Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  Oddly, to be eligible for the canonization that ensures posterity's regard, a work has to be published in paperback, in days gone by considered the transient format. An original hardcover publication has some value initially because newspapers and magazines traditionally review only books that appear in hardcover, and some value ultimately because libraries preserve hardcover copies. But availability in paper is now the important thing—not just a mass-market paperback edition that is on and off the racks in a matter of months, but in "trade paper," part of a regular backlist that's kept in stock. This is because the professor listing books for his course cannot expect students to pay hardcover prices. To become part of the contemporary canon, a work has to be taught; and to be taught it has to be in paper.

  But there are still more ways colleges and universities affect the literary establishment. They provide the otherwise missing dimension of "community" for America's widespread authors, through the system of visiting writer-teachers, the circuit of reading programs, and the summer writing conferences—virtually all of which are sponsored by campuses and held on them. And through college and university support of literary quarterlies (almost all are edited from a campus) and little magazines, they provide a far broader market for short stories than the national magazines can. This publication is continually necessary for writing teachers to be hired in the first place, then kept on, promoted, granted tenure, and so on. It is an example of the universities providing one another with the accreditation-publication that they themselves require of their faculty. The same is true of the way that university presses, which once published only scholarly works not attractive to commercial publishers, will now publish novels by faculty members (usually from other schools) if a regular publisher can't be found. The colleges and universities now—by first finding writers, then supporting them, and now beginning to publish them, as well as making the ultimate judgment on them—seem just about ready to take over the entire "business" of literature itself.

  One other major contribution made by the colleges and universities is in providing what modern fiction really seems to need most: readers. Gore Vidal once said something to the effect that Americans now read serious fiction only when they are required to, in college; and there is, sadly, truth in that. And there is especially truth in that when it comes to the short story. More readers probably read contemporary literary short stories now ("today") than ever have before, but that's just because there are so many readers who are studying them now, whether as literature students or as aspiring writers themselves. More short stories are being written than ever before—that's clearly true, because the story is the basic workshop entry and there are now all those thousands of young writers all across the country having to produce for their workshops and theses.

  Now, because the creation of the American short story takes place by and large and on the whole "today" in an academic setting and for academic reasons, you'd think we'd all be reading academic stories. That doesn't seem to be the case. People have been decrying "workshop fiction" in America for decades, but no one has been able to describe just what a workshop story is, or even could be. The complaints come anyway from people who haven't had much experience of the workshop process and don't realize how freewheeling and nonproscriptive it is. In fact in the workshop anything original or unusual is specially prized and encouraged.

  But what does happen in a situation where stories are written in academia by proto-academics partially at least to satisfy academic-bureaucratic requirements is a kind of wavering of judgment. I'm not speaking of inaccurate literary evaluation, but of a lack of sense of proportion. It's not just possible but likely that all these students/ writers/teachers, awash in short fiction for the big years of their lives—fiction of their own, of their friends, of their teachers, of their students—it's not just possible but likely that they'd feel the American short story today is "having a renaissance." And of course there are more collections of stories and anthologies being published all the time to service the university's needs, and more grants and more awards and more short story contests and so on, and my God, it does seem like a renaissance. Writers, editors, publishers, teachers, agents, grad students of writing by the programful—to everyone involved in the qual-lit game it's clearly a renaissance. And anyone not involved in it doesn't care in the least anyway.

  The American short story today—or yesterday for that matter—could be having a huge renaissance or be in massive, virtually terminal, decline and the bleak sad fact is that the public as a whole would have no knowledge or interest either way. You can say, who cares that practically no one cares; but actually, faced with so much that's fine so utterly neglected, it's hard not to care at least a little.

  Afterword: Writing in General

  All of my friends, and most of my acquaintances, are writers of one sort or another, or editors or agents who deal with writers constantly. But it's remarkable how little I know of what happens to writers when they're actually alone writing.

  If the way my mind works when I'm trying to write has any resemblance to the way real writers' minds work, then I pity them all. When I have time to write, the ideas aren't there—or if the ideas, then not the words. Forcing myself to put the words on paper helps not at all: insights become platitudes as phrased when writing under self-imposed duress. You see?!

  If I determine once and for all to finish up a section which has been "nearly finished" for months, then the simplest transitional paragraph evokes related but irrelevant speculations and I find myself furiously scribbling thoughts that get further and further from what I was intending to do, that cover material I know I must some time write, but it's material that I'll want to have make a different point from the point I'm making with it now.

  Still, one often stares so blankly for so long at the paper to no avail that to be writing anything—and this fast!—is to be exploited while it lasts. And perhaps there are some sentences in it that when later combined with the laborious, correctly directed writing-under-duress can be organized to say what it is that's needed.

  Combining them, then, later—determined this time to make a coherent sequence out of all these scraps and all these sets of three or four pages of hasty handwriting, some retyped and some not—I try to construct some sort of bridge between two of these passages, some transitional passage, which somehow gets me started on a related train of thought, but certainly not the one that's needed here, and off I go again, wildly and enthusiastically (but despairingly) scribbling something I hope is good and may have some use later: another disjointed passage to puzzle over.

  This is a sample of that.

  Can I use it to say that the necessary, planned writing is often the most pedestrian, if not actually awkward, and that what seems most useless when it is being written will often prove not only best but eventually central, because it flows as it comes—which it wouldn't do if it were wrong with the mind, with your own real thoughts on the matter?

  But that's not it, not really. Sometimes I can see not only exactly what it was I meant in such-and-such a passage, but also a use for it with a whole new slant. I can comprehend the whole. I can see beyond a few pages to where so-and-so might lead. Befuddlement passes. Superego sneaks away in shame. Energy releases clarity. Clarity releases energy. What paralyzes a writer is the inability to see where what he is writing is going—to see the connections between the aspects of his work. Concentration is all that's needed, really. A deadline releases nervous energy. Adrenalin flows. There's someone who wants the work, is waiting for it. Encouragement's coming, is on the way. No, again that's not it, really. It's more than that. The truth is that the only way not to feel really terrible is to work.

  But sometimes it seems easier just to feel really terrible.

  Here's a paragraph I scribbled, one that I should have worked in with the passage above, but couldn't. Ideas come complete with words sometimes, but with no relation to the whole conception. The greatest problem is putting all the pieces together. Composed
at different times, the passages seem to overlap, often even to contradict, repeat the same examples, sometimes to make one point, sometimes another that's just faintly different. To put them all together into a coherent essay is the problem, and I can stare at the pages for hours, staple them, cut them up, and make no sense of matters at all. My mind is not capable of re-establishing the conviction, much less the emotion, much less the precise rhetoric, with which each was written. The mind is there—it wrote these passages once—why is it gone?

  Joyce Carol Oates says she knows the solution to writer's block, and I guess we have to believe she does, considering how much she's written. She says writer's block is caused by some problem in the work that the mind can't consciously solve, and that the solution is to put the work aside for a bit until the subconscious solves the problem.

  This solution seems to me to bring up problems of its own. I firmly believe that if you are really to get going in a piece of writing, it has to be what you're concerned about most at that point in your life. I mean, sex and carpentry and tennis, say, may all be great recreations from writing, very relaxing, and actually presumably creative for the writing too, if your subconscious is working on those problems that are causing your block because your consciousness can't handle them. But for many "of us writers of small conviction and low intensity, the trouble is that even when we're supposed to be working (writing) our subconscious is running over the sex, carpentry, and tennis, or whatever else that, at that point in our lives, actually concerns us most.

  Some writers do manage, though, really to get into their work sometimes. That it can happen is proved by a writer named William Manchester, if by no one else. You might remember Manchester as the writer of a big long book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At one point when he was working on it, his book editor sought him out and found him in what was described as "a bleak room in a house on the Housatonic River." Apparently the room "contained only three objects, a writing desk, a chair, and a photograph of John F. Kennedy." But as reported in the newspaper, Manchester was doing just fine:

  Manchester was writing in longhand. Evidently, he had been working long and intensively. There was blood on the fingers of his writing hand.

  One has to envy this concentration. Of course, at the time, Manchester was sometimes calling his wife "Jackie" and often saying the date was "November 22nd." One envies the ability to work this hard, as one envies any obsessed, near-loony state. We all think it would be nice to be crazy. Certainly it would be easier—as long as one didn't have to work that hard, of course.

  Against the way Manchester was working, let me give a sample of my own writing schedule. Say I set out to work just in the morning, start at nine, knock off at 12:30, then do some carpentry or play tennis. From nine to ten, the struggle is to overcome sense of futility of whole project. Paper shuffling. At ten o'clock decide a start must be made. Typewriter makes first tentative clicks. Awful. Proceed anyway, because just had a thought which ties in with this. At 10:15, begin going good. At 10:30, pause exhausted. There are a million ways this could go, a million things to say, all needed at once to set up what comes next. Got to get it all down. Sudden thirst or need to go to the john, or flies bothering, or hot, or fire going out, getting cold. Never mind, it's going so good now it won't hurt to interrupt for a minute. While drinking water or taking a leak, thinking of project. Yes, it's going good. Potentially a fine book. All this being done now ties in beautifully with that part later that's already done. Must make a note of it. At 10:37, back at desk making note of that part later. Note expands. Never mind, this is good stuff, going great now, would be hard to do later. Working brilliantly. It's 10:45, pause a minute. Exhausted. Does this really fit with the first part? Not the way it's headed, it doesn't. Better leave it, get back to the part I was doing, fix it a bit. Better to take things in order, not skip around too much, get things right as you go. Everything going to fit fine, when you get it straight. Greatest book of its kind in progress here. Now here, where I discuss this, it's too early—I repeat it again later. Ought to have one big wrap-up discussion of this part, all in one place. But no, this is pretty good the way it leads into the other point. Best to leave it the way it is, couldn't really do better than that. But then what about the way the same thing's said later? Jesus, this is a hard business. There really isn't any way to work all these things in together without repeating. Hopeless. What's that noise? What I need is a bleak room on the Housatonic. Thirsty again. Phew, completely let down. Hungry, still an hour to lunch. I ought to be able to work on this later. But then, what about the tennis? Writers need exercise. The trouble is there seems to be only about at most one half hour in any three-hour period devoted to writing in which one is capable of really concentrating and creating. This is usually fifteen minutes on the problem at hand, and fifteen minutes in which one can write well of some more-or-less connected aspect. The solution, for a writer, must be to enlarge those moments if he can, cultivate them, protect them from interruption, from distraction, and try to keep himself on the subject itself. Better jot that down. Oh, this is going to be some book. An honest book. It will really speak to other writers, directly, one writer to another. It'll be great to have it done. Sending it off to be retyped. Don't think of that now. Have to rephrase the dedication, make it more elegant. Then I start daydreaming in earnest, drafting the covering letter to the book editor when I send the manuscript in, writing the reviews and excerpting quotes from them to be used in the advertising, a real professional.

  And all afternoon and evening, I feel really terrible.