Learning to Write Fiction

Things to do. Books to read.

Vincent Price holding cats is better than a stock photo of someone trying to write.

Garbage

I’m still learning. I hope you are, too. If you’re struggling with wanting to write a story but feeling intimidated by it, you might start by attempting a three-page short short (about 1050 words) as poorly as possible. Make it the worst story you’ve ever written and see what happens.

Quit trying to be interesting and brilliant. That’s your ego at work, the same thing that subverts your writing process in lots of other ways. Let it go. Write trash. Don’t be afraid of making garbage. Just pay attention while you’re doing it. You’ll learn a lot that way. More importantly, you’ll have a moment in which you’re creating without anxiety, without the need for permission, which is a rare and wonderful experience. Such moments are our greatest teachers.

This is part of the considerable inner work of being a creative writer. The publishing industry doesn’t have blogs that talk about this because you can’t monetize inner work. Even writers, so adept with words and images, can’t explain it, aren’t sure it’s real, and wonder whether they’re simply distracted when they have creative inner experiences. They aren’t. The inner work is ubiquitous and undeniable. They’re merely trying to contend with self-doubt which comes from living a society that calls everything other than monetized productivity stupid and delusional.

You do your best creative work not through trying to impress your ego, which is worried about how acceptable you seem and about whether you’re going to survive, but through dropping those aspirations and getting to the unadulterated creative impulse that first called to you. For a fiction writer, the way to a powerful creative state is not by going up into the light of concepts, ideas, and social approbation, but by going down into the darkness of urges, emotions, and impulses. You can civilize your writing later, in revision. For now, be a savage. And write garbage first.

Books You Don’t Have to Read

Of course, there are books you could be reading. Think of this as part of the “outer work.” What books are these? Only you can say, because your work, your artistic project and path belong to you—not to some voice on the internet preaching about life hacks and best practices (which is what most writing advice amounts to). All of that is, as Ecclesiastes might say, vanity. Or is, as we might say, marketing. But here are some suggestions nonetheless.

Get a library card and read a lot of what you want to write. No one writes without influences. So locate your influences. Originality exists, but fixating on it, such that the idea of “finding your voice” becomes a restrictive, overly romantic obsession, is another obstacle. Instead, saturate yourself with anything you like and be honest with yourself about it. It could be trashy (get away from literary status anxiety—read what you want to read, anything that speaks to you). It could be classic literature (works in translation count, too). It could also be the latest socially acceptable novel being pushed by Penguin Random House. It absolutely does not matter. Just immerse yourself in whatever stimulates your imagination. And read vigorously.

Creative writing programs and English departments have a problem with this. They’re in the business of stratifying, articulating, and hierarchizing products of the imagination. So there will be an implicit bias there, usually coming from the careers, anxieties, and assumptions of the professors. But repeat after me: “I will read what draws me, what stimulates my imagination, not what I am being implicitly or explicitly told is marketable and therefore preferable.”

I’m not bashing art school. I believe in creative writing programs the way I believe in The New York Post. It’s entertaining, often darkly absurd, and provides material for lively conversation. MFA programs rarely amount to more than an interesting form of literary journalism—talking about writing and talking about talking about writing. You can learn a lot from all that talk. I believe the arts and humanities do matter and do offer a valuable education, in spite of what the misguided STEM fetishists may think. But the MFA industrial complex is not where you discover the inner imperative that makes you want to create. That comes from experiencing art and then attempting to create it. All the talk (and discursive essay writing) in the world can’t make you an artist. Only art can.

I rarely enjoy reading lists created by actual journalists, even by the journalists I like and think are smart. What journalists consider new, important, and a “must read” (I hate that clichéd expression) is never important to me, since I’m the one that matters in this process. Remember: my project is to go down into the darkness of my inner self and find that raw, creative impulse. News publications focus on social tensions, explanations of current events, cultural trends, laws, politics and, when talking about art, how it relates to those things. Good journalism is essential for a free, capable, concerted citizenry, but it does not understand art. Some journalists are artists, but many more have no concept of art or how to think about it.

Tiresome Theory and Craft Books

Remember to keep the “you should be reading this right now” lists in perspective. That includes the lists I’m offering you here. You shouldn’t necessarily be reading any of these things right now (or ever). But I recognize that in our culture of life hacks and best practices, we will inevitably go seeking authoritative methods. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’ve read these books, too. Besides, there are so many awful ones in the Self Help for Writers category. The following craft books are less awful than most, in my opinion.

Gentle Writing Advice: How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself, Chuck Wendig. Wendig is smart and he cares about writers. In spite of the title, he’s not engaging in nauseating Julia Cameron hand holding. He’s not doing a ridiculous “tough love for writers” Robert McKee performance, either. Wendig’s in-between those extremes. His advice is sane and even-tempered. But he likes to be cute and thinks he’s funny. That can be aggravating if you don’t share his sense of humor. It doesn’t bother me and I actually find myself smiling a lot, especially when I read his footnotes.
Writing Fiction: a Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway. Useful, neutral advice. By “neutral” I mean what I meant with Wendig’s book, but also that Burroway never seems to be lying, boasting, or to have an agenda other than describing a range of technical options. Her example stories are great (at least in the third edition, which is the one I have) and she uses them like a gifted creative writing instructor to demonstrate what she’s talking about. Her writing exercises are not boring and I’ve relied on a number of them in my own teaching.
Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, Madison Smartt Bell. Read this after Burroway. Think of it as the intermediate sequel to her book. In my opinion, Bell is a good fiction writer and much of what he says here comes from his firsthand experience. I return to this book more than any others.
The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts, David Lodge. His excerpted examples are wonderful and he uses them to good effect in his discussions. His opinions are solid and not beholden to any particular school, voice, or movement.

Read these four books and you will have a bellyful of exercises and theories about fiction writing, more theories than you ever wanted. But you might also come away with a new repertoire of examples and references, which can be helpful.

I used to recommend McKee’s Story to people, but honestly you can get what’s good in his book from the four books I list above and skip his absolutist bluster. I also don’t recommend John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, not because it isn’t good, but because it’s very closely aligned to a particular fiction writing aesthetic. And I think taking that as a guide can create counterproductive stylization in beginning writers.

Fiction

Saturating yourself with fiction you like is far more important than looking at craft books. Here are some things I’m reading now, which may change at any time. I follow my creative impulses above all else (i.e. I read permissively, not like a scholar). If you don’t know where to start or what to read, you could start with these (why not?), but you should quickly diverge from this. The value of starting here is as much based on not liking these books as it is on liking them. Find out what speaks to you. You can do this by starting anywhere with any reading. Starting’s the thing. Read multiple books at once if you feel that’s the way to go. Or look at them one at a time. There are no rules.

Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi. Not sure what I think about this novel yet, but the voice intrigues me.
Murder Most Serene, Gabrielle Wittkop. This writer has no fear. If you read her novel, The Necrophiliac, you know what I mean.
The Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant. I’m just getting into Gallant, but I already feel she has things to teach me.
The Savage Spear of the Unicorn, Delicious Tacos. You may find this one extremely offensive and valuable in that respect.

This list is idiosyncratic. How could it be otherwise? If you don’t like the look of these, compile your own list. The point is to involve yourself with fiction that stimulates you. There is no time to waste.

Final Thought

The world doesn’t need more artists. It also doesn’t need more people trying to prove their worth to mom and dad. It also doesn’t need more kids in law school, STEM worshippers, venture capitalists, or any other thing. The world needs more introspection and individuality. The rest follows. My way should not, actually cannot, be your way. And that is a beautiful thing. Find your way.

Martial Arts: Just Start

Something few people know about me is that I’ve practiced martial arts, in one form or another, since 1983. I’ve trained through ups and downs, in sickness and in health, traveling, on my own or in a dojo, in various countries, with weapons and open hands, in good shape and sick, healthy and injured, and with people from every ethnicity, creed, culture, and economic standing, good, bad, and ugly. I don’t talk or write about it very often because, honestly, what’s there to say? Still, this time, I might have something.

Growing up, I studied Tang Soo Do karate in the Moo Duk Kwan with a legendary master, where I trained with members of the local SWAT team, off-duty Marines, and a wide variety of people from all over the world. I honor that tradition, but I have also studied Choi Li Fut, Shotokan, Vo Lam Kung Fu, Chin Na, Taijutsu, and western boxing.

Throughout all these years, I’ve had times when I felt I was very proficient and other times when I felt ashamed of my inadequacies. I also learned to set all those feelings aside. As “Dai E Zenji’s Vow for Awakening” puts it, “My only prayer is to be firm in my determination to pursue the study of truth, so that I may not feel weary however long I have to apply myself to it . . . to be free from illnesses and to drive out both depressed feelings and lightheartedness.”

Feeling good about yourself can be wonderful. And feeling bad about yourself can be horrible. But ultimately these are fleeting states of mind, conditions equivalent to each other, and not that different from illnesses. They distract you from what’s really going on within you and beyond you. Accepting this is the substance of mindfulness and is integral to martial arts and to Zen, which is something I also study, among other things.

To be honest, I am not a great martial artist and never have been. At best, I’m mediocre, especially relative to some of the highly gifted athletes from whom I’ve had the benefit of learning. If my mediocrity were relevant to anything, it might bother me. All that’s relevant is that I continue to practice, day in, day out, because there is only one person on my path: me. The path (the training) is endless. There is nothing to accomplish and there is always more to learn. There is no trophy that means anything, no organizational belt rank that ultimately signifies a definitive stopping point. I’ll never “get it done” or “have it handled.”

Rather, martial arts training is a way of life, a stance toward every moment, such that body and mind are brought together as fully as possible in the here and now. The body and mind are constantly changing. So this training demands continual focus and dedication. Hence, the “do,” the Way. But none of it is remarkable. As Jack Kornfield writes, in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry:

Enlightenment flowers not as an ideal, but in the miraculous reality of our human form, with its pleasures and pains. No master can escape this truth, nor does enlightenment make the vulnerability of our body go away. The Buddha had illnesses and backaches. Sages like Ramana Maharshi, Karmapa, and Suzuki Roshi died of cancer in spite of their holy understanding. Their example shows we must find awakening in sickness and in health, in pleasure and in pain, in this human body as it is.

There is no escaping the fact of our mortality, of our finitude. But practicing martial arts isn’t about escaping. This is why, when I see overheated, arrogant MMA fighters putting down traditional martial arts, I wonder about values and physical limitations. One day, these MMA practitioners, as great as they may be, will get old and will no longer be able to dish out the same beatings to others (and to themselves). What then? Does the training stop? Is it time to hang up the gloves and get a soft serve on the way to the orthopedic specialist? When age and injuries have broken your body, is that when the introspection can start? In my opinion, that would be a very limited way of practicing.

A teacher of mine recently described karate as a form of “moving prayer.” I like that a lot. Prayer is about hope. It’s about putting your best intentions into words and giving them a more tangible form. If you believe in a higher power, it’s about affirming that connection and is therefore an act of faith made with your body and mind.

So I thought I’d write this (very different) piece just to say one thing: no matter who you are, no matter your body type or physical limitations, age, gender, ethnicity, or financial status, you can start studying martial arts—even if it’s at a corny storefront dojo in the mall or in your basement with a YouTube video. Start from where you are. You don’t have to be great. Set aside your egotistical perfectionism (something we all have to a degree) and just start.

I write this in memory of a fantastic martial artist and Tang Soo Do instructor, Master Lloyd Francis, who had a formative influence on me when I was very young.

The Adderall Diaries Revisited

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone. I was an underachiever and a social outcast, who lived primarily through his imagination, and I read constantly and widely. I’d impersonate my father in order to call myself in sick—my father rarely ever knew or cared when I was sick, but the school secretary had a different impression—then head down to the public library’s central branch to read all day. I learned more that way, mostly about arts and humanities subjects, than I ever did in my depressing cliquey high school.

One of the books I encountered was Dali / Miro: Masters of Surrealism. It was a good read and I thought Dali was weird and cool. Like a lot of teenagers just learning about art, I thought you had to be weird and cool to be an artist. And when I read the book, the idea that artists were different made sense to me on a higher level. They were a unique species.

Both of my parents were serious artists (my father a writer, my mother a painter and sculptor) and they were definitely not weird and cool. They were just mom and dad. I didn’t put them in the same category as someone like Salvador Dali, Buckminster Fuller, William Burroughs, Joan Miró, Hemingway, HP Lovecraft, Picasso, or Jack Kerouac—all illustrious weirdos on whom I’d developed a teenage obsession at some point.

Also, less illustrious but no less weird: Robert E. Howard, Jim Starlin, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Robert Aspirin, Lynn Abbey, Dave Sim, CJ Cherryh, and many other sci-fi / fantasy people, who were great in pop-culture, but who were a bit too lowbrow to garner respect from anyone in my family.

To be fair, like any teen, I didn’t understand that these “names” were the product of intense cultural mediation, specifically economic and industry concerns, their greatness established and maintained, by multinational media organizations. As Foucault writes in “What is an author?” “an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. . . . [I]ts status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.”

Instead, I mistook marketing for mystery and felt the answer to my suffering was somewhere far away with these special people—maybe in a comic book, a fantasy novel, or whatever esoteric elephant vapor held up Dali’s melting art chateau. I had to Find The Others. But at that time in my life, I would have had to borrow the car to do it.

One day, I asked my mom to explain the weirdness to me and why she wasn’t like that. Her answer was something I’d never forget. You can’t generalize about art and artists because everyone is different. But there are such things as posers and they are numerous.

A poser is someone who takes his creative energy and puts it into his appearance and identity instead of into his work. She added that some people are posers and artists at the same time. Warhol, Basquiat, Hemingway, and Dali are good examples. Others are just framed by the media in colorful ways for author-branding purposes. Hence, the Hollywood image of the artist as a flamboyant weirdo. Hollywood understands this pose because the poser-weirdo artist is an evergreen role that makes conventional Joe Sixpack comfortable.

Artists are people willing to dwell in the imagination. They’re indulgent, often emotionally arrested in some ways and hyper-developed in others, and they’ve given themselves certain inner permissions to an unsettling degree. This might be generally true. But if we can put them in a container, labelled FREAK, we can feel less threatened by their existence.

At least from the standpoint of values and expectations, this is what Hollywood is usually about: reinforcing dominant social attitudes and trends and making lots of money as a result. Sometimes, Hollywood stumbles into art and makes something amazing. But most of the time, it recycles garbage. And one of its often-recycled garbage products is James Franco playing a writer.

It seems like he does this far too much. He’s an actor, so a creative person by definition, and he actually does have an MFA in creative writing (not making him a writer by definition, which is something for a different essay), but he seems to be suffering from the actor who really wants to be the thing he portrays syndrome.

Yes, Franco has published multiple books. And I feel sure it was as difficult for him to find a publisher as it was for Jewel, if anyone remembers her as a literary sensation. Some of his material might be good. I haven’t made a definitive study of the Franco corpus. And I don’t want to bag on him as a writer or as a person. But I do think he does a disservice to the discipline of literary writing by reinforcing Hollywood’s poser-weirdo artist stereotype. Then again, he’s an actor. Posing is his primary skill.

So I watched The Adderall Diaries after a nine-year cleansing period. It has not aged well. The story, in case you wisely abstained the first time around, is that Stephen Elliott has writer’s block. He’s on the verge of a big deal with Penguin for a creative nonfiction book on his late, abusive father and shitty childhood. But it all falls apart when the supposedly dead dad (Ed Harris) shows up at a very posh, exclusive publishing-industry reading and calls Elliott out as a fraud.

Cue Cynthia Nixon, playing a literary agent but really just reprising her Distressed Middle Management Lady role from Sex and the City: no one wants anything to do with Stephen Elliott now that he hasn’t really been chained up in a basement like he claimed and his dad is still around. He’d better produce hard evidence that he was a messed up kid and fast.

Then we get Amber Heard, a spectrum of drugs appearing out of Elliott’s pockets, and multiple S&M intercuts with hookers throughout the greater New York metropolitan region, representing to Joe Sixpack the Decadence And Depravity To Which An Artist With A Wounded Soul Can Descend. In movies, you never see an artist washing the dishes unless she has a needle hanging out of her arm. And yet, the dishes do seem to get washed. Who does them? Maybe “Dobby the House Elf,” since this is about as realistic as Harry Potter.

You never see the high cost of the rock-and-roll lifestyle supposedly led by creative people because, much like me as a teenager, Joe Sixpack must have certain assumptions reinforced. Artists are “other.” The normal rules of human life don’t apply to them. If they debauch themselves, the consequences are largely aesthetic, quickly forgotten by the next scene.

They drink whiskey like it’s apple juice. They’re pursued by modelesque beauties or hunky men, who find them incredibly interesting. They engage in a smorgasbord of extracurricular porn sex. And they rarely need to consider whether such a lifestyle might interfere with their writing. In reality, if you’ve got a headache, you’ll notice you typically write fewer pages that day. If you’ve got a hangover, the manuscript can wait.

James Franco is an attractive man and Amber Heard, even post-Depp, is gorgeous. I have no doubt they are in the right field. They should be looked at for money. But being able to strike a pose is not the same as being able to work with lousy source material or function effectively as a different type of artist. It’s definitely not enough to turn you into the real thing. The difference between Franco and, say, Salvador Dali, Hunter Thompson, Charles Bukowski, or Andy Warhol is simple. They were exceptional because they had enough creative energy to weave self-aggrandizing image-myths while also making real art.

But most artists want to live quietly. They want their energy and attention to go toward one thing. In the meantime, the movie industry (and, to a certain extent, the publishing industry) chugs along, recycling comfortable stereotypes so that everyone can feel a little less bad about the poems they wrote at age 14.