Writing as Occasion for Grace

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. —Kurt Vonnegut

I.

Can Writing Be Learned?

My junior year at Thomas Aquinas College, a professor asked me what I wanted to do after I graduated. I told him, “I want to go to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for an MFA in Creative Writing.”

He, let’s call him Dr. Salviati, said, “Well, can’t you already read?”

“Yes.”

“Then why go to graduate school to learn how to write?” As the discussion continued, he made his point clear: “People either are writers, or they aren’t. Writing cannot be taught.”

Today, I am a teacher of writing, both fiction and nonfiction. I’ve taken many classes on writing, which have significantly improved my writing. I believe that I didn’t really learn how to write until I started attending writers’ workshops. Still, Dr. Salviati haunts me. I wrote a series of essays for this magazine’s blog, Deep Down Things, on why creative writing must be taught, not just as a fine art, but as a liberal art. But can it be taught?

Thomas Aquinas College didn’t teach me how to write. When I left TAC, I had the natural proclivities of a writer, but my work was rejected from publications, prizes, acceptances into MFA programs, and scholarships, until I attended Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop and learned a few tools of the trade. I got my first publication after my first workshop at Lighthouse, and my first prize one year later. The key difference between TAC and Lighthouse in my education as a writer is that TAC doubted whether creative writing could be taught, and Lighthouse was founded on the idea that it could.

In my experience, saying writing can’t be taught is like saying physics can’t be taught. Sure, no university will make you Einstein, but that doesn’t mean students will never learn enough fundamentals to make some simple (or even advanced) calculations. Maybe an analogy that’s more evident is teaching someone to draw. You might never teach a student to be a great artist, but it doesn’t take a genius to grasp the principles of shade and shape. Hell, many geniuses reject those principles. However, a good drawing instructor can surprise students with “no artistic ability” by teaching them the proportions of a face. “Wow,” I remember hearing my middle-grade students at St. James School say when I had them rendering Bargue plates. “I did that.”

But Lighthouse did not make me into a writer. Lighthouse simply taught me how to write (or, how to write something publishable, sellable, acceptance-into-a-programmable, prize-winnable). As a friend of mine said: “Any idiot can learn to write. It takes a special idiot to be a writer.” Good thing, too, because although it’s taken me time to accept, I am that kind of idiot.

My first experience writing something I considered “good” was in a story contest held by my high-school English teacher. The prize was extra credit on our lowest grade. I submitted a short story about a young man on an online chatroom talking to a stranger about suicide. I won the contest, and my English teacher told me, “You should be proud of this. It’s a good story.” Still, I felt this intense shame. The story felt seedy. Online chatrooms, suicide notes, the tone and style of Charles Bukowski (my favorite writer at the time). I didn’t want anyone to know I wrote it, especially not my dad, a PhD in statistics who discouraged me from pursuing music and art. He had scolded me for some Edgar Allen Poe-inspired poems I wrote in middle school.

After my English teacher encouraged me, I decided to give my dad a copy, the copy on which my English teacher had written “Good Job!” in red ink. A week passed. I thought he forgot about it. One night, when I was asleep, I felt something pushing down on the foot bed of my bed. I woke up. I saw my dad holding my story in his hand. The clock by my bed read 12:00 a.m. I thought he was mad. “Que pasa?” I asked him.

“Mijo,” he said, “You need to be a writer.”

I don’t think I would be writing if it weren’t for that. However, I would still be a writer.

George Orwell says it better than I can in his essay, “Why I Write:”

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

As a child, I had a melancholy disposition. Like Orwell, I was the middle of three, and I didn’t see much of my father before I was eight. English was my second language, and my classmates either made fun of me for my accent or refused to talk to me because they couldn’t understand me. I spoke with gasps, stutters, and a strong Mexican accent. I had trouble reading, but I told myself stories, although that didn’t help me get AR points. I felt inept. The only thing I was any good at was math. When I was twelve, my English started improving after years of speech therapy. However, that same year, my math teacher regularly called me stupid and said I had no friends. She encouraged the other students to make fun of me. In private, she was kind to me. She called me smart, talented, and said I was “going places.” I have no idea how to make sense of that experience. Maybe she hated me. Maybe she was grooming me. I don’t know.

I turned to poetry as a safe place. I picked up a little purple book of poems from the library one day. I read through it quickly, but one poem stuck with me:

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me

I couldn’t stop re-reading it. I felt understood. I had no idea why. I hadn’t experienced dying, but I suppose neither had Emily Dickinson when she wrote that poem. Whatever that feeling was, I needed to keep feeling it.

I went back to the library. There was a book that had no business being there. It was titled The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes From Life. The teachers thought I was reading a sci-fi novel. It was a memoir. The first paragraph was: “My father died because he drank too much. Six years before, my mother died because she drank too much. I drink too much. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree.” Again, I felt seen. I read the horrible incidents of the memoirist’s poor life. I read through the physical abuse the memoirist endured from his father, and the sexual abuse he suffered because of an older cousin. There was a sadness in me that made me keep going. Sadness turned to shame. I let my teachers think it was sci-fi. I wrote a fake book report about an alien invasion.

This sadness soon turned into an obsession with Poe, then Gibran, then Borges and Neruda, turned to writing Jessica Flores love poems every day, turned to my father scolding me, turned to my first break-up, turned to Bukowski, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut. All these books hurt me—Naked Lunch, Ham on Rye, The Dharma Bums, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater—but somehow, this pain made everything easier.

However, my writing was still childish, self-absorbed, until X forced me to write a story about something beyond myself.

As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my “story” ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. ... The “story” must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality. (Orwell, “Why I Write”)

I had a girlfriend when I was fifteen. We’ll call her X. When X broke up with me, she called me an asshole and said all sorts of horrible things about me. I told my sister about it, expecting her to side with me, but she said, “Maybe X’s right. Maybe you are an asshole.”

My third experience as a writer was an attempted novel. It was about my relationship with X but told from her perspective. Sure enough, I discovered I was an asshole. The book took on a life of its own. X had a brother, and a family, and a million things she cared about more than me. As big of an asshole as I was, this simple writing exercise made me realize how little I mattered.

In a way, I learned everything I needed to know about creative writing within those four years. When I was twelve, I learned there was something shameful and dark that called me to it, a desire to face unpleasant facts. When I was fourteen, I learned that embracing that hurt led to writing good stories. When I was fifteen, I learned that I was insignificant. “May I decrease so he may increase.”

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in—at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own—but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. (Orwell, “Why I Write”)

Writing can be taught, but you can’t teach someone to be a writer.

Any idiot can learn to write. The tools are simple: plot, conflict, dialogue, and rhetoric can be used to craft a cohesive story. So, it takes an idiot to be a writer. It’s a habit or disposition of the soul, maybe learned, maybe a priori, typically born from a lonely childhood, an inability to make yourself understood, a desire to be understood, loved, valued, to grapple with the dark things about the self and others, to understand the self, a fear of ever doing so, and a love of someone you can call an audience. It’s born from a love of literature, a need for literature, a feeling that one might die without it, a desire to spend years thinking about the same thing, even if we’re not good at it. We sail through elements not easy to name: magic, grace, curses, witchcraft, depravity, blessings. There is patience. There is an intense love of sinners. There is never really knowing, in the way philosophers have permission to know.

However, although liberal arts curriculums can’t provide a lonely childhood, a writers’ workshop is still an occasion to learn a few core habits of the soul. Teaching writing as a liberal art does not mean creating the next generation of Borgeses and Bolaños. It means teaching people how to use letters and papers in an effective way. For example, despite any argument over whether virtue can be taught, TAC, like many colleges, offers a class on ethics. Seminars provide a discussion of its general principles. Life provides an occasion to exercise virtue. Likewise, seminars over literary criticism and craft can allow students to develop their critical method. Writers’ workshops give them a chance to test it.

A good workshop can call you on your “bullshit”—as it did for me. That’s to say that the goal of the writer is to embrace real human truth. The enemy of good literature is false emotionality. I experienced this sort of edit, the most important kind of edit, when Benjamin Whitmer told me the unrevised end of my story, “The Last Real Cowboy,” was a cop-out. I needed to follow the character to the necessary consequences of his actions. An occasion for us both to grow.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. (Orwell, “Why I Write”)

My senior year at Thomas Aquinas College, a friend, we’ll call him Simplicio, and I were arguing about The Catcher in the Rye before class. Simplicio said he hated it because Holden was so awful. I agreed. “He’s supposed to be awful,” I told him.

“I’d rather read about Achilles or somebody great,” Simplicio said. “Maybe that’s why some people like some writing and other people like other writing. Aristotle talks about how tragedy is imitation of the noble, and comedy is imitation of the ignoble. Noble people like imitations of the noble, ignoble people like imitations of the ignoble.”

As far as I could tell, that meant the conversation was over.

Simplicio makes me think literature cannot be taught. Not just writing, but reading, too. At least, no more than loving sinners can be taught. Saying he was too noble to enjoy a story about Holden was like saying he was too noble to see Christ in Holden. But, in a way, Simplicio is right: literature requires you to get your hands dirty with shame. Plot is created by sin. As Cardinal Newman wrote, “You cannot have a sinless literature of sinful man.”

If we placed Simplicio in a writers’ workshop, I imagine he would soon discover his noble characters were flat. In The Habit of Being, Flannery wrote, “The human soul vigorously rejects grace, because grace changes us and change is painful.” This isn’t just writing advice, it’s spiritual guidance. For a character to accept grace, she must be pushed to the point where she has no choice but to accept. This is why The Misfit was right. The grandmother would be a good woman if somebody were there to shoot her every day. Taking this writing advice off the page, I too would be a good man if only somebody were there to shoot me every day. Simplicio might be disgusted by the events in The Catcher in the Rye, but that does not mean he is unlike Holden. It just means he hasn’t recognized the likeness.

My middle-school math teacher was right. I am very stupid. I have no friends (besides my wife, who is the greatest blessing God has given me). Simplicio was right. I am ignoble. I am a wretch. I am the pretentious child who calls everyone on the phone but who is himself too traumatized to be sincere, unless he is pushed by endless suffering. X was right. I am an asshole. I console myself with the knowledge that however bad I am, my harm is insignificant. I can’t find this quote, so I must have dreamed it, but I once heard that Saint Therese said, “All the pains of hell are the size of a speck on the smallest butterfly in heaven.”

Teaching writing is like teaching virtue. You can tell someone what courage is, lay out your definitions, but you won’t know if they learned anything until you watch them get mugged. Or more, until you watch them grapple with the temptation of their basest behavior.

The education of a writer consists of being a friendless child in a new country, having two drunk parents, or seeing the bombs go off in Dresden. Admittedly, no undergraduate institution should be willing to create these experiences for their students. But to the end of freely thinking about literature, workshops and readings on craft can be provided. The occasion for writing—especially fiction, poetry, and narrative nonfiction about the tragic, comedic, emotionally intense story-worthy ideas—must be provided. Not because Simplicio might get something out of it—God knows he probably won’t. The occasion for creative writing must be included if only because it’s an occasion to grow the soul.

II.

Can Writing Be Lived?

I ended Part One in a contradiction. I gave credence to the idea that writing cannot be taught, yet I also held to my belief that it must be taught, if only because it makes the soul grow. But how is that?

Because of grad school, my life is a series of semesters. Because I’m an adult and I’m married, I have fellowship and job applications to send. I have a child on the way. Life happens at a rate semesters cannot fit. I am living more life than I ever have.

When I was twenty-three and I went to Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop, I had heaps of stories. Stories were spilling out of me. All I needed was Ben Whitmer to teach me what psychic distance and scene hygiene were so that I could make the stories publishable.

I went to Iowa Writers’ Workshop at twenty-five. My first semester, a teacher told me, “When I read your stories, they’re perfect on a craft level. The problem isn’t the stories. The problem is the writer. You know Hemingway’s quote that the greatest tool a writer has is his bullshit detector? You have no bullshit detector.” He wasn’t telling me anything my middle school math teacher didn’t make sure I already knew: I am very stupid. I am incapable. I am inept. Any idiot can learn to write. I’m just the idiot who learned to write something publishable. This professor continued, “You know what your problem is? You’re a narcissist. You have an intrusive narrator. Every time your story gets going and it gets very interesting, and your characters are finally doing something, the narrator jumps in and fixes things or says something. You have to let your characters be who they are, go wherever they want, and you just have to follow them. And in workshop, you get so defensive. Have some humility. Set yourself aside and let your writing problems be talked about.”

I later went to my editor friend and relayed the conversation. She said, “Well, maybe what he means is that you need to give yourself up to your fiction the way that Christ gave himself up to us. If you need to follow your characters and do whatever they want, maybe they have to do things you don’t want them to do. They’ll sin against you. They’ll crucify you. You, then, let them and the reader eat your flesh and drink your blood. Writing as a eucharistic act.”

It wasn’t consoling, or at least not consoling the way I expected it to be. It was like when my sister told me, “Maybe you are the asshole.” It didn’t make me feel good about myself, but it was something I needed to hear. As Flannery says, “The truth is not dependent on your ability to swallow it emotionally.”

My writing has reached a place craft cannot go. I used to be able to write instead of going to Mass; now, if I don’t go to Mass, I can’t write. I need rosaries, communion, and time in adoration. I need to deeply love my characters. I must pray for them. If I don’t, I can’t write. Although the knowledge of craft hasn’t been able to help me, the ignorance of prayer has been a major support. If I don’t take time to pray, time to approach that which I will never fully know, I cannot write. “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Cor 3:19).

I remember reading a Kurt Vonnegut quote: “To be a writer, you have to be a very stupid person. You have to be able to obsess over one thing for years. ‘What happens if a character does this?’” I must have dreamed it because I can’t find the quote anywhere, although I suspect you could find a similar quote in a PBS interview he gave.

I remember reading a Jorge Luis Borges quote: “Literature is a profession in which no one knows anything.” Again, I must have dreamed it, but if that quote exists it’s possibly in This Craft of Verse.

I say this because I do not want writing ever to be an act in which I deify myself, although I do want writing to be an act in which I imitate Christ. I try to approach fiction as a Eucharistic act, as my editor friend suggested I do. I try to forget myself and love my characters. I try to let them sin against me, and I try to give myself over to them, but I don’t want to think I’m Jesus Christ for it. Isn’t humility funny that way? The humbler you are, the more divine you are made.

There isn’t a one-to-one correlation between my spiritual life and my writing life. There have been times in my life when my prayer life has been nonexistent, and my writing has reached new depths. However, there is an element of my writing which is significantly helped by prayer and sacraments. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is.

Consider Tolstoy. I doubt he knew as much about craft as, say, John Gardner, but few people would say that John Gardner’s greatest stories rival even Tolstoy’s minor works. Despite my love of craft and my consistent advocacy for it, there’s an aspect of writing which is beyond craft. Tolstoy (another very stupid person who was described by his teachers as “both unable and unwilling to learn”) transcends craft in a way that seems touched by both grace and suffering. The comparison between Tolstoy and Gardner is not to say that suffering or religiosity is what makes a great writer, but to say that Tolstoy went somewhere Gardner’s craft could not take him.

Reflecting on my writing life, craft didn’t make me a writer. It did nourish me. It did teach me what I needed to get my first publications, but I was a writer long before I read The Art of Fiction or came to Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop. Craft hasn’t made me a great writer. At best, craft made me publishable. At worst, it gave me a false sense of knowledge, a fake intelligence, something that made me think I was very smart, witty, creative. Craft made me feel like my strength was how much I knew when, in fact, my strength is how much I do not know (I think; maybe that’s not true).

I can’t help but think of Plato. Socrates’ quotes rush into my head. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” says one, telling me that there’s value in this meditation. “I know more because I know that I do not know,” says another, offering some validity to my claims about the importance of stupidity. But more than anything, I think of the one work of Plato’s which I ignored, the one I disregarded in my time at TAC: the Ion.

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession, he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophesy. Therefore, because it’s not by mastery that they make poems or say many lovely things about their subject…—but because it’s by divine gift—each poet is able only to compose beautifully what the Muse has aroused in him… You see, it’s not mastery that enables them to speak those verses, but divine power… That’s why the god takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not with them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us.      

To quote Borges quoting Bernard Shaw, “I think the Holy Ghost has not only written the Bible, but all books.”

If only it were the Holy Spirit who wrote my little stories. But, for him to increase, I must decrease.

I know nothing. God, if I write this book, it’s gonna suck. Let me abandon myself to the story You need me to write. It’s a little job, not a big one. Just a novel that’s not working. Just a little bit of an intrusive narrator. I have nothing. Craft falls short. I know nothing. You know all about fishing, and spear throwing, and skies. There is nothing good in this world that is not from You.

“To show that, the god deliberately sang the most beautiful lyric poem through the most worthless poet. Don’t you think I’m right, Ion?”

“Lord yes, I certainly do.”