I’ve
been teaching college for—Jesus, nine years now. It’s the
end of the semester down here at Georgia State University, the week when
I dole out advice to my fiction writing students because there’s
really nothing else left to do. They’d rather I let them out a few
minutes early, but I feel obligated to let them loose with some last (and
perhaps first) words of wisdom for the semester. I have no idea if my
words are wise, but they work for me, so I say them anyway.
I tell them to take at least three other courses before they graduate:
advanced grammar (so they can put sentences together), poetry writing
(so they can make those sentences sing), and screenwriting (so they can
string sentences together into “story structure.”) Someone’s
probably wondering why fiction classes don’t teach story structure.
We try, but, frankly, the books we canonize for college are the books
that tend to break story structure rules—which is fine, and fun,
but I’ve always been a fan of the notion that one needs to know
the rules before one can break them. Besides that, we don’t often
study novels in writing classes, which is a damn shame. Screenwriting,
in my limited experience, tends to be a lot more brutal and pragmatic
about structure, and that’s a trial student writers need to put
themselves through. At the very least, they need to read Robert McKee’s
screenwriting book Story—at least a couple times—and
then watch the movie Adaptation to see how Charlie Kaufman
messes (and doesn’t mess) with it.
I also tell them that when they finish college, or during their summer
breaks, they need to find a backbreaking, grassroots job to do for a while.
Not telemarketing, not fast food service, not the video store. Okay, full
disclosure: I worked at a chain video store for a long time and learned
nothing about human nature. However, while getting my master’s degree,
for extra money I worked in a mom-and-pop video store that rented out
mostly porn, and I learned more about human nature in a few months than
I did working at the other place for years. And I mean the nature of the
customers, folks, not the rampant “nature” exhibited in the
movies we rented out.
But I’m not talking about some video store, or any store. I’m
talking delivery jobs, construction work, paint work, Department of Transportation
work, stuff that’ll give you a sunburn, bug bites, muscle cramps
and insomnia. Stuff that’ll put you within reach of people that’ll
never have the time or inclination to read a word of your damn fiction
drivel. Stuff that’ll make you want to drink yourself into oblivion
on your days off. Frankly, most of my fiction students have been suburban
kids that never would’ve dreamed of taking such a job. That kind
of reticence, I think, is never going to help them get to where they want
to be as writers. They need to learn how the world functions. They need
to see real people struggling through their daily lives. They need to
be humbled, have some of that sparkly serene self-esteem knocked out of
their heads. Then they can write about something other than satire about
the materialism of the rich, suburban ennui (resulting in suicide), and
how fun frat parties are.
Me, I took a job driving an ice cream truck for two summers. I know what
you’re thinking, but believe me, it was backbreaking. Every day,
twelve hours on the road, hundreds of miles logged, most of them driven
at two miles per hour, trying not to run over the kids and dogs darting
out into the road. I saw human nature at its best and worst, and it wasn’t
just kids. I’ve sold strawberry éclairs to gang-bangers who
probably would’ve brained and robbed me if they knew I had five-hundred
bucks in earnings tucked under the driver’s seat of my truck. I’ve
fed creamsicles to unchained growling Rotties.
I’m deeply grateful, in retrospect, that I got to sell two-dollar
bomb pops at ten o’clock at night, hallucinating from sleep deprivation
and heat exposure, in a dirt-road trailer park out in the woods eight
miles from any mapped town, swarming with mosquitoes, to a shirtless father
almost too drunk to stand up, who paid me in wet dimes and chuckled when
his starving kids, wearing nothing but underwear, peeled off the wrappers,
tossed them in the grass, and scarfed down their popsicles in three bites.
I tell you, every inclination to write suicidal suburban ennui frat satire
left my heart for good. The world contains real human beings, suffering,
striving, wild in their hearts—and apprentice writers, especially
“privileged” ones like I was, need to learn that truth a hard
way, I think. Chances are, we’ll never learn it the actual hard
way, by living it our whole lives, but visiting is better than nothing.
And if we get our asses kicked once or twice, even better (I suppose this
last comment is for the men in the audience, mostly; I don’t advocate
women going out to get their asses kicked).
The last advice I give them is related, in that it’s another urge
to leap out of the nest: You want to be a writer, go live in a foreign
country for a while, even if it’s just for a month. Preferably a
country where English is not spoken, so that you’re made to feel
desperate and frightened and humiliated on a regular basis. But you have
to live there, with the people, not as a tourist. I got this advice myself
from John Irving—not personally, but from reading an interview he’d
done years ago. Irving’s odyssey was to Austria, and those of you
who know his early novels can see how profoundly influenced he was by
that experience.
There are certainly practical reasons for a writer to go international:
readers like to read stories that take place in foreign lands because
it’s akin to proxy travel, without the risks or cost. But, more
importantly, Irving also cited more metaphysical reasons for why his time
abroad was key to his development as a writer. In Austria, he saw himself
as a true “other” for the first time, a stranger in his surroundings,
and the experience introduced a deeper sense of self that became critical
to his ability to creating real characters in his fiction. Even more importantly,
the cultural differences between Austria and New England provided him
with a much worldlier sense of his own home environment. In Austria, he
learned to SEE New England, as if for the first time.
Perhaps I’m conflating some of Irving’s own experience with
mine, but that’s the basic sense of what he’d said. Me, I’ve
never written anything set primarily outside the United States. In fact,
I’ve rarely written anything set outside of a particular fictional
town in upstate New York I call Hammersport, an amalgam of several Erie
Canal port towns west of Rochester. It’s the area where I grew up,
but I am certain I never really saw it with writer’s eyes until
I lived overseas for a spell. I didn’t get to Europe for the first
time until grad school, though I’d been slated to go to England
as an undergrad, a trip that was cancelled because the professor in charge
was deemed too dodgy by the administration. It was after reading Irving’s
advice that my thwarted desire became an obsession, so I contrived, no
matter the cost, to have myself shipped to Prague for a couple months.
I fell in with the ESL (teaching English as a Second Language) crowd,
as good a way as any to get by.
I could go on forever about Prague, probably the greatest city I’ve
ever visited. Suffice it to say my time there altered my mind and my aesthetic
forever. It was an ancient place, a brooding place, a perfect place to
hone my noir sensibilities. I walked the Charles Bridge at night, wandered
through a church filled with thousands of human bones arranged as artwork,
stood at the foot of Kafka’s grave, drank absinthe in underground
taverns. I learned that magic really exists in the world, and it wasn’t
just because of the absinthe. I’ve been openly harassed on the street
by toothless gypsy prostitutes, and I’ve been berated in words I
couldn’t understand by waiters who refused to serve me because I
didn’t speak Czech. I’ve seen ten foot statues of anonymous
farmers, the Socialist dream. I’ve seen someone run over by a cable
car. I’ve seen an elderly woman exhibiting stigmata on her hands.
I’ve seen beggar artists hawk their own brilliant artwork for booze
money. I’ve run out of money and known the terror of temporary homelessness.
I’ve watched Swedish surrealist films with hipsters in a rundown
theater. I’ve seen a concert crowd of thousands chant “Mother
Russian rain down!” with the Sisters of Mercy (not the nuns; the
goth-rock band). I’ve eaten the juiciest sausages and drunk golden
hops-heavy beer for a quarter a pint.
The only problem with such an odyssey is, like Odysseus himself, you tend
to get bitten by the travel bug. And not just travel, either; I have little
desire to go anywhere for a week, to see all the requisite sites listed
in the travel guide. There’s nothing a writer can learn from that
except dry information. I want to live in these places. And I’ve
been lucky in regards to living in foreign lands: I wrote a third of my
forthcoming novel in a tin-roof shack just outside of San Jose, Costa
Rica—no hot water, no telephone, millipedes crawling all over the
floor, rainwater leaking down the walls. At times I was miserable there;
at other times it was like a spiritual experience—to see an active
volcano spewing smoke, to hear and see the howler monkeys bellowing in
the trees just outside of our hotel bungalow. I’d never trade the
experience.
For a time, I taught at my undergraduate college and managed to revive
the same month-long England program that had been cancelled when I tried
to go years earlier. I went to England four times as the instructor for
that program, and, though I won’t say the experience was particularly
“foreign,” I was profoundly inspired by walking the same streets
that Charles Dickens walked, writing a few pages of my novel in the same
bay window at the hotel where Thomas Hardy sometimes wrote (not to mention
drinking in his favorite pub), wandering the same moors that haunted Emily
Bronte. And I have so many fond memories of sharing ideas about writing,
art and life with my students over eight-dollar pints at pubs all across
the country, like the Eagle & Child, the Oxford pub where Tolkien
and C.S. Lewis used to hang.
I realize international living isn’t possible for everyone. That’s
why I try to deliver the advice to students before they’re tethered
by full-time jobs, family obligations, and credit card debt—when
they can use college scholarships, grants and loans to offset the cost
of such travel. I guess I have to admit I’ve “sacrificed”
in order to do these things. Still don’t have a house or a new car,
but I don’t see how either could make me a better writer anyway.
My job will never pay much, but I get my summers off and I get opportunities
like teaching that England program. So maybe I’m crazy. Nonetheless,
if there are any beginning writers out there, or even seasoned ones, who
have the ways and means, do it. Don’t got to the fucking Bahamas.
Go somewhere you’re scared to go. Not every moment will be pretty,
but you’ll learn some things for your writing that no amount of
practice or study can ever teach you.
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