For some reason, there's this tendency for writers to overstate things about their own writing or about what writing should do or how it should be. I think this impulse comes from a place of wanting art to be more than what it is. Which is not to say that art isn't important in some way, but I often feel confused about the way writers/artists talk about their art/writing, or how others should write/do art. This might be because I feel differently about art - I feel that it's a kind of tool, and that while I'm interested in "art," I'm also terribly suspect of "art." What art is for. I'm not sure what I think writing should be for, or what a sentence should do, though I do often feel that writing should in some way attempt to express the inexpressible (that koan for all writers to play with or become dismayed by), but beyond that I have no idea. In any case, here are some other writers saying things about writing in a way that I'm both interested in, and that I'm confused by (all are writers I admire, teach, and either still read or once read with, for me, great care):
1. Joy Williams, a writer I've always read and loved, says a story should have "sentences that can stand strikingly alone." I agree with this in principle, and then the more I think about it, the more I think it doesn't make a lot of sense, even for a devoted minimalist, which I don't think Williams really is. In any case, if you take a story of Joy Williams, like "The Visiting Privilege," and then just sort of randomly look at some sentences, you have to be honest and say that these sentences certainly can stand alone, but they're not very striking: "Donna had been visiting Cynthia for about a week now"; "The old woman was a mysterious opponent, not at all what she seemed"; "Cynthia came into the room, eating a piece of fruit, a nectarine or something"; "The house didn't seem that strange to Donna." These don't seem like striking sentences to me, and really, while I like this story, find it strange and convincing, and am moved by its kind of metaphysical or spiritual hiddenness beneath the surface of narcissism and distraction, the sentences, frankly, need accrual to have any force. Most of them only make sense in terms of other sentences, and additionally, while I can locate some that do stand "strikingly alone," - like "The dolphin that had persisted keeping Lucy company had an immense boner"; "He looked like a stereo speaker"; "Cynthia kept talking, pretty much about her life, the details of which Donna had heard before and which were no more riveting this time" - it's not even as though these sentences do much of anything except be slightly interesting. So, the whole idea that a story, in particular,= should have "sentences that can stand strikingly alone" sounds really good, but I don't know if I even understand what it means in practice. In fact, I'm not sure it's practicable. I should note here that in the interview from which I've taken this Williams quote, she goes on a bit about Gordon Lish. So let's go to another Lishean.
2. Kathryn Scanlan, another writer I really like, says this in a "Notes on Craft" piece: "I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on the shelf in my office." Scanlan then quotes a writer quoting Gordon Lish, and then quotes another writer, paraphrasing Gordon Lish. Everyone is going on about sentences. What the sentence should be. Here's a standout: "narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude...the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the ear and the eye as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself." That's Gary Lutz (or Garielle Lutz). His sentences are incredibly interesting, if they also feel intractable at times. Here are a few chosen at random from his complete works: "I would choose his aisle"; "They won't let me back into class until I get ten people";"I got used to being one of sleep's discards"; "My ex-wife: I could tell that a lot of thought had gone into the things she had taken out on me." Some of these sentences are pretty banal if one begins from the above quotes, but in my mind they're just doing the work that fiction, or any writing, occasionally does. But they don't live up to the standards of a sentences that is a "totality, an omnitude." In other words, I feel like this is artistic exaggeration, which makes me suspect of art in some way. It also turns my own tendencies and proclivities elsewhere. Toward something more unspeakable - using language as representational and reality at once. In any case, a couple of those Lutz sentences are very interesting: "I got used to being one of sleep's discards." That's an interesting way of writing that. Giving agency to sleep, etc. Anthropomorphizing it, basically. But again, even Lutz's most interesting sentences - and I was fairly enamored with his stories, and confounded by them, years ago - don't seem like totalities unto themselves. They just seem sort of interesting. I'm not entirely sure that anything can be a totality unto itself unless we're speaking in terms of ultimate reality, in which each thing in the universe - this sentence, the computer I'm typing on, this coffee cup someone made for me - is intimately tied and connected to everything else, and thus, is everything else. This is basic principle in zen, though, and ultimately of little interest. In other words, the whole universe in a flower, and yet that flower is also just a flower. It's not trying to be special or an omnitude unto itself. It just is what it is. But this began with Kathryn Scanlan. Here are a few from the story hitched to the interview, which is called "The Poker" (and this is a story I really like, which I teach each year, along with Gary Lutz stories): "I threw my cigarette to the ground"; "We stopped at street carnivals to try our luck"; "My daughter was lifted, tickled, fluffed." Again, these are just a few I pulled at random - the last seems the most interesting, the best sound, etc. But again, is this an omnitude, a totality unto itself? None of this is meant to say that I don't like these writers. I love these writers, but I sometimes think there's this reverence toward the sentence that borders on the religious, that is basically unfounded. It's just a kind of artistic or aesthetic idea, and while I enjoy reading these writers, it seems to me that the aesthetic principles behind the work are more aspirational than practical. In each case, it's the accrual of less interesting, more banal, "workmanlike" sentences that lead to a sentence that sings. And I'm not saying these writers don't have unique ways of writing. They clearly do. I'm only pointing out that I think a lot of writers sort of overestimate what they do on the page when they begin to talk about it.
3. Let's do a couple "maximalists" now, and what I'd like to do here is simply show that their writing advice is completely at odds. One is David Foster Wallace. The other is William Gass. These are both writers I've liked, though I don't read Gass anymore and have grown away from his very sort of stringent sense of art for art's sake, and I occasionally teach a Wallace story because I think he's relevant, especially for young people. Here's what Wallace has to say about writing for an audience: "One of the things that’s good about writing and practicing writing is it’s a great remedy for my natural self-involvement and self-centeredness. . . . learning how to write effectively is, in fact, probably more of a matter of spirit than it is of intellect. I think probably even of verbal facility. And the spirit means I never forget there’s someone on the end of the line, that I owe that person certain allegiances, that I’m sending that person all kinds of messages." Okay, so he's thinking about the audience here, and there's a notion of self-improvement inherent in the project. Here's William Gass: "As far as writing something is concerned, the reader really doesn’t exist. The writer’s business is somehow to create in the work something which will stand on its own and make its own demands; and if the writer is good, he discovers what those demands are, and he meets them, and creates this thing which readers can then do what they like with. Gertrude Stein said, “I write for myself and strangers,” and then eventually she said that she wrote only for herself. I think she should have taken one further step. You don’t write for anybody." So here we have the complete contradiction to Wallace. So which is it? You write with a reader in mind? Not an audience, but just with the notion that you're trying to communicate? Or you don't write for anyone at all? The point I'm attempting to make here is that while it's sort of enjoyable to talk about the creative process, I don't think one can really say much that is useful about it. Gass also says to "stay away from the novel that teaches." Wallace says that good art should be "morally instructive." So which is it? We're in different territory than the above Lisheans, but the point is that, like reality, it's really very difficult to say anything useful, practical, or even instructive about a certain type of writing, which most people call art. There's a Zen book by Dainin Katagari (a student of Shunryu Suzuki) called "You Have to Say Something," which is a kind of Zen joke about how it's frankly impossible to really say much of anything about Zen practice. You can say a few things about the practical side of it (which I believe is true of writing as well), which is that you sit like this, you breath like this, you put your hands like this, but when you get to the mystical side of it (Dogen was called a Mystical Realist), you can't say anything. It has to be experienced directly, beyond language. This is true of writing as well, in my view.
What I mean to say is this: sometimes I write sentences that seem to be able to stand strikingly alone, but sometimes I don't; sometimes there are sentences that seem real as any object in my room, an omnitude unto themselves, but mostly not - I'm more interested in accrual; sometimes what I write seems instructive, to myself and others, and seems to be communicating, meant to communicate; sometimes it is so deeply not for anyone that I'm not even sure where it's coming from. All of this to say that I think it's very difficult to speak about writing in a honest way, and yet, here I am, through the use of other authors I love or have loved, trying to say something honest about writing.
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