The Patriot Post® · Against Process

I went to the Arkansas Writers Conference the other day to talk about writing.

Talk about writing? Rather defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? Like driving somewhere to walk. Or attending a conference to learn how to pray in solitude.

But I accepted the invitation anyway. I had a few things I wanted to say about the current tendency to teach writing as a process. Much like churning out pre-cast concrete, no doubt. Or producing a political speech that, you can tell, has been written by asking all the politician’s advisers for their, to use another unfortunate term, Input. Because that’s the accepted Process. As in processed cheese.

There’s a reason Mr. Lincoln wrote his Gettysburg Address, and the ineffable Second Inaugural, alone. Writing should concentrate thought, not diffuse it. But we live in the age of writing coaches. You find them everywhere:

At corporate headquarters. (“Let our professional Writing Coach teach you how to write your memoir, Mr. or Ms. CEO! He can remember your experiences so much better than you can!)”

At conventions of writers, which is an interesting concept in itself, considering what a solitary business writing is, or ought to be.

Or you can consult a writing coach on your own. (“Have a seat, Count Tolstoy, and let a real pro show you how it’s done. First off, you’ll want to foreshadow Anna Karenina’s character rather than just throwing her into some messy Russian household, don’t you think? And this Vronsky character, he’s still a bit of a blank. Your reader’s got to wonder what Anna ever saw in him. If you could just bring him out, give him some strong convictions, maybe make him a political activist seeking social justice. … But on the whole your plot has great potential. There are real possibilities here. You work this thing just right, and you could have a … screenplay!”)

As with any other craft – like restoring furniture or auto body work or shoe repair – there ought to be a way to teach writing. I used to think so – before I tried to do it. Once a week at the Little Rock branch of the University of Arkansas. I soon found out there’s no teaching it, no way to turn out a writer who wasn’t essentially one before he fell into my clutches.

No talent, no writer. Yes, given enough time and inexhaustible patience, we might be able to produce a wordsmith that way – but not a writer. Some of the well trained might even be able to pass for writers among the undiscerning. Often enough I feel as if I’m passing for one. A fellow could dine out on that kind of adulation. I know.

I’ve found that those impressed by the wannabe writer, the writer manque, aren’t worth impressing. Unless maybe they have a nice big grant to hand out.

The surest sign of a writer worth reading is that he’s not much interested in talking about writing at conferences or workshops. Or anyplace else. Talking is one thing, writing quite another.

Now and then, somebody will want to talk to me about this great idea he has for an article or a book, usually only vaguely. I make it a rule to do him a great favor. I tell him to just write it up instead. Write, don’t talk about writing. Show, don’t tell. That way, there’ll be something on paper, or at least on the computer screen, to work with – actual, written words.

For a year to the day, I attended an hour-long editorial conference every weekday morning at the old Chicago Daily News, and watched good ideas talked away daily.

The Daily News was a great newspaper when it still had a fine corps of foreign correspondents and a local columnist named Mike Royko. He was so local, so Chicago, he was a national treasure. That’s what having a sense of place will do for a columnist. Or for a real writer – a Faulkner, a Barry Hannah, a Walker Percy, an Ellen Gilchrist.

But how do you teach anybody a sense of place?

Short answer: You don’t. You just stand aside and get out of the way when a Buddy Portis comes roaring by, or rather comes trotting by in the perfect 19th-century prose of his soul-daughter Mattie Ross out of Yell County, she of, and with, “True Grit.”

Teach somebody to write like that? At a conference? In a classroom? At a writers’ workshop? Please.

Kingsley Amis, who should never go unmentioned when writers are discussed, once said that everything wrong about his post-war era could be summed up in one word:

Workshop.

Maybe that’s because so much talking is done in workshops, while writing – good writing, at least – is done alone.

Writers, like other dangerous criminals, should come to know solitary confinement. It does ‘em a world of good. No wonder prisons have incubated the best political writing, certainly in Russia, whether under tsar or commissar. (No matter how much Russia changes, it remains Russia.)

There are certain words that let you know at once that the kind of writing they describe will be certifiably, professionally bad. Words that sound as if they came out of an industrial manual. For excruciating example:

Process.

Input.

Product.

Raymond Carver said that, once a writer starts talking about technique, you know he’s all out of ideas.

Writing is simple enough. All you need do is walk into a room, sit down – alone – and look at that blank page staring you in the face like a cobra. Then it is time to face the most terrifying of audiences, the one that can see through your every trick: yourself.

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