-class WASP bourgeoisie all the way, baby), I didn't have much of a chance to find cons or writing groups or mailing-lists or anything.
I developed some pretty entrenched habits of thought.
One of those I don't regret, which is the passionate conviction that genre fiction is just as worthwhile and serious and valuable as "mainstream" fiction. And considering how many writing instructors and how-to books I've found since then who have said, either overtly or obliquely, that genre fiction is crap, I'm glad I didn't know about them when I was young and impressionable. Because I don't think they would have changed what I wrote, but they would have made it much harder for me to believe anyone else had any reason to take me seriously. And I have a hard enough time with that as it is.
But I also developed some habits of thought that I have since come to realize were counter-productive. One was the idea that I was a particular kind of writer and thus I could only work in a particular way, and there was no point even trying to do anything differently. I thought "craft" was an offensive word and that trying to analyze one's writing or one's writing process was like pinning luna moths to cork boards. I was too "sensitive" for criticism (which was actually true, I used to cry whenever anyone gave me a critique, but I also
romanticized it as part of my Artiste-Self). I had an elaborate system of self-rationalization set up, positing (iirc) two kinds of writers, the "organic" and the "clockwork," and although I paid lip-service to the idea that the two kinds were equally good, I'm afraid there is no doubt that some animals were more equal than others. In my heart of hearts, I believed that "organic" writers were superior to "clockwork" writers because they were more honest and they were true to their art and, hello, pretentious much?
(In case you were wondering, "organic" writers were the ones who only wrote when they were inspired and never knew what was going to happen next. Which, hey, was exactly my M.O. at the time.)
Now, I'm not making value-judgments about people's processes. You do what works. What I'm saying is that I had a process, and I built up a structure of theory and self-esteem around it such that I locked myself into a very very small box. And when that process quit working for me ... I was still locked in a very very small box. And that's not a good time.
So I was aggressive and pretentious and supercilious as only very bright teenagers can be. I was, to be blunt about it, a bitch, and I was a bitch because I was convinced I was right. And, to make things worse, when I got to college and began to find other people who were intelligent and wanted to be writers, it didn't take much acuity to realize that they weren't as good as I was. Somebody said somewhere that everybody gets one thing about their craft for free. For some people it's plot and for some it's characterization or the really groovy sensawunda ideas that make an sf story click. Mine, I think, is prose style. I can put a sentence together and make it do damn near anything I want. (*ahem* there's a little of that teenage arrogance in action) And I coasted on that for a really long time.
Until I noticed I wasn't finishing anything. Dead end after dead end. And my rationalization system, well trained and highly developed, jumped in with some more caltrops and boiling oil. I'm not a short story writer, I said. I'm a natural novelist. (Which deals with one objection: I don't have anything finished because I can't write short-form.) I have to wait for inspiration, I said. My brain will tell me when it's ready to, I said. (Objection the second smashed to the earth: I don't have anything finished because I'm not *ready*. Tangentially, one of the professors in the department where I got my Ph.D. used to tell her advisees that there was no sense worrying about when they finished their dissertation--they'd finish it when they were ready to. There are reasons I did not ask this woman to be my director.)
And the really horrible thing? It worked.
Partly, this was because I was a full-time student, so I actually *didn't* have time to write every day. And partly, I think, this was because I did still really and truly want to be A Writer, and so I was still working at it. Haphazardly, but working.
And I finished a novel. Went off to grad school. (Learned a lot about how to recognize pretentious wankery when I saw it and learned to dislike it very much in myself.) Sent the novel to an agent I'd heard about. He said he'd be willing to represent me, if I could revise the novel into better shape, and he also gave me two pieces of advice which mark the shift, for me, from "I wannabe A Writer," to "Writing is my career."
1. Go to cons.
2. Publish short fiction.
Neither of these pieces of advice, in and of themselves, would have done it, but they put my feet on the right road. I still thought I couldn't write short stories, but I went to cons. And here's where the wild luck weasels came and war-danced for me, because I went to Wiscon and met
elisem and did her Artist's Challenge with a necklace named "Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans' Day."I met the challenge. I wrote a short story. In about a week. (And lest this seem too Cinderella-y, let me add that I still haven't sold it.)
And then I wrote another one.
And I began to seriously rethink my conceptualization of myself as a writer. Nobody could *teach* me the need for discipline, because I wasn't listening. I'd turned the volume way up on my own personal myth of Being A Writer. And I had to turn it all the way down before I could learn anything at all. I started to find community, and other writers who were as good or better than I was, and learned how to take criticism, and basically took everything down and started again.
And kept writing. And slowly started selling things. And now I'm actually a pro, and I'm looking around going, Wait! When the hell did that happen? Because somewhere along the way it quit being about being A Writer and just became about writing and submitting, keeping my head down and doing the job.
Also, rejection letters are very hard on the ego, but they teach you you're not as cool as you think you are, and that's a good lesson. Also, you have to be very business-like about rejection letters. You get them, you wince, you turn around and send the story out again. And because response times for short fiction markets are so freaking long, you'd better keep writing, because the more things you have out at once, (a.) the more likely it is that something will sell, and (b.) the less you obsess about any one particular story at any one particular market (and, of course (c.) the more likely it is that you will have more than one rejection letter staring you in the face when you open your mailbox on a cold and snowy Friday morning in January). Submitting short fiction taught me a lot about brute persistence, which is 95% of being a pro writer (because of submitting and resubmitting and rewriting and resubmitting and on and on and on) and 90% of being a writer, full-stop (because of finishing things and improving one's craft and all the rest of it).
Being a writer, I said to
matociquala once, is beating your head against a brick wall until the wall falls down.So I learned. The hard way. By myself. I wish, goodness knows, that I could have been *taught* some of these things. But creativity is so damn subjective, and what works for one person is anathema to another, and when you're arrogant and stupid as I was when I was seventeen, you hear one thing you don't agree with and promptly stick your fingers in your ears and start singing "La Marseillaise."
I guess the moral of my story is, Don't build a box and lock yourself into it. Because there's a lot of things I would have told you ten years ago I couldn't do, and now they're just part of how I work.
Process is fluid. That's why it's process.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-02-04 03:10 pm (UTC)I just learned the less you obsess about any one particular story at any one particular market a couple months ago, and I'm still trying to put it into practice.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-04 03:23 pm (UTC)But you knew that, or you wouldn't have written this.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-04 03:53 pm (UTC)I think my gift is for the obvious: there are some things that are only learned by doing, by exploring and experimenting and making mistakes, analysing the mistakes and developing a feel for what works. Like swimming: people can tell you about it all day long, but you don't learn until you get in the water.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-04 09:13 pm (UTC)It's dawned on me gradually that writing really is about rejection/failure --
For someone to be 'taught' writing the person/people saying whatever sparks the epiphany have to be doing so around the time the person who learns is ready to hear. Otherwise the information gets rejected like an incompatible organ.
But that's why the emphasis is on learning I guess -- because keeping on listening, and thinking, and taking part in conversations about things I think I know, and not walking away thinking I'm/people are dumb because I don't grok what they're saying, is the only way of being there for the times when my eyes widen and I slap my forehead and mumble 'I'm an idiot aren't I?'.
Grok not seven times, listen eight. ::grins::
BTW Thank you for sharing your insights so I can build mine ever now and then.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-07 03:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-07 04:07 pm (UTC)When I was teaching creative writing, I had students argue with me about why shaggy-dog stories were bad, why they should want speech tags to be invisible as a general rule, why they had to try to communicate with other people through their stories ... the list goes on and on and on.
And that's my point--if you want to be taught, you can learn a bunch about writing. If you refuse to be taught, nobody can teach you anything.