PART ONE
THE LECTURES
1
BOOT CAMP
âTo be an artist means never to avert your eyes.â
âAkira Kurosawa
I need to make this clear first off: no matter where you are in your writing career, if you aspire to create literature, if you aspire to be an artist in the medium of language, if you aspire to create narratives of whatever length that arrive at the condition of artâthere are fundamental truths about the artistic process to which you must attend.
In the nearly two decades Iâve been teaching this subject, I have read many thousands of manuscripts from aspiring writers, and virtually all of themâvirtually all of themâfail to show an intuitive command of the essentials of the process of fictional art. Because of the creative writing pedagogy in this country, and because of the nature of this art form, and because of the medium you work with, and because of the rigors of artistic vision, and because of youth, and because no one has ever told you these things clearly, the great likelihood is that all of the fiction youâve written is mortally flawed in terms of the essentials of process.
This, I think, is why my students have come to call this boot camp: becauseâand I will do this in as friendly and gentle and encouraging a way as I possibly canâwhat I have to say to you will indict virtually everything youâve written.
Itâs not going to be an easy message to hear. But Iâm going to tell you right up front: before I wrote my first published novel, The Alleys of Eden, I wrote literally a million words of absolute dreck. Five god-awful novels, forty dreadful short stories, and a dozen truly terrible full-length plays. I made all those fatal errors of process I would bet my mortgage youâre making now. I want to help you get around that. But youâve got to open up and listen to me about this. If youâre not prepared to do that, if youâre not prepared to open your sensibilitiesâand, incidentally, your mindsâto what Iâm going to tell you and to the implications for the work you have done and will do, then it is best that you and I part ways now. There are some folks in this room who will attest to the fact that itâs going to be tough, itâs going to be nerve-racking, itâs going to unsettle you. But I think they will also attest that the rewards are worth it.
You must, to be in here, have the highest aspirations for yourselves as writersâthe desire to create works of fiction that will endure, that reflect and articulate the deepest truth about the human condition. If that is your aspiration, then this is where you belong. I will not blow you off. I will take your aspirations seriously, and I will demand that you take them seriously.
I always begin with something the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once said. He said, âTo be an artist means never to avert your eyes.â To be an artist means never to avert your eyesâthis is the absolute essential truth here. Youâre going to be, and probably always have been, led to avert your eyes. But turning from that path is what it means to be an artist. You need courage, and thatâs something I canât teach you. I can teach you that youâve got to have it.
What does an artist do?
As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses. Everything else derives from that. You are creatures of your senses. All that followsâall the stuff of the mind, all the analysis, all the rationalization, all the abstracting and interpretingâfollows upon that point of contact, in the moment, through your senses.
If you live in the moment, through your senses, your first impression certainly will be that at the heart of things is chaos. God knows we had a very clear example of that in September of 2001. You can be sitting on the ninetieth floor of the World Trade Center on a beautiful late summer morning, smelling your Starbucks coffee, glad they brewed Sumatra today, and someone with visions of seventy-two virgins waiting for him in heaven flies a United Airlines jet through your window. That is a paradigm of the human condition.
Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning; behind the flux of moment-to-moment experience there is a deep and abiding order.
The artist shares her intuition of the worldâs order with the philosophers, the theologians, the scientists, the psychoanalystsâthere are lots of people who believe there is order in the universeâbut those others embrace the understanding and expression of that order through abstractions, through ideas, through analytical thought. The artist is deeply uncomfortable with those modes of understanding and expression. The theologians have their dogma and the philosophers their theories and the scientists their scientific principles and the psychoanalysts their Jungian or Freudian insightsâbut to those modes of expression and understanding the artist says, âThat doesnât make sense to me. Those are not the terms in which I intuit the world.â The artist cannot understand or access her vision of the world in any of those ways. The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encounteredâthat is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself: a record of moment-to-moment sensual experience, an encounter as direct as those we have with life itself. Only in this way, by shaping and ordering experience into an art object, is the artist able to express her deep intuition of order.
Thereâs an interesting precedent for this ideaâand what Iâm about to observe has no intended religious message. A very influential person in Western and world culture taught almost exclusively in one way: only by parable, by telling stories. âWithout a parable he spake not unto them.â He asked questions similar to the ones I just suggested artists ask: What is the abiding universal human condition? What is this all about here on planet Earth? And his answer was, There was a guy who owned a vineyard and he had a son ⊠and so forth. He told stories. Thatâs what was clearly recorded in the books written closest to the time in which Jesus of Nazareth lived. Jesus said, emphatically, âHe that hath ears to hear, let him hear.â He did not say, âHe that hath a brain to think, let him think.â Itâs through the ear. By means of a story.
The great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis said, âMan, you donât play what you know, you play what you hear.â Davis had very strong political ideasâbut he was an artist; he knew that you donât make music from ideas.
Please get out of the habit of saying that youâve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you.
Does this make sense? Do you understand what Iâm saying? If you want to think your way into your fiction, if you think you can analyze your way into a work of art, weâre going to be totally at odds philosophically about what art is and where it comes from. But if you have this aspiration and an open sensibility, and if what Iâm saying makes sense, then you have to tell your mind to back the hell off. Itâs another place in yourself entirely where you must look to create a work of art. And Iâll wager that virtually everything youâve written so far has come from your head.
You know, itâs easy to get caught up in the ambition of being a writer. Itâs easy to get caught up in loving literature and wishing to be the person on the dust jacket. This ambition, as innocent-seeming as it is, can very easily muscle out your deeper, more delicate, more difficult ambitions. It can muscle them out in favor of: I want to get published, I want to be famous, I want to win a prize. Or even in the terms: I want to be an artist. I said earlier, âIf you aspire to create art.â Please understand thatâs different from âI want to be a great artist.â And even âI want to create artâ is a bit of a dangerous ambition. What I want to nurture in you is the impulse: âIâm ravished by sensual experience. I yearn to take life in. My God! Iâve got this sense that the world has meaning. Things roil around in my dream space, and Iâve got to figure out how to make art objects of them.â Thatâs really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous. Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists. The objects we create are sensual objects, and the way youâll know that youâre writing from your head is that youâll look at your story and find it full of abstraction and generalization and summary and analysis and interpretation. These modes of discourse will be prevalent in works that are written from the head. Even if you can by force of will insert some nicely observed sense details into the work, youâll find the work moving toward analysis and description and generalization and abstraction when, in fact, in the work of art the most important moments are the most sensual of all, the most in the moment.
Mies van der Rohe said that God is in the details. Letâs substitute: the human condition resides in the details, the sense details.
The primary point of contact for the reader is going to be an emotional one, because emotions reside in the senses. What we do with emotions after that, to protect ourselves in the world, is a different thing; but emotions are experienced in the senses and therefore are best expressed in fiction through the senses.
Emotions are also basically experienced, and therefore expressed in fiction, in five ways. First, we have a sensual reaction inside our bodyâtemperature, heartbeat, muscle reaction, neural change.
Second, there is a sensual response that sends signals outside of our bodyâposture, gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, and so forth.
Third, we have, as an experience of emotion, flashes of the past. Moments of reference in our past come back to us in our consciousness, not as ideas or analyses about the past, but as little vivid bursts of waking dream; they come back as images, sense impressions.
The fourth way we experience emotion and can therefore express it in fiction is that there are flashes of the future, similar to flashes of the past, but of something that has not yet happened or that may happen, something we desire or fear or otherwise anticipate. Those also come to us as images, like bursts of waking dreams.
And finallyâthis is important for the fiction writerâwe experience what I would call sensual selectivity. At any given moment we, and therefore our characters, are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of sensual cues. But in that moment only a very small number of those sensual cues will impinge on our consciousness. Now, what makes that selection for us? Well, our emotions do.
Henry James said that âlandscape is character,â and this could well be what he meant. Our personalities, our emotions, are expressed in response to the sensual cues around us. We look at the landscape and what we see out there is our deepest emotional inner selves. This is at the heart of a work of art.
Why is this sensual center of our art so hard for us to get at? Miles Davis, if he were a writer, probably would struggle with the same problems I struggled with and that youâre probably struggling with now. Itâs easy for him to say âyou donât play what you know, you play what you hear,â because his medium is entirely sensual, inescapably so. The sound that comes out of his horn is irreducibly sensual. Every other art form is irreducibly sensual. Dancers move, composers work with sound, painters with color; even abstract art isnât abstract at allâitâs color and form. You stand in front of a Barnett Newman painting, and whatever may have been in his brain about artistic theory, what confronts you is a massive experience of color and a delicate experience of texture.
But you folks have it really difficult. No one in my position in any of the other arts has to say the things I say. Why? Because your medium is language, and language is not innately sensual. Language, in fact, is much more often used in non-sensual ways. Look at the paradox of this evening. I am inveighing against abstraction, generalization, and summary and analysis and interpretation in what terms? Abstract, general, analytical, and interpretive. Am I not? Well, thatâs the nature of human beings. There are things we have to express in this way.
Now, Iâve heard no gasps of recognition yet, but let me assume that some of you are thinking, Of course, this makes sense. Oh boy oh boy! If so, you and I are still going to have to be patient, becauseâyou know what?âyour understanding is still here in your head, and itâs going to take a while to make all this part of your process.
If I had me to talk to me back when, I might not have had to write a million dreadful words. If Iâd caught me at the right momentâand in the right spiritâI might have had to write only a quarter of a millionâmaybe not so many as that if Iâd really listened. You might ask, why did he write five terrible novels? How many terrible novels can you write? The answer is that I had no idea how badly I was writing. None. And my ability to continue working through a million words was so rooted in self-deception that I might not have been able to hear this message. So those are the things you may have to sort through, too.
The special problem here is that the artistic medium of fiction writersâlanguageâis not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself wonât let them think.
Literatureâlanguage, fictionâdoes not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, itâs going to show.
Why is it so tough to get past that? Why does Kurosawa say that the essence of being an artist is that you canât avert your eyes? Why avert them? We still havenât quite made that connection. If the artist sees the chaos of experience and feels order behind it and creates objects to express that order, surely that is reassuring, right? Well, at some point maybe. But what do you have to do first? And why is it so hard? This is whyâand this is why virtually all inexperienced writers end up in their heads instead of the unconscious: because the unconscious is scary as hell. It is hell for many of us.
If I say art doesnât come from the mind, it comes from the place where you dream, you may say, âWell, I wake up screaming in the night. I donât want to go into my dreams, thank you very much. I donât want to go into that white-hot center; Iâve spent my life staying out of there. Thatâs why Iâm sitting in this classroom, why I was able to draw a comb through my hair this morning. Because I havenât gone there, I donât go there. Iâve got lots of ways of staying out of there.â And you know what? You still need those ways twenty-one or twenty-two hours a day. But this is the tough part: for those two hours a day when you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot placeâit canât be white-hot and dark at the same time, but I donât careâthat paradox, live with itâwhatever scared the hell out of you down thereâand thereâs plentyâyou have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you canât flinch, canât walk away. Thatâs the only way to create a work of artâeven though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there, and those defense mechanisms are going to work against you mightily.
I fight this battle every day. Janet fights this battle every day. Every artist in the world fights this battle every day. To go to a scary place that makes some other part of you say: What are you doing? No. Just no. No. No. Your hands are poised over the keyboard, and that voice says, Look at your fingernails; they need clipping. And when the voice has got you in the bathroom: Look at the toilet; it needs cleaning. And you say, Yes! Anything, anything but to go back and face this stuff.
Not only that. That voice wants to draw you up into your head. And you know what that head has been for you all your life? Everyone in this room, Iâm sure, has been significantly smarter in all kinds of ways than the people around you. Youâve had your own view of things, and you havenât really followed the crowd, because youâre a little too smart for thatâor way too smartâand you see things in a different way. Youâre isolated. And in order to get through childhood and puberty and adolescence and young adulthood, broken relationships and a marriage or two, or fourâyou have identified with your mind. Iâm smart, Iâm smarter than they are. Thereâs a part of your mind youâve been rewarded for all through school, and that is your literal memory. Youâll be rewarded for it again in classrooms in this same program. You remember things; you can talk these things back and command details. You know literature. Youâve always found your self-worth there, and what Iâm telling you is that literal memory is your enemy. Itâs been a large part of your identity all your life, and that part is going to want to drag you down, to destroy the things you create. Thatâs not an easy message to take.
Furthermore, youâve got this self-conscious metavoice going all the time. I do, and Iâm sure a lot of you do, too. You sit quietly and your metavoice is talking to you in your head. âWell, here Iâm sitting,â it says. And even, âOK, maybe I shouldnât think so much now. That sounds like itâs something I probably should try, to see if I can do that.â These words are going through your head, right? This is going on all the time; thereâs all this analytical garbage running through your mind. This self-conscious metavoice; itâs a voice about the voice. Itâs like talking about my own consciousness.
This is why Catholics and Muslims have repetitive, predetermined prayers, why the Hindus and the Zen Buddhists and the Transcendental Meditationalists have their mantras. Because you repeat these repetitive predetermined prayers enough and they lose their meaning. So these words that have no rational meaning are falling through your mind. And what happens? The analytic flow stops. You prolong the moment of no voice in your head, and it induces a kind of spiritual high. The religions give this to you as a...