On Writing

In "The Topoi Revisited," Edward P.J. Corbett says, "The most frequently asked question of novelists on talk shows is 'Where do you get your ideas for your stories?'....They (writers) talk all around the question....but they never really get down to tell you how they create their stories." Later in his essay, he continues: "Teachers have made deliberate efforts to observe their students in the act of writing, to question them about their writing habits, and to speculate about their cognitive processes from analyzing the revisions that they make from draft to draft."

This quote leads me back to a recurring thought I've had since the beginning of the semester: why the hell do these people want to know so bad how a writer writes? In most of the essays we've read to this point, prominent scholars try to figure out the answer to this question to no avail. But they keep trying, and I think it's because they want to standardize the teaching of composition. It's as if they think that if they find that one magic formula, then all students can be trained to write like The Great Ones (James Joyce, Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, etc.). But I don't know that there is a formula for good writing. The Great Ones are great not because they stood on someone's shoulders (which they frequently did, let's be honest), but because they revolutionized some aspect of their craft. Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, developed iambic pentameter and in so doing, shifted the English language from the harsh guttural tones of the Anglo-Saxons towards something more melodic and pleasing to the ear. Dante Alighieri pioneered the use of allegory to reflect the political instability, corruption, and moral bankruptcy in his native Florence. The point is that good writing is characterized by original thought.

I think Richard Leo Enos would agree with me. In his Introduction in Recovering the Lost Art of Researching the History of Rhetoric, he criticized scholars in his field for standing on the rhetoric sidelines like football commentators rather than actually participating in the game. These scholars spend their entire careers saying, "Oh, he should have done this" and "It would have been so much better if he'd have done that," but they make no contributions of their own. And I believe that it's much easier to sit in the stands and heckle the team rather than being the quarterback making the plays. Enos says, and I agree, that there's very little, if any, original thought. And it's making the playing field static.

Even though Enos was talking about rhetorical scholarship, not creative writing, I believe it's pertinent to us creative writers as well. My biggest frustration as an undergraduate was that my classmates and I were taught to pick apart the work of The Great Ones, but not to create anything of substance ourselves. I frequently thought, "Who are we to criticize the masters? We're just a bunch of unimportant little undergraduates!" Oftentimes, our criticisms just parroted our professors opinions. Now, in English 501, I am agitated with our assigned readings because the authors seem to be mimicking each other; they all say, "We've conducted so-and-so experiment to find out how a writer writes, but our results are inconclusive." I want an answer - ANY answer - just so long as I don't have to read yet another wishy-washy opinion on the matter.

But truthfully, I don't think scholars will ever find that magic formula they're so desperately searching for. There's no philosopher's stone to turn lead writers into gold. And I'm okay with that. I don't want a magic formula. I don't want a sea of writers just regurgitating what each other says. If we all could do it, why would we do it at all?

Perhaps you find my opposition to investigating the writing process a bit short-sighted, and you could be right. As a creative writer, I'm protective of my process. This is not because I have some secret to hide, but rather because I believe part of the magic of writing is the mystery. I don't want some cold scientist to rationalize that feeling of divine inspiration I get when I suddenly feel possessed to create something. In our all-too reasonable Age of Reason, much of the magic in our world has fled because people have dissected it to death rather than create it anew. I don't want to understand how I do what I do, I just want to do it. I suppose I'm like the American Romantics in this aspect.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, especially when it comes to writing, but I do know this: if you want to be a good writer, then you have to practice. That's the formula. Let me give you a dramatic example of this. Nathaniel Hawthorne locked himself in a closet for years just to practice writing, and when he finally emerged, he promptly destroyed everything he'd written because he recognized these manuscripts were no good. Their only purpose was to teach him how to be better. I am no master, but I can tell you that I'm not the same writer I was 15 years ago. My stuff from back then was good for a teenager, but nowhere good as my stuff from now. A lot of that is my education, naturally, but I think it's mostly from practice. So just think what I'll know tomorrow.

Scholars and scientists could dissect a writer clear down to his/her last atom to find out the magic formula, where ideas come from, and how ideas are executed. But in the end, I think it boils down to practice and inventiveness. And asking a writer to explain how is like asking a horse why it runs fast. It just does.

Sure, you could say, "Why bother being a teacher if you have such a passive view of teaching composition?" And I would answer that I believe all people can learn to write better, formula or no. I struggle with calculus, for example, but I could become better at it if I enlisted the aid of a tutor, practiced problems, and devoted more time to studying it. But what separates the good from the great is original thought. If this magic formula theoretically existed, then it would stand to reason that what writers churned out was formulaic. Hardly creative. In fact, I'd wager that such writers would be parroting one another. And this kind of thinking is what Enos was protesting. So to paraphrase Enos, quit talking about the whys and hows of writing, and just do it already!

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.