From “the big boat”

This is the story of a story. Shortly after writing “The Governor’s Ball,” I gave a lecture in Park City about how I thought I had written it. I didn’t really think of it as a lecture at the time but as an honest tracing of my writing day, a simple narrative of the actual process of how I survived the writing of that story. In refining my notes on that talk, and in speaking to thousands of writers in classrooms and conferences, I have some to see that the way I wrote “The Governor’s Ball” was not some reflexive quirk, an anomaly, but rather a clear example of the way my writing process works. It has become a process I trust.
      This is a change. When I went off to teach English and writing over twenty-five years ago, I had the notion that if I covered the elements of craft with my students I could send them off into writing fiction, and that would be that. I taught with a brilliant guy who emphasized the personal heart in his class. Instead of building upward from craft, they were guided by their powerful personal visions, their dreams. Most students, of course, used both in trying to write stories about accidents and trips and sometimes the family pet. I taught craft because it was teachable. There were examples everywhere of dialogue and scene and character and imagery and point of view, etc. Vision, of course, is not teachable. Dreams are not teachable. What a person chooses to write about is not teachable. Can writing ever be taught? The best answer to that was given obliquely by the rock musician David Lee Roth. When asked if money could buy happiness, he said, no, but with money you could buy the big boat and go right up to where the people were happy. With a teacher you can go right up to where the writing is done; the leap is made alone with vision, subject, passion, and instinct. So a writer comes to the page with vision in her heart and craft in her hands and a sense of what a story might be in her head. How do the three come together? My thesis is the old one: they merge in the physical writing--inside the act of writing, not from the outside. The process is the teacher. Craft is part of it, and I’m going to discuss elements/approaches to craft as we go along, but there is something else.
      And that is process. The process of writing a story, as opposed to writing a letter, or a research paper, or even a novel, is a process involving radical, substance-changing discovery. If you let the process of writing a research paper on Romeo and Juliet change the advice the Friar gives to those young people, you’re headed for trouble. If you let the process of writing a story inform and change the advice an uncle gives his niece, you’re probably moving closer to the truth. I’ve also become convinced that a writer’s confidence in his/her process is as important as any accumulated craft dexterity or writing “skill.”
Sometimes this can be a hard sell to beginning writers because it feels like a mystery. They see things: articles full of how-to advice or books full of finished stories accompanied by study questions. But between the nuts and bolts of prose construction, character work, dialogue strategies, and the sweep of the short masterpieces of Western literature, there may be other notes useful for the writer.
      There are a lot of books about writing, and there is good information in many of them. Years ago when I was looking for books that might be helpful, I could only find the standard anthologies, some ultrabasic primers that only went two of three steps beyond grammar, and a kind of long personal aesthetic that was many times more metaphoric than mechanical. (“Writing my book was like flying an airplane, meeting a strange woman in a labyrinth, swimming in a cold river at night”--and I’ll use a lot of metaphors in this volume!) I saw all those books in the library, but I had no idea how they got there. Just their binding seemed to make it clear that the act of writing was beyond me.
      Yet I felt I had what it took. I wanted to write, and the times that I’d applied myself to it, the results had been good. But how could I get better? All those people in the library had the ticket, I felt; how could I get it? I knew grammar. I’d read the two hundred great stories of all time, eternity, the twelfth of never, and so on. So, now?
      The mistake I’d made in that thinking, I see now, was confusing reading fiction and writing fiction as being similar activities. They are related in important ways, but not as activities. You have to do one in order to do the other (guess which?), and they meet in the book, that rare and beautiful object, but they are not conducted with the same posture or instruments. One is reactive and the other creative. They are as different as walking through a strange city and folding a map correctly, as timing a swim meet and swimming in a cold river at night, as flying a plane and meeting a strange woman in an airplane. A writer goes into a story with the dream/vision that is the North Star, and an understanding of craft that is the footing, and instinct/ passion that is the driving force.

From Ron Carlson Writes a Story. © 2009 by Ron Carlson. All rights reserved.