What I find the most offensive about the current construction of the
discipline of creative writing is that it says nothing about the world
we send our writers into. If your writing is good, will it get
published? Maybe, maybe not. If you work your ass off for a decade to
perfect your craft, what will you get in return? Something, but we’re
not sure what. Can anyone ever really say what good writing is? Yeah,
but not until way after it has been published. No, wait…not then,
either.
And what about the supremely important quality of desire? Instead, we
talk more about talent, as Lynn Freed does with such determination in
her Harper’s Magazine essay on the subject of creative writing. She
says that “talent is the naked emperor of writing programs.” She’s
wrong about that, though. Talent is, rather, the emperor’s invisible
clothes. You know this is true because Freed herself, who despairs more
mightily than anyone over the possibilities of creative writing, never
defines talent. Instead, she brings in Proust to define it, and even he
doesn’t do a good job: “Talent is like a sort of memory which will
enable [gifted men] to bring this indistinct music closer to them, to
hear it clearly, to note it down.”
Everyone—particularly Freed—thinks it’s talent that makes a writer, but
that’s just more of that imaginary natural taxonomy of writers that
makes redundant the teaching of creative writing itself. At what point,
I like to ask my students, does Michael Jordan become the greatest
basketball player that ever lived? The tenth time he shoots a free
throw? The ten thousandth? The hundred thousandth? If you’re so good at
spotting talent, Ms. Freed, let’s visit some high schools and you tell
me who the next Yeats will be. Me, I know nothing about talent, but a
lot about desire. Desire is what gets you from ten to a hundred
thousand; desire is what makes a poet like Yeats. When asked a question
about his own talent, I heard Michael Cunningham quote Marilyn Monroe,
who said that she wasn’t the prettiest and she wasn’t the most skilled,
but she wanted it more than anyone else.
What’s important, ultimately, is the struggle—the struggle that desire
creates in both writers and writing. My first graduate instructor, Mona
Simpson, told us that graduate school was where you went to find out
that you don’t want to be a writer, and this would make it worth every
penny. And yet if it’s in this mess of battle that we find ourselves,
well, then it’s in this mess of battle that we find ourselves. Most
workshop stories that I’ve read are missing that crucial element of
conflict. It’s little wonder. We’re terrified of the pain and suffering
it takes to become a good writer, let alone the pain and suffering
that’s inherent in good writing itself. Desire is important to creative
writing because it’s the only thing that causes conflict. Conflict is
important to writers because it’s the only evidence of desire. So few
of us have faced up to the fact that we are at war with ourselves, with
others, with the very conditions of our lives.
Donald Hall, who’s probably forgotten more about teaching writing than
most of us will ever know, says that “terror” is the thing that’s
missing from most workshops. I have to agree with him. And maybe it’s
my virtue as an instructor to bring my students these great
gifts—terror and failure. They were certainly the greatest gifts that
my instructors gave to me.
Dan Barden, a novelist and professor at Butler University in Indianapolis, is currently helping to start a new MFA program.